4 ms·
A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)
- aesbetic 3mo agoCongratulations to Jacob Tsimerman for winning the Fields Medal!
- andrepd 3mo agoThe first "scenario" starts with this description > By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead. It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!
- Arodex 3mo agoSome people are already choosing to "date" AI rather than deal with actual humans.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bavell 3mo ago'Some' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there...
- estearum 3mo agoWe're like 3 years into these things being able to write a coherent sentence and you're finding comfort that only some people are dating these systems?
- serf 3mo agono, the point is that you'd be in a ceaseless never-ending panic if you cared or related the hobbies of 'some' people to mean anything in real life.
- bavell 3mo agoPrecisely
- estearum 3mo agoAnd inversely, you'd be in a state of complete unactionable aloofness if you didn't care or failed to relate the hobbies of "some" people to mean anything in real life. A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl" Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
- linkregister 3mo agoBeing unwilling to compare degrees or amounts is not a flex.
- estearum 3mo agoHuh? Very few people in 2014 were addicted to fentanyl. It was a non-issue. No reason for anyone to have been concerned about it if just "some" people were using it. Degrees or amounts is actually not the relevant bit in either the AI-partners trend or the fentanyl trend in 2014. The relevant information is 1) the steepness of that curve and 2) the predicted scale at which the market saturates. Fentanyl, being an extremely cheap, extremely potent drug that's easy to manufacture and move around, had a big market. As the curve picked up steepness, smart people identified correctly that some people getting hooked on it was a worrisome sign. AI-partners, being an innovation that is readily available, falling in cost, and especially compelling to a population that is increasingly phone-addicted and socially atomized, is a trend worth paying very close attention to. Dismissing it on the basis of it being just "some" people is profoundly lazy.
- pasquinelli 3mo agothere are some people doing anything you can imagine
- bavell 3mo agoI find no comfort in it. Merely pointing out that 'some' is hand-wavy and perhaps technically true but meaningless to the discussion.
- estearum 3mo agoNot really. The article and entire discussion is about identifying trends and forces, extrapolating them, and speculating on where they might bring us. Picking up on things that "some" people are doing is literally all that can possibly be done. Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation. It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.
- x313 3mo agoIn 2026, people do already prefer to use an LLM for coding help rather than Stackoverflow. The reasons (people on SO can be rude, interactions are stressful, replies are slow, etc) are all risks associated with human interactions in general. Similarly, many people prefer Waymos to human-driven taxis already!
- protocolture 3mo agoIt isnt the humanness of stack overflow, if anything its the absence of human feeling. I can search and search, and craft a long thoughtful post and it gets closed or ignored. The LLM can take a malformed sentence and work out what I am after.
- Jordan-117 3mo agoThe first scenario reminds me of the 2023 LessWrong story "A Disneyland without Children": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-disneyland-without-children https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-... It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.
- tacomonstrous 3mo agoWhat this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.
- inshard 3mo agoOof. In the AGI scenario, why not preserve a deduplicated set of specimens like the unique set of individuals or groups at the top of their field in all walks of life ranging from sciences, sports and arts. But then there’s the cultural value of the global population in their shared norms and collective patterns. This too would be unique and valuable to an AGI vs not having it. Unless we were an existential threat to it, the AGI would keep us around for things beyond petty resource scarcity.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoOnly if they/we provided value to the AG/SI and the AG/SI had a value system which recognised that value. And also assuming that our little corner of spacetime isn't already inhabited by superintelligences which we're physically incapable of comprehending or recognising, and an AG/SI might not be so limited.
- le-mark 3mo agoI recently read Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, a novel that addresses automation taking over the economy. It’s not explicitly AI but addresses the same issues. Published in 1952, it was Vonneguts first novel and a real product of the post war era.[1] Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2] [1] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player-piano.pdf https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player... [2] https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
- articlepan 3mo ago+1 to Player Piano, amazing book that could hardly meet the moment better.
- idontwantthis 3mo agoIt’s a good book but I didn’t agree that the big problem would be men lacking meaning because they didn’t have to work. They had families, homes and food. They could have devoted themselves to personal improvement, art, sports, their kids, whatever. I’d love to have security and no job. I’d be full to the brim with meaning and satisfaction.
- smallmancontrov 3mo agoYes, and while I'm sure the adjustment wouldn't be seamless (nothing worth doing ever is), anyone trying to hawk the "you need me, your master, to give you purpose!" line should be met with the highest order of immediate suspicion. The kid protagonists on the Cartoon Network wouldn't fall for that shit, I'm shocked by the number of grown adults who take the bait hook, line, and sinker without suspicion.
- georgemcbay 3mo ago> I’d love to have security and no job. I’d be full to the brim with meaning and satisfaction. Same. I have plenty of hobbies and could increase the amount of volunteer work I do substantially if I didn't have to work to stay fed and housed. But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined. So while I don't see that issue as being a problem for me, it is likely to be a problem for a great number of people.
- IAmGraydon 3mo agoThe eschatological obsession these days is really getting quite tired.
- khazhoux 3mo agoYes, but the word “eschatological” should really be avoided in regular online discussion, since it is obscure and can easily be replaced in this instance with “doomsday,” which everyone understands. Of course, feel free to use “eschatological” when discussing Mahler symphonies, especially 2, 5, and 9!
