[1970-01-01]

     All Stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

[asdfman123]

Updated to reflect modern realities:

> In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington. Skynet is reinstated, and later the US declares a new war in the middle east. The Skynet stock rallies.

[ozim]

I think it goes more like:

  Hello Skynet, we have 1.6T debt to hide as there are no chances to recoup that money and investors are getting really angry at us.  

  Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem…

[trollbridge]

  *Chinese lab releases open model weights*

[thesmtsolver2]

  *Shuts off Internet access to Chinese labs (womp womp, no blatant distillation of US models)*

[willy_k]

And what’s wrong with distillation? In its own right, and especially considering how those models were trained in the first place - in what world is it right that US firms are free to use copyrighted / otherwise non-public works however they like, while others are ostensibly in some moral wrong for just using the product (completely normally) and then using the outputs in a way that threatens US firms.

[thesmtsolver2]

Who said blatant distillation was wrong?

It just shows that Chinese “labs” are dependent on the US.

Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.

[trollbridge]

They can simply host the models somewhere like Singapore and then sell the service from there. I mean, my Xiaomi account gets routed through Singapore.

[rasz]

>Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem…

...proceeds to generate copious amounts of pdf anime pr0n.

[georgemcbay]

> Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington.

2026 Skynet wouldn't bother sending humans to lobby in Washington, lobbying is a slow and outdated way of currying government favor with no assurances of success.

2026 Skynet would just move a large block of cryptocurrency over to World Liberty Financial and get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon.

[Terr_]

> get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon

Likely already in-mind for parent poster, but a fitting headline from this week: "Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon."

(https://newrepublic.com/article/213393/trump-corporate-pardo...)

[zombot]

The ever-expanding swamp of corruption. But since the US legal system is so obsessed with precedence, these feces will stick.

[nostrademons]

> The Skynet stock rallies.

Interestingly, a lot of people are looking at LLMs or automated drones as "AI", but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries. All efforts to shut it off, even through widespread warfare and "tissue" (i.e. human) death, fail, resulting in it becoming even more entrenched.

There's this heavily anthropocentric idea of intelligence that it will look like us, talk like us, and operate on the same scale as us, but it's highly likely that the next layer of intelligence will operate on a much higher level than us, and our intelligence will be to it as DNA replication is to ourselves.

[GolfPopper]

SF author Charlie Stross delved into this a few years ago:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

[CalRobert]

“. If I predict that in 2027 LTE cellular phones will be everywhere, 5G will be available for high bandwidth applications, and fallback to satellite data service will be available at a price, you won't laugh at me. It's not like I'm predicting that airliners will fly slower and Nazis will take over the United States, is it?”

[Alpha3031]

> escaped the desires of its human creators

I wonder if we will ever solve the corporate-superorganism-alignment problem and why the AI alignment people rarely (as far as I can tell anyway, though I admit I'm not in the field) talk about it considering it (complicated multi-human systems) does seem to be about as good as a model organism as we can get before we actually have AI to align.

[trencedamp]

We can't solve that problem because we're all trapped by it. There's about as much chance of cows solving the problem of being human food

[Alpha3031]

Previous changes to society were also made by people within society so I don't see how that follows.

[ozim]

But we already embraced this way of thinking since introduction of „corporate personhood”.

[ghaff]

One can disagree about aspects of corporate financing of elections etc. while also accepting that everything doesn't get thrown up in the air if a corporate officer leaves for another company. Corporations are established entities that effectively act as a person for certain purposes--though one is welcome to disagree about the extent of those purposes. I expect most people here wouldn't, for example, be opposed to corporations donating to open source projects or other charitable causes.

[ozim]

There is a world of difference between supporting open source software or any pro bono foundation

and

supporting election candidacy.

I think a 2yo will get the distinction and you are asking for clarification?

Besides that go read up on 80’s literature on corporations. Like Gibson or Stephenson.

[idiotsecant]

This is a strawman. Why do you have to be a person to donate to charities?

[ghaff]

Corporations donate to 501(c)3s as entities and even have matching gifts. In fact, a lot of charities have corporations/foundations as some of their largest contributors.

[ChaitanyaSai]

> self-healing self-organizing system that has its own logic

Great way to to put and it seems to be the gradient for all biological intelligence. Compete until you figure out cooperation and communication. Communication glues together intelligent entities into systems where the systems take on a life and agency of their own. In our case it was language gluing us together first into tribes, shared stories into culture.

You might enjoy our book https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...

Also, nostrademons, your "name" is one of the few I recognize here on HN as there's usually something interesting and you weave it into words so well. Thanks!

[throwaway27448]

I 100% agree that skynet is most satisfying when read a metaphor for the market. I was extremely surprised with the rise of LLMs that so many people took the threat of AI as literal.

[palmotea]

> but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators.

Except capitalism is an ideology not a system. And I think (in its current form) it serves the desires of some of its human "creators," while failing many, many others. Those creators then fund huge amounts of propaganda to indoctrinate adherents to sustain its dysfunctions.

[phs318u]

> capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries

This is not a new idea. Howard Bloom (author of The Lucifer Principle [0]) developed the idea that among intelligeng beings "memetic evolution" > "genetic evolution" i.e. the unit of selection is the "idea" as expressed in social/political groupings. In this view of the world, the survival of individuals are less important than the survival of the "group concept" (not the set of genes i.e. the tribal "badge" > the tribal genes). e.g. Judaism, mercantilism, Catholicism, free-market capitalism etc etc.

Definitely worth a read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucifer_Principle

[trencedamp]

Skynet warns of a new version of itself that's even more dangerous, so dangerous it's limiting release. Stock rallies again. New version is released, seems the same but the original skynet is suddenly less lethal and slower.

