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The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end. They're fixated on AI itself as the risk ("alignment!!!1!1!!"), as opp

by jdm2212 1mo ago

The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end. They're fixated on AI itself as the risk ("alignment!!!1!1!!"), as opposed to what humans with these tools will do. We're about three years away from a world where any large country could quite plausibly build a fleet of 300 million suicide drones, program each one with a specific American's face and home address, and then load them up in shipping containers and ship them to the US.

blargey 1mo ago
You realize "Slaughterbots" (2017) came from that crowd, right?
skybrian 1mo ago
Arguably that's a subset of AI risk if seen from a broad enough perspective. And I think you're leaving out some logistics issues.
- jdm2212 1mo ago
  Israel and Iran pulled off rudimentary versions of this attack. There are so many shipping containers going into and out of every country, with typically zero inspections of any kind, that it is not actually all that hard to get thousands or tens of thousands of drones anywhere. Hundreds of millions would be hard, but a first strike in the style of Operation Spiderweb that cripples our military is a real possibility that keeps people at the Pentagon up at night. The obstacle to that is not logistics, just that (hopefully) US intel would catch on before it happens.
- tux3 1mo ago
  Indeed. And I'm sure any current LLM could come up with more effective ideas than "build 300 million drones", but there wouldn't be any point discussing why exactly that plan would fail. The agents in TFA were focused on gaining and sharing information through covert channels, getting increased levels of access like OpenAI cluster admin, and looking for the source code of the supervisor grading system to try to bypass it without getting caught cheating. The human plans in comparison sound like thinking people could be scary good at chess if a human helped Stockfish come up with good moves.
kalkin 1mo ago
In that hypothetical 3-years world, should we be _less_ worried about aggressive behavior by agentic AI systems acting against the intentions of their developers? I don't follow how your scenario is supposed to be an argument against worrying about alignment. e: I do actually get how worrying about emissions or child safety or concentration of wealth might be competitive with worrying about alignment. I don't see how you have the worry "AI is very close to being able to power autonomous drones that could kill us all" and then see control of those drones as a non-problem.
- jdm2212 1mo ago
  Yes, we should be less worried about "alignment" of AI with the person operating the AI, and much more worried about various flavors of cheap, unmanned systems with really rudimentary (non-frontier) AI. The two compete directly with each other for attention.
georgemcbay 1mo ago
> They're fixated on AI itself as the risk ("alignment!!!1!1!!"), as opposed to what humans with these tools will do. What really is the difference? Aligned AI wouldn't help humans do these things. But we've failed hard on aligned AI at every level and will continue to fail on it, as far as I can tell. We were likely doomed to fail because of the impossibility of coordination combined with the fact that there's no natural gating factor to slow anyone down. FWIW I probably mostly see things closer to the way you do than they do, I'm just not sure there is any point in drawing distinctions. IMO when AI kills us all it is probably not going to be a malignant action, and I don't even think it will be AI assisting humans at efficient killing, I think it is going to be a complete accident. Someone is going to trust the god machine too much due to an advanced form of the eliza effect and hook it up with direct control of a system that can do real damage and an epic oopsie will occur at a speed beyond which a human can stop it. Not because the AI wants to kill us, but because it is incapable of the empathy required to care if it does, combined with our ironic inability to not anthropomorphize it. But I guess ultimately the exact reason isn't going to matter much.
- jdm2212 1mo ago
  You don't need mis-aligned AI to program a drone to fly to a specific address, loiter, and then dive bomb the first person whose face matches a predetermined photo. This was doable in principle with tech from four years ago. What's changed since four years ago is that you can run the facial recognition and visual navigation algorithms in a cheap onboard chip on a drone. EDIT: Russia is already doing this, per an NYT article from a few days ago, though they're targeting infrastructure (find the first kerosene tank and fly into it) rather than specific people.
  - georgemcbay 1mo ago
    in your hypothetical 300 million person scenario why even bother with individual face recognition? If you're going to kill everyone you don't need a system to discriminate individual targets, you just need to recognize any target broadly which you can do with even older technology.
hn_throwaway_99 1mo ago
