[Philpax]

A month with a superintelligence at your hands could be quite impactful, especially if you're willing to break the law / normal operating decorum in the pursuit of protecting what you have. A superintelligence, if wielded so, could destroy your competitors in a great many ways, including the relatively-benign solution of outcompeting them, to exploiting them and tearing them apart from the inside.

A genuine superintelligence is a very, very scary thing to have under the control of one person or organisation.

[remexre]

If I interpret "a machine superintelligence" as "a classroom of 300IQ humans," I'm not really sure how this is true? You still have material and energy constraints, you can't think your way out of those.

[Philpax]

For the concrete problem we're discussing, you can hack your competitors out of existence, replace all of your knowledge workers to shed costs, hyperoptimise your logistics, etc. It's not just intelligence, it's speed and scale.

Bostrom's Superintelligence (2014) is a bit of a dreary read, and I didn't finish it, but it pulls no punches about the leverage that a superintelligence might have in our highly-connected world.

[vkou]

> For the concrete problem we're discussing, you can hack your competitors out of existence, replace all of your knowledge workers to shed costs, hyperoptimise your logistics, etc. It's not just intelligence, it's speed and scale.

For the concrete problem we're discussing, that hypothetical belongs in a Marvel movie, not reality. In the real world, you can't 'hack your competitors out of existence', and you'll be going to prison very quickly for trying this sort of thing.

[Philpax]

I did say

> especially if you're willing to break the law / normal operating decorum

in my original post. If you have a superintelligence, you have something that can find and take advantage of every exploitation vector in parallel - technical, social, bureaucratic - and use that to destroy a company from the inside. A superintelligence that is subservient to its operator is an informational superweapon.

I agree that this sounds fanciful, but you can see what existing cyberattacks can do to organisations; it does not take that much imagination to gauge how much worse it could be when the process can be automated and scaled.

[vkou]

> A superintelligence that is subservient to its operator is an informational superweapon.

The five dollar wrench attack will put an end to that operator's use of an informational superweapon.

> I agree that this sounds fanciful, but you can see what existing cyberattacks can do to organisations

What can it do? Generally, a minor disruption to operations.

It consistently does a lot less than what law enforcement can do to you if you start messing with other rich peoples' money, while having enough of a presence to own a super-intelligence and a trillion-dollar data center.

[Philpax]

Within a day - well before any legal or societal force could intervene - a superintelligence could make its way into every part of an organisation's internal network and tear it apart from the inside.

Conventional hackers are limited by the serial nature of their work - finding breaches, exploiting them, conducting further exploration of the network, trying not to get detected - in ways that a superintelligence would not be. The latter could be a hundred times as effective, a hundred times as fast, and a hundred times more parallel.

I agree that this is unlikely to happen because the societal bill would come due in time, but my point is that a month's lead is enough to do significant and lasting damage.