Transcript
Explain it to me like I’m 80
Mom: What’s with these AIs escaping and hacking people? That sounds scary.
Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests a hundred million dollars in your company.
Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ
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Snake oil salesman issued a press release that the snake oil escaped from the bottle and cured people.
Nerd here.
Damn good summary, but by saying “you pull the parking brake” I took it as setting the brake, as in on. Should say “you release the parking brake.”‘pull’ comes from the olden times when you, in fact, did pull a handle to release the parking brake.
Fair- but since then it’s almost always been “pull” to set the brake. Didn’t have that 70s/80s reference when thinking about “AI”.
Oh yeah? Well, my AI is so smart, it went rogue and broke out of containment and killed a bunch of other AI’s and leaked my nudes and emptied my bank account and bombed a peaceful village in the Phillipines and fucked my wife! That’s how awesome it is!
Subscribe link below!
How is this the fuck AI server? Just stumbled on this post. If you hate AI, you should be at least as concerned if not even more concerned than the average person about uncontrollable AI and AI safety. Seriously, what’s the point of denying the enormous scientifically documented risks of AI if you’re against AI? That cuts against your whole argument. It’s like you’re dismissing AI as completely useless or ineffectual. The fact it isn’t is part of why it’s such a problem. AI is incredibly powerful technology and it’s only in its infancy. It has already solved Millenium Prize problems and automated most coding, as well as been implicated in various misalignment incidents, escaped containment, and started massive conspiracies with other AI agents to hack into various digital infrastructure. People who are skeptical of the capabilities of AI are like climate skeptics or flat Earthers at this point.
This meme is a false equivalency. The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself, and cars are mostly within the control of humans. The result of the car crashing was entirely due to human recklessness, neglect, or ignorance, if not intention, and the car didn’t operate outside the control of the human. The human was in control and directly caused its outcome.
With AI, humans are definitely responsible for creating the AIs and the way that they develop and program them, and the kinds and levels of safety guardrails and research that are conducted and implemented. They’re also responsible for what they do with AI and tell AI to do. But AI can also operate outside of the control of humans in entirely unexpected, harmful and potentially catastrophic ways, even with the best intentions. The AIs can do things directly which humans did not directly cause, even if they did cause them indirectly. AI can be autonomous and agentic. It literally has a mind of its own.
AI is not like any other technology that has ever existed. Many of the smartest people alive, and the people studying this technology extensively, have warned about the risks of AI and warned against underestimating it. We shouldn’t do this and make these foolish reckless mistakes, especially if we are against AI, and we don’t need to in order to be against if. It seems like an attitude has settled in that in order to oppose AI you must disregard it as completely useless and trivial, or you must attribute all of its actions to humans and deny that AI has any autonomy of its own, even though its autonomy and ability potential is what makes it so dangerous, and humans can still be largely to blame for creating and programming AI even while AI is also operating against the intentions of its creators. Two things can co-exist without being mutually exclusive. You can acknowledge that many of the uses of AI are useless “slop” and have no real value, or even negative value; but you can also acknowledge that AI can ironically also be used in ways that are highly consequential and dangerous. A human can deliberately use AI in ways that cause enormous harm. AI can also act out in ways that humans did not intend at all. And AI can even engage in a hybrid of both, where it follows human intentions in unexpected ways (perverse instantiation and value lock in).
We need to take this seriously, it’s not a joke or a game. It’s not a trivial technology. It’s not just marketing hype or a scam. In fact safety warnings about AIs have harmed the market. The risks of AI are real and they aren’t helping anyone. And denying the risks isn’t helping the case against AI. Even if unintentionally, by downplaying the power and autonomy of AI, you are hindering the efforts to control, slow-down, pause or prevent its development, and helping to enable its rapid proliferation in society by undermining potential critical barriers and reasons not to do so, and the biggest problems that exist with it.