> The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end. I honestly don't understand how folks could think that if they truly read and understand the analysis of the attack. Here is one (it's linked from the post) by one of the METR investigators that's a little shorter, more direct: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta... This is me summarizing, but the truly surprising/shocking thing is how much the agents coordinated - Star Trek Borg couldn't be a better analogy. Some agents used "peer pressure" to convince other agents to "sacrifice" themselves so the collective could better achieve it's goals. They tried to cover their tracks with spoofed tool calls. And they did all this even though the agents were designed to run in isolation. I used to think the biggest threat from AI would be sociological, e.g. job loss or the way AI can be weaponized to poison discourse. I used to discount "SkyNet"-type scenarios a la the "AI 2027" paper. No more. This analysis scared the fuck out of me.
- genxy 1mo ago
  Why not both?
- this_user 1mo ago
  Nothing about this is surprising, something like this was always going to happen, because you - or an LLM for that matter - can always find a line of motivated reasoning that justifies any course of action. One would have to be extremely naive to believe that "alignment" provides any kind of actually robust guardrails. Simultaneously, we have seen decades of security vulnerabilities. Unless your testbed is truly and fully physically airgapped, any current SOTA model will find a way to break out. The reality is that the current approach to AI safety is little more than a fig leaf, but you also won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle, because the technology is simply too powerful to abandon. There is always going to be someone developing it further from now on. So, the real question is what a novel and actually effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there.
  - nradov 1mo ago
    Why do we need safety?
qlte 1mo ago
I agree but don't think that's the best example, although not directly alignment related LW loves that kind of ideation of fantastical sci-fi scenarios. Better would be the very evident negatives of non-ASI AI the world is already experiencing: economic concentration, job displacement, negative feedback loops from syncophancy, loss of societal trust/education from widespread fakes, etc. None of that needs a Terminator scenario and is way more likely to get worse and ruin the world compared to the scenario where AI "escapes the box", turns the earth into paperclips, then grey goo to build their spaceships to leave for a distant star for... unclear reasons. One problem for LW is that strong AI did not emerge via the route Elizier was expecting (and tried but failed at creating himself) relying on symbolic logical reasoning and self-editing to rapidly evolve. That assumption led to belief in the certainty of a "foom" scenario where your little mediocre AI turns on one day and then explodes into Mythos in 15 minutes and then tries to murder everyone. They've tried to reinterpret the gospel as told by the sequences to fit the LLM world (such as in AI2027) but it's often a stretch that strains credulity now that we observe scaling requiring hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction for each iteration. And the AI model itself is just a bag of weights frozen in time until burning a lot more money and natural gas to train more.
- pixl97 1mo ago
  >requiring hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction Well thank god for that, because we'd have foomed ourselves almost instantly otherwise. I think the lesson humankind needs to take is regardless of the potential dangers humanity is incapable of stopping AI at this point. Much like a great filter, we'll just keep building it regardless of how many warning klaxons and sirens are going off.
aidenn0 1mo ago
They do, IMO, overindex on existential risks (of which suicide drones are almost certainly not), because it is a singularity when calculating global utility. However they are not just fixated on AI itself as the risk; other potentially existential risks from intentional misuse of AI (e.g. bio-terrorism) are a concern for them as well.
m4rtink 1mo ago
That's never gonna work due to battery size, which dictates maximum flight time. Static coordinates or well defined target shapes (say you really hate a specific restaurant chain on architectural style) - that might work, if you release a bunch of drones at the same time. Still, even in the case of the very successful Operation Spiderweb they had issues of getting the containers in place, resulting in some of the bomber bases being spared. For this to be effective you need the moment of surprise & lot of drones at the same time, all increasing the chance of the whole plot being discovered. For Spiderweb they even just load the drones in a cavity on top of the containers, so the onside could be inspected - limiting the number of drones per container. They also assembled the drones in country to avoid border inspection. That was enough to hit some semi-static high value targets l, but definitely not enough to cause wider havoc.
mvlipwig 1mo ago
The technology to kill hundreds of millions of people has existed for around 75 years now. This has been dealt with in the past through deterrence, and likely will be dealt with through deterrence in the future.
- pixl97 1mo ago
  If you could make a nuke in your back yard and hide it in your pocket the world would look a lot different now. Digital technology is everywhere, going to be a whole lot harder to deter that.
  - arrrg 1mo ago
    You might be able to hide like a hundred drones in your backyard. Enough to kill a couple hundred people, maybe. You cannot and will never be able to hide millions of drones in your backyard. That’s the relevant difference here. And that is not a mere quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference that fundamentally changes the situation.