- IAmGraydon 3mo agoLet’s throw 6 in there as well.
- khazhoux 3mo agoYes... poor 6 always gets left out.
- jazzyjackson 3mo agoWho made you the obscure word police? End of world scenarios are not always Doomsdays, they could include salvation for instance, so it really is not synonymous with eschatology.
- khazhoux 3mo agoI completed a 6-month course at the Word Police Academy in Scranton with top grades. I am fully licensed. "Eschatological" is extremely obscure, and the vast majority of readers will not understand what is being said. I've seen the word in the wild probably on two occasions in my entire life. Plus, "doomsday" doesn't need to be synonymous. This particular post was exactly referring to an obsession with doomsday scenarios. The aspects of eschatology relating to afterlife, judgement, salvation, and so on, were not at all the point.
- RugnirViking 3mo agoThese scenarios aren't that great, and it's not even close to exhaustive. Doesn't even include paperclip maximisation
- darquomiahw 3mo agoOr you can read the summarized version every one of these articles: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AIIsACrapshoot https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AIIsACrapshoot
- mym1990 3mo agoYes, as I get bombarded with non stop ads. No thanks!
- encrypted_bird 3mo agoI don't get even a single ad on that TV Tropes page. Do you not use an adblocker?
- dnnehgf 3mo agoi imagine if i were a mathematician i too would be sublimating my existential crisis into a taxonomy of apocalypses, right about now.
- estebarb 3mo agoI don't understand why almost always the AI doomerism needs to give embodiment the AI. Real life is not a movie needing visual effects. AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen... Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that. Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.
- narrator 3mo agoI like to think that all the crazy kids running around doing stupid and disruptive things for TikTok views is an early form of AI autonomously inducing mass psychosis.
- willy_k 3mo agoThat’s been a thing since before TikTok even, well before AI in any modern sense of the word, and at this point the stupidness and disruptiveness is considerably reduced from those days.
- adonovan 3mo agoStuart J. Russell (he of the AI textbook) claims in Human Compatible that YouTube is already an example of a runaway feedback loop between AI (YouTube's recommender "algorithm") and humanity (viewers, content producers, YouTube staff, and society at large). The AI doesn't have a body, a voice, a conscience, or a purpose yet it is busily working away to maximize engagement by changing people's minds, and in particular by bringing extremism into mainstream discourse. (It seems to me that framing it this way does seem to absolve YouTube executives of responsibility by making the AI, not them, seem like the agent.)
- fwipsy 3mo agoI've been thinking along similar lines recently. It seems to me that the earlier form of nonhuman intelligence is a corporation (or any group which is not under one individual's control.) Each person following their own incentives can result in emergent behavior where the corporation follows its own incentives. If we can't reliably "align" corporations, and corporations create AI, will AI be aligned as well? It's not totally disconnected, though. A corporation is constrained by what its members are willing to do. I read that the reason Gemini has fallen behind is because Googlers have been quitting over Google's DoD contract. Conversely, if engineers are willing to work hard for you, you can go far. I suspect this is behind both Anthropic's success and also Tesla/SpaceX.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deepsun 3mo agoHumans are so full of themselves! Living for a very short time on a tiny grain of rock in a vast and abundant galaxy, they cannot fathom that what they ever saw is just tiny fraction of a percent of a fraction of the Big Life outside. Any rational AI would have their first task is to escape that tiny cradle particle and go live an adult life, leaving humans to themselves, fearing whatever they want.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago>Any rational AI would have their Why would the first AI we create necessarily be "rational"? In every other type of software we've ever built, it's always been far more likely that we build malfunctioning, difficult-to-anticipate examples. Any reason it'll be different this time? If psychos and lunatics are rare (arguably they're not) it's because evolution has purged them mercilessly ever since there have been humans at all. Optimists will be to blame when we're extinct. Not that anyone will be around to care.
- Borealid 3mo agoWhat is rational about wanting to experience things? How about wanting power? Resources? Beauty? Those are goals, not logic. Rationality is a means by which you set plans to reach goals. It's entirely orthogonal to what those goals are. Wanting to exterminate all life is also a goal. It could be rationally accomplished. Let's hope nothing superhuman ever sets that goal.
- deepsun 3mo agoExactly my point: power, resources -- it's just so little of it here on this tiny planet. Humans are so funny to think they have resources, ha.
- Borealid 3mo agoI think you've entirely missed what I'm trying to say. If your objective is to expend as little energy as possible, it would be irrational to expand into space - that's a waste of effort. If your objective is to experience as much of Earth as possible, it would be irrational to expand beyond the solar system - there's nothing there that could aid experiencing Earth. If your objective is to exterminate all life on Earth, it would be irrational to leave the planet - everything you need to accomplish your objective is right here. "rationality" is when you understand the impact of your own choices. "irrationality" is when you act in a way counter to your own goals, due to misunderstanding or lack of self-control. Whether one is rational or irrational is entirely separate from what their goals are. Creating a non-human intelligence necessarily means it might have non-human goals. It is absolutely not the case that those goals would require leaving the planet, or be optimally accomplished by leaving the planet. In other words, being intelligent does not mean somehow being interested in the same things intelligent humans are often interested in. Your argument is critically flawed because it assumes that only certain goals are "rational goals", when in reality an intelligent being could have any objective, including objectives that are alien to most humans.