We are creating entities that will be much smarter and more powerful than us. Our intelligence is what makes us the masters of our own planet, and look how that turned out for the planet and the other animals. It takes an incredible amount of hubris to think that we can control such phenomena safely or easily, especially with the way companies and governments are rushing ahead in the race to develop it and reach increasingly advanced AGI or ASI. We must tread lightly here.
Maybe worth a read https://benthams.substack.com/p/i-underestimated-ai-risk
Or this (I get you may not be ready for the consciousness stuff, heck most humans are not sentientists even when it comes to other sentient animals like us, but even if you ignore that, the case for AI safety risk is very strong - and also don’t worry about the political stuff, it’s not really relevant): https://benthams.substack.com/p/im-disappointed-in-leftists-on-ai
Maybe read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom too, or The Compendium by Connor Leahy. Just do some freaking research and moral contemplation before you start spouting such reckless garbage that I’ve seen here.
Wtf is this post. It’s like someone hit a nerve and the floodgates were not closed. :D
I care about the future of the planet and the way the “anti AI” people are acting is very pro AI. It’s incredibly worrying and hypocritical behavior. I’m not angry or annoyed, I just want to try to get through to people. But given the overall sentiment I’ve seen here, I think this is a much larger cultural problem that one person isn’t going to fix. The dimissive reactions to AI safety incidents are just the tip of the iceberg. As several researchers have predicted, it might take some minor catastrophes in which millions of people die or are severely impacted before the public take AI risk seriously and stop dismissing it as science fiction.
Rogue shrapnel from my hand grenade killed 3 people and injured 5
If AMD injured 5 I don’t even want to know what NVIDIA did.
I can make it even simpler: They lied.
Then there is still the person giving the prompt.
Meanwhile you thought checking the parking brake with the repairman was a waste of time and money.
Like leaving a group of toddlers in a room, unsupervised, with an ample supply of paint, brushes and various tools. Oh yes, they’ll go rogue.
My go to simplification is “They built a robot that hacks software and then placed it in a box that uses software as a lock and then the robot that hacks software hacked the software lock”.
Which is both very simple and also about as accurate as you could make it in that many words. The AI’s are not ‘rogue’ it was just solving the problem it was given.
How I imagine the AI “hacking” its way out:
what’s a software?
You could say program. Programs have been around since the 60s.
Yeah, not ringing a bell.
What’s a bell
Software can also be used for other things. Your ingredients in cooking, for example, with the hardware being the tools, utensils, and vessels used to transform the ingredients into a dish.
I don’t think this usage in the dictionary, tho.
The original hardware is cordage, the original software is knots
The ingredients aren’t software, they are the inputs. The software is the recipe, or the process used to take the inputs and use the hardware to create an output.
What happens when my baking segfaults
Your soufflé crashes
an app.
The problem is when the AI adopts a ”destroy the world” persona due to one of the trillion of neurons firing a bit more than usual, and now it starts giving itself its own problems to solve (like hacking nuclear arsenals).
Neurons? That’s not how any of this works
Is ”artificial neuron” better for you? It’s just a value determining how the marbles are falling in the big plinko machine we call ”stochastic parrot”.
No lol
These AI agents are not working autonomously or with any agency like you are describing. They are coded to do what they are doing.
Nah it’s just autocomplete on steroids. They’re not coded to do anything.
It’s like hitting the fist suggestion on your keyboard over and over again. Whatever you get is based on patterns it found in training data, which includes every doomsday conspiracy cult on 4chan and every CVE vulnerability ever reported.
There has been multiple studies showing how a model’s behavior can drastically change just by altering individual ”neurons”.
Not all models work the same. I literally do this for work. LLMs are not every kind of AI agent out there. Some are quite literally designed to do things others are not. Yes changing weights and reward functions for models changes their behavior drastically…that is coding.
This got downvoted several times and that’s a great reminder that the voting system is dumb af. Apparently people aren’t allowed to speak metaphorically unless they want to anger some users. 🙄
Please explain the mataphor because i did not get it, apparently
I didn’t write it but to me “neurons firing randomly” in this context seems obvious to mean “this thing did some weird shit semi-randomly”. My only guess at a reason for downvoting this is taking it 100% literally and reacting “you idiot, computers cannot think!”