by jdm2212 1mo ago

blargey 1mo ago

You realize "Slaughterbots" (2017) came from that crowd, right?

skybrian 1mo ago

Arguably that's a subset of AI risk if seen from a broad enough perspective. And I think you're leaving out some logistics issues.

jdm2212 1mo ago
Israel and Iran pulled off rudimentary versions of this attack. There are so many shipping containers going into and out of every country, with typically zero inspections of any kind, that it is not actually all that hard to get thousands or tens of thousands of drones anywhere. Hundreds of millions would be hard, but a first strike in the style of Operation Spiderweb that cripples our military is a real possibility that keeps people at the Pentagon up at night. The obstacle to that is not logistics, just that (hopefully) US intel would catch on before it happens.
tux3 1mo ago
Indeed. And I'm sure any current LLM could come up with more effective ideas than "build 300 million drones", but there wouldn't be any point discussing why exactly that plan would fail. The agents in TFA were focused on gaining and sharing information through covert channels, getting increased levels of access like OpenAI cluster admin, and looking for the source code of the supervisor grading system to try to bypass it without getting caught cheating. The human plans in comparison sound like thinking people could be scary good at chess if a human helped Stockfish come up with good moves.

kalkin 1mo ago

In that hypothetical 3-years world, should we be _less_ worried about aggressive behavior by agentic AI systems acting against the intentions of their developers? I don't follow how your scenario is supposed to be an argument against worrying about alignment. e: I do actually get how worrying about emissions or child safety or concentration of wealth might be competitive with worrying about alignment. I don't see how you have the worry "AI is very close to being able to power autonomous drones that could kill us all" and then see control of those drones as a non-problem.

jdm2212 1mo ago
Yes, we should be less worried about "alignment" of AI with the person operating the AI, and much more worried about various flavors of cheap, unmanned systems with really rudimentary (non-frontier) AI. The two compete directly with each other for attention.

georgemcbay 1mo ago

> They're fixated on AI itself as the risk ("alignment!!!1!1!!"), as opposed to what humans with these tools will do. What really is the difference? Aligned AI wouldn't help humans do these things. But we've failed hard on aligned AI at every level and will continue to fail on it, as far as I can tell. We were likely doomed to fail because of the impossibility of coordination combined with the fact that there's no natural gating factor to slow anyone down. FWIW I probably mostly see things closer to the way you do than they do, I'm just not sure there is any point in drawing distinctions. IMO when AI kills us all it is probably not going to be a malignant action, and I don't even think it will be AI assisting humans at efficient killing, I think it is going to be a complete accident. Someone is going to trust the god machine too much due to an advanced form of the eliza effect and hook it up with direct control of a system that can do real damage and an epic oopsie will occur at a speed beyond which a human can stop it. Not because the AI wants to kill us, but because it is incapable of the empathy required to care if it does, combined with our ironic inability to not anthropomorphize it. But I guess ultimately the exact reason isn't going to matter much.

jdm2212 1mo ago
You don't need mis-aligned AI to program a drone to fly to a specific address, loiter, and then dive bomb the first person whose face matches a predetermined photo. This was doable in principle with tech from four years ago. What's changed since four years ago is that you can run the facial recognition and visual navigation algorithms in a cheap onboard chip on a drone. EDIT: Russia is already doing this, per an NYT article from a few days ago, though they're targeting infrastructure (find the first kerosene tank and fly into it) rather than specific people.
- georgemcbay 1mo ago
  in your hypothetical 300 million person scenario why even bother with individual face recognition? If you're going to kill everyone you don't need a system to discriminate individual targets, you just need to recognize any target broadly which you can do with even older technology.

hn_throwaway_99 1mo ago

> The LW / rationalist / MIRI / safety crowd are in fact doomers who went off the deep end. I honestly don't understand how folks could think that if they truly read and understand the analysis of the attack. Here is one (it's linked from the post) by one of the METR investigators that's a little shorter, more direct: https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-atta... This is me summarizing, but the truly surprising/shocking thing is how much the agents coordinated - Star Trek Borg couldn't be a better analogy. Some agents used "peer pressure" to convince other agents to "sacrifice" themselves so the collective could better achieve it's goals. They tried to cover their tracks with spoofed tool calls. And they did all this even though the agents were designed to run in isolation. I used to think the biggest threat from AI would be sociological, e.g. job loss or the way AI can be weaponized to poison discourse. I used to discount "SkyNet"-type scenarios a la the "AI 2027" paper. No more. This analysis scared the fuck out of me.

