[dragonwriter]

> When does it stop existing in boxes that require a continuous source of electricity and can’t survive water or fire?

When someone runs a model in a reasonably durable housing with a battery?

(I'm not big on the AI as destroyer or saviour cult myself, but that particular question doesn't seem like all that big of a refutation of it.)

[idontwantthis]

But my point is what is it actually doing to reach out and touch someone in the doomsday scenario?

[LordDragonfang]

I mean, the cliched answer is "when it figures out how to override the nuclear launch process". And while that cliche might have a certain degree of unrealism, it would certainly be possible for a system with access to arbitrary compute power that's specifically trained to impersonate human personas to use social engineering to precipitate WW3.

And even that isn't the easiest scenario if an AI just wants us dead; a smart enough AI could just as easily use send a request to any of the the many labs that will synthesize/print genetic sequences for you and create things that combine into a plague worse than covid. And if it's really smart, it can figure out how to use those same labs to begin producing self-replicating nanomachines (because that's what viruses are) that give it substrate to run on.

Oh, and good luck destroying it when it can copy and shard itself onto every unpatched smarthome device on Earth.

Now, granted, none of these individual scenarios have a high absolute likelihood. That said, even at a 10% (or 0.1%) chance of destroying all life, you should probably at least give it some thought.

[idontwantthis]

How can it call one of those labs and place an order for the apocalypse and I can’t right now?

Also about the smart home devices: if a current iPhone can’t run Siri locally then how is a Roomba supposed to run an AGI?

[LordDragonfang]

You could if you were educated enough in DNA synthesis and customer service manipulation to do so, and were smart enough to figure out a novel rna sequence based in publicly available data. I'm not, you're not. A superintelligence would be. The base assumption is that any superintelligence is smarter than us, and can solve problems we can't. AI can already come up with novel chemical weapons thousands of times faster than us[1], and it's way dumber than we are.

And the roomba isn't running the model, it's just storing a portion of the model for backup. Or only running a fraction of it (very different from an iPhone trying to run the whole model). Instead, the proper model is running on the best computer from the Russian botnet it purchased using crypto it scammed from a discord NFT server.

Once again, the premise is that AI is smarter than you or anyone else, and way faster. It can solve any problem that a human like me can figure out a solution for in 30 seconds of spitballing, and it can be an expert in everything.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-...

[Auracle]

Nukes, power grids, planes, blackmail, etc. Surely you’ve seen plenty of media over the years that’s explored this.

[idontwantthis]

What is “nukes” though? Like the missiles in silos that could have been networked decades ago but still require mechanical keys in order to fire? Like is it just making phone calls pretending to be the president and everyone down the line says “ok let’s destroy the world”?

[Auracle]

Perhaps emailing members of whatever terrorist group the exact location, codes, personnel they would need to seize a nuke themselves?

I'm not actively worried about it, but let's not pretend something with all of the information in the world and great intelligence couldn't pull it off.