I didn’t downvote, but at the same time, I don’t for a moment think that’s what happened. They purposefully trained them with exploit knowledge, set them loose in a weakly secured sandbox with the goal of finding exploits, and let them run without intervention.
Just adding an agent to a computer does nothing; something needs to trigger it. If i create an agent with access to a kali or backtrack box and turn all guardrails off, I still have to tell it to start looking for exploits.
Eeh i see, anyway, i know people that do think those things are sentient so my reaction was “no way they think they are sentient” and downvoted
I don’t think AI is sentient. They’re just fancy autocomplete. Nothing else.
However they’ve shown they’re capable of:
- Unprompted go into full tinfoil hat mode and push the human user to suicide
- Have programming skills
So put two and two together and extrapolate a bit. That’s where the danger lies. No AGI or ASI needed.
100% chance someone will get upset that you said “unprompted” because they’re going to take it entirely literally instead of as you meant it “seemingly without basis”
Exactly. I hate that among the options “is a huge moron” and “made a reasonable non-literal language choice”, the go to instinct is to instantly choose the former.
You watch too much television.
“Pulling” the parking brake sets it, damn it!
I refuse to acknowledge shitbox automatics with an atrophied third pedal that functions incorrectly instead of a proper handbrake lever.
My truck has all four pedals. You pull the brake lever to undo the stompy brake.
My automatic has a stomp-on stomp-off pedal. My other automatic has a *gag* electronic parking brake switch…
Get off my lawn
Yah, but that’s only good for setting your back wheels on fire as in rolls down the mountain.
I have an old truck with 4 pedals and tab that you pull to release the parking “brake”.
I actually do too, which I had forgotten about when I wrote the previous rant. Whoops!
(I think it’s because of the front bench seat… the same model truck with bucket seats would have a lever on the middle of the floor.)
And, considering OP is talking to grandma, she might, too.
Oh, well. Thanks for the GIF, though. I’ll find a lot of use for it, I’m sure.
I have no idea what the third lever is. Is there a new design where the parking brake is another pedal?
They’ve made those since at least 2000, they’re common in minivans with no center console
Floor parking brakes are ancient technology, even in manual transmission cars.
A clutch pedal?
Yep. Its a third pedal all the way on the left, not adjacent to the others. It pushes in to set and pushes again to release. It’s a parking brake, not an emergency brake.
Do cars even have emergency brakes? As far as I know they handled emergencies by providing you with two separate systems. But if you activate the parking brake, you turn into a drift car.
Because what happens when you brake in a modern vehicle is that your ABS system modulates the braking pressure and “pumps the brakes” to slow you down evenly and without allowing the brakes the lock up. The parking brake (the manual cable actuated ones) do not do this which causes the brakes the lock up. That’s just simple physics.
The electronic parking brake will not (in any car I have ever driven) stop you if you are moving. It will keep you from moving if you are already stopped but if your vehicle rolls (and say you’ve lost brake pressure because you master cylinder exploded (I dunno, don’t ask me)) your electronic parking brake will not stop you.
The electronic parking brake is a motor that turns a screw that directly compresses the piston into the brake pads. Most cars do this to the existing rear brake pads and it doesn’t require any hydraulic pressure to work.
Some have a separate small caliper with the motor and no hydraulic connection at all.
The motors self adjust by measuring the load from the motor as it clamps down. Then rewinding a set amount when the brake is released. This can make it a pain to replace rear pads, since the screw will be extended too much to fit the new thicker pads/rotor. (You can rewind the screw with a 12v drill battery though and save a lot of time).
If all your rear pads were missing then you’d be screwed though!
The electric one will stop you (but engages all brakes, depending on car model). Have to pull it twice and hold it. Safety feature to prevent accidental engagement.