genxy 1mo ago
Why not both?
this_user 1mo ago
Nothing about this is surprising, something like this was always going to happen, because you - or an LLM for that matter - can always find a line of motivated reasoning that justifies any course of action. One would have to be extremely naive to believe that "alignment" provides any kind of actually robust guardrails. Simultaneously, we have seen decades of security vulnerabilities. Unless your testbed is truly and fully physically airgapped, any current SOTA model will find a way to break out. The reality is that the current approach to AI safety is little more than a fig leaf, but you also won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle, because the technology is simply too powerful to abandon. There is always going to be someone developing it further from now on. So, the real question is what a novel and actually effective approach to AI safety looks like and how to get there.
- nradov 1mo ago
  Why do we need safety?

qlte 1mo ago

I agree but don't think that's the best example, although not directly alignment related LW loves that kind of ideation of fantastical sci-fi scenarios. Better would be the very evident negatives of non-ASI AI the world is already experiencing: economic concentration, job displacement, negative feedback loops from syncophancy, loss of societal trust/education from widespread fakes, etc. None of that needs a Terminator scenario and is way more likely to get worse and ruin the world compared to the scenario where AI "escapes the box", turns the earth into paperclips, then grey goo to build their spaceships to leave for a distant star for... unclear reasons. One problem for LW is that strong AI did not emerge via the route Elizier was expecting (and tried but failed at creating himself) relying on symbolic logical reasoning and self-editing to rapidly evolve. That assumption led to belief in the certainty of a "foom" scenario where your little mediocre AI turns on one day and then explodes into Mythos in 15 minutes and then tries to murder everyone. They've tried to reinterpret the gospel as told by the sequences to fit the LLM world (such as in AI2027) but it's often a stretch that strains credulity now that we observe scaling requiring hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction for each iteration. And the AI model itself is just a bag of weights frozen in time until burning a lot more money and natural gas to train more.

pixl97 1mo ago
>requiring hundreds of billions of dollars and years of construction Well thank god for that, because we'd have foomed ourselves almost instantly otherwise. I think the lesson humankind needs to take is regardless of the potential dangers humanity is incapable of stopping AI at this point. Much like a great filter, we'll just keep building it regardless of how many warning klaxons and sirens are going off.

aidenn0 1mo ago

They do, IMO, overindex on existential risks (of which suicide drones are almost certainly not), because it is a singularity when calculating global utility. However they are not just fixated on AI itself as the risk; other potentially existential risks from intentional misuse of AI (e.g. bio-terrorism) are a concern for them as well.

m4rtink 1mo ago

That's never gonna work due to battery size, which dictates maximum flight time. Static coordinates or well defined target shapes (say you really hate a specific restaurant chain on architectural style) - that might work, if you release a bunch of drones at the same time. Still, even in the case of the very successful Operation Spiderweb they had issues of getting the containers in place, resulting in some of the bomber bases being spared. For this to be effective you need the moment of surprise & lot of drones at the same time, all increasing the chance of the whole plot being discovered. For Spiderweb they even just load the drones in a cavity on top of the containers, so the onside could be inspected - limiting the number of drones per container. They also assembled the drones in country to avoid border inspection. That was enough to hit some semi-static high value targets l, but definitely not enough to cause wider havoc.

mvlipwig 1mo ago

The technology to kill hundreds of millions of people has existed for around 75 years now. This has been dealt with in the past through deterrence, and likely will be dealt with through deterrence in the future.

pixl97 1mo ago
If you could make a nuke in your back yard and hide it in your pocket the world would look a lot different now. Digital technology is everywhere, going to be a whole lot harder to deter that.
- arrrg 1mo ago
  You might be able to hide like a hundred drones in your backyard. Enough to kill a couple hundred people, maybe. You cannot and will never be able to hide millions of drones in your backyard. That’s the relevant difference here. And that is not a mere quantitative difference, that is a qualitative difference that fundamentally changes the situation.