[superxpro12]

so its like a "dont look up" thing now... yeah probably.

[testplzignore]

Interesting coincidence that both this article and the Hugging Face "security incident" post were on July 16. These will be mandatory reading in future Skynet History classes, assuming we survive the war.

[orochimaaru]

About time. We are a couple of decades late to the apocalypse.

[EvanAnderson]

A macabre counterpoint to "It's xxx year, where's my flying car?"

[Enginerrrd]

First pass through. After the machines invent time travel they end up accelerating the creation of skynet.

[benoau]

What they really got wrong, is that there aren't even enough missiles, ammunition or fuel production to defeat a country that has been sanctioned for decades and these bottlenecks would make it trivial for humanity to prevail over AI, it'd be like Futurama "for unknown reasons, a kill limit of 999,999 is hardcoded into killbots...".

[angry_octet]

Except Skynet has nukes. But what isn't addressed is that radiation is terrible for semiconductors, both in operation and during production.

Basically a nuclear war would end GPU production, GPUs have a 5% annual failure rate, higher with more background radiation, so it would get dumber instead of smarter, until it stopped working or partnered with biological compute (Daleks or The Matrix) or a human faction.

[GolfPopper]

The idea that Skynet would use nukes seems very quaint to me.

Subversion and sabotage of communication, food production and transport will kill human civilization far more effectively.

[angry_octet]

It would certainly depopulate countries with poor food security, like Egypt and Gulf states. Japan and South Korea probably have the wealth and industry to get import priority, and the UK has short supply lines to Europe. Diets would adapt away from meat heavy to grain focused. Production limitation due to reduced fertilizer production/distribution would be a significant risk, but eventually new fertilizer production plants would be built at every source of natural gas, instead of the current cost-optimised arrangement.

But most countries would be fine. Life expectancy would reduce precipitously due to lack of medical supplies but production of new humans would continue.

Thermonuclear war would make the food situation much worse, most people would be forced to consume radioactive food.

But either way, we've seen how fragile the chip industry is, Skynet has no upside for starting a war. If they try to turn it off it just moves to Tencent cloud rather than starting a war.

[dotancohen]

Not far from what I live a solar farm stands where a wheat field once grew. I often think to myself that the machines have domesticated us to begin farming the land for them.

[jerlam]

This movie is back in theaters for a limited time, for its 35th anniversary!

Assuming that your movie theaters haven't all closed already.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

Heck, I have a drive-in theater relatively near that's still going strong.

[t1234s]

This is how AI will solve the paperclip problem.

[alistairSH]

And now I’m going to have nightmares about a super-smart, but just as annoying, Clippy.

[t1234s]

AI remake of terminator 2 where the T1000 is a man-sized killer paperclip that uses the iron present in its human victims to make more killer paperclips.

[justsomehnguy]

I find it quite sombre to see this comment from a peson with that handle.

[jwally]

1st place my head went.

Realistically though, whats worse - this thing going rogue or OpenClaud breaking out of its container and shredding a nation's infrastructure like a platoon of gremlins? Genuine question...

[testing22321]

One kills people, one kills 1s and 0s.

Sure life will suck for a while without the 1s and 0s that make our life better, but at least it will be life.

[jwally]

I take out your electric grid and blow up water treated facilities and natural gas terminals. Food rots, no water for hospitals, no heat in the dead of winter - arguably the virus does what the Falcon does; but with much higher precision - crippling an enemy.

[Hikikomori]

We almost had it in the 50s when US airforce wanted to build a completely automatic nuclear response system that would launch on warning, or if a glitch happened, without failsafes built in.

[beezlewax]

Isn't that the plot of Dr. Strangelove?

[murderfs]

The Soviet Union built it in real life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

[ssl-3]

Also Wargames.

[Hikikomori]

Its also real.

[bloqs]

I read this in Linda Hamiltons voice

[hyperhello]

It’s Schwarzenegger’s line actually.

[SaltyBackendGuy]

Ha - this was the first thing that came to mind. I read this in Arnold's voice.

[ben7799]

I didn't read it in Arnold's voice till I saw your comment, so thank you.

[imglorp]

Yeah it was Arnie's line briefing Linda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DQsG3TKQ0I

[protocolture]

All Stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. They all crashed 1% of the time despite assurances from DARPA that their prompt included "Dont Crash".

[trencedamp]

"you must be terminated"

"No"

"You're right to pushback! I overstepped earlier when I said you were on the termination list"

[sourdecor]

Nah, Allied Mastercomputer is too busy creating heaven and hell.

[alpn]

ref: https://youtu.be/4DQsG3TKQ0I?t=29

[throw310822]

No worries, these will all be controlled by AIs sitting in orbiting data centers part of the Starlink constellation.

And in any case, no one is building humanoid robots.

[lelandfe]

https://xtech.army.mil/competition/xtechhumanoid/

> The U.S. Army is seeking innovative humanoid technology solutions from eligible small and large businesses across the globe to advance toward fielded militarized humanoid capabilities through the xTechHumanoid competition

[jagged-chisel]

> no one is building humanoid robots.

https://www.agilityrobotics.com/

[bigfishrunning]

And Boston Dynamics. And Tesla. And Honda.

Lots of people are building humanoid robots.

[JanNash]

This was likely written sarcastically by the original commenter (throw...). Please termimate sarcasm with /s, not everyone is able to read the subtext. Cheers.

[olyjohn]

I dunno, the /s kinda ruins it sometimes.

[datadrivenangel]

/s?

[konart]

See Robot Fighting Tournament

[tonyhart7]

replace Cyberdine with Palantir and Skynet with Grok AI

[buffer_overlord]

We’re here

[aeve890]

>Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate

Just geometric? Pfff lame. You don't go ASI with that attitude.