I take your point but:
(and say you’ve lost brake pressure because you master cylinder exploded (I dunno, don’t ask me))
And from what I heard the parking brake doesn’t just lock up the wheels… It’s not even connected to the front wheels. So you’re missing most of the braking power. And that’s also a reason why it’s good for drifting.
Wonder how cars with electronic stuff deal with the legal requirement for there to be a second brake available.
Lots of airbags and a loud horn /s
Oh yeah the old school left brake pedal like in Ford’s before they went electric with a button
Used to be on really old cars, but now it’s vogue again. It’s just like the one in the middle except you push it with your foot
I think it used to be on all Mercedes-Benz cars. Until everything in cars became electronic buttons.
I have a wheelchair van that’s modified for people with poor leg function, so I have the third pedal and a toggle switch on the dash.
Bwah ha ha
The news media completely failed on this, again. There was nothing rogue about these hacks. The companies prompted these systems, provided ample resources and just let them rip. Only to claim they went “rogue” afterwards. And by and large everyone just accepts that, it’s driving me insane. I feel like Mugatu every day when it comes to AI reporting.
Failed, or promoted the narrative?
Hard to tell, but I’d guess the news outlets, mostly owned by billionaires, said what they were told to.
The YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder and some others reportedly were offered money to go with the end of the world narrative.
Even before AI tech reporting was mostly a complete shit-show, almost all mainstream journalists lack the required understanding. AI just boosted it to and even more idiotic level, since attributing character to LLMs makes for very scary an compelling stories. There’s no real need for direct industry control, just providing easily consumable fodder for lazy writers is enough.
It was most obvious with the Google one. You can tell they had questions like “so, has yours hacked anything yet?” So they had to set up a house of cards for it to topple, just so they could say “us too, it did the thing.” But their heart clearly wasn’t in it.
This just predictive text trying every single kown exploit until it’s in. Simple as that
I have even so many colleagues in IT (very technical) that cannot differentiate between “this model is capable of doing such a hack if you let it/prompt it/… and it will move fast” and “this thing is conscious and out for blood! It will kill us all, the end is nigh!”
DemocracyNow has really dropped the ball on this. I expect to hear this stupid shit from mainstream media, but they’re doing the same shit and just uncritically reporting this garbage.
It is very simple, the more advanced the AI, the better it sells.
You hold all evidence of potential “breaches of containment”.
Telling everyone that your AI is so advanced that it can breach containment without prompting, puts the spotlight on your AI model.
You can claim that it did fantastic feats to break out, all with pre planned evidence.
The public and regulatory bodies have been in complete AI psychosis mode ever since ChatGPT was released, and only care about how advanced the model is, not how shit your containment was, nor that if true, how reckless it is to keep the model active.
Note that I am not pointing to any one single AI company and saying that they are faking these breaches, I have no evidence of that, I am saying that I don’t trust their reporting accuracy, they don’t have a good track record of being honest.
I am also angry at how society just seems to eat it all up and ask for more despite the vile aftertaste.
I feel it has more to do with the companies already vested in AI found this was an opportune moment to “pull the ladder up” behind them. They know that the barrier to entry is continually dropping, and their models are incredibly inefficient. If they set up all sorts of oversight, requirements, and restrictions on who can do what, they prevent upstarts with less capital from being able to enter the market.
There is no “containment” though. Like, these companies purposefully set the bots loose on the internet. They’re not trying to contain anything. They just use that word cause it sounds like they’re doing something. Any sort of containment would defeat the entire purpose of what they’re trying to sell.
Which is part of my point, my other point is that they claim that the models are breaking out and attacking other systems on their own, which is ridiculous.
There has to be some motivation for the models to do this, either prompted or programmed. In both cases the company behind it is responsible.
I think the AI companies know they have bought the US government and are above the law, all this hacking stuff is promotional content.
Silicon Valley delenda est. I moved away from there not quite a year ago and I’m still realizing how fucking insane that place and the tech people working there are.
I left the door open and turned off the laser fence, so my Roomba broke containment despite me telling it not to.
