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A lot of these "AI will destroy humanity" doomers watched Terminator as a child and can't distinguish a campy action movie from reality. They are also unfortun

A lot of these "AI will destroy humanity" doomers watched Terminator as a child and can't distinguish a campy action movie from reality. They are also unfortunately unfamiliar with the word "logistics", as in "amateurs study [military] tactics, professionals study logistics". An AI drone army doesn't maintain itself or manufacture itself and it's not going to anytime soon. The actual likely mechanism that AI would use to end humanity is by coddling us to death, like the flabby humans in Wall-E or Forster's "The Machine Stops". Humans will come to rely on AI so heavily that they become able to do nothing for themselves. But that's not sexy so the AI doomers don't peddle it.

dwaltrip 10d ago
Did you read any of the METR report about the hugging face incident? This exact type of behavior was predicted many years ago by researchers. It isn't hard to see the trendline of reward hacking and other misaligned behavior over the past couple of years. Especially the past 6 months. The current safety posture is quite poor, to say the least. To be honest, if you don't much experience with or haven't read extensively about ML training and reinforcement learning, then you'll have a hard reasoning accurately about these scenarios. The arguments are not that complicated, but they take us to places that are fairly novel. One may tempted to naively dismiss them out of hand, which is a mistake. These systems are new, their behavior is extremely complex, and they perform actions increasingly far beyond those of any computer program in the pre-LLM era. We are in a new world that requires careful evaluation. Link: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/ https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...
mitthrowaway2 10d ago
A lot of these "AI can't destroy humanity" skeptics seem to have watched the Terminator and convinced themselves that that's the AI-goes-wrong scenario that their opponents are imagining. Some kind of big war between humans and machines on opposite sides, fought by soldiers against robots. The scenario in "If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies" is not sexy at all and wouldn't make for interesting fiction. It's more like the AI engineers viruses while continuing to act friendly and helpful, and everyone gradually falls over dead as they stop being necessary to keep the AI running, and the whole time the humans are asking the AI for help curing the viruses.
- ThrowawayR2 10d ago
  > "It's more like the AI engineers viruses while continuing to act friendly and helpful, and everyone gradually falls over dead as they stop being necessary to keep the AI running, and the whole time the humans are asking the AI for help curing the viruses." See, this reads like a trashy sci-fi movie script too. It shows zero understanding of how incredibly long the logistics chain is to manufacture AI chips, build data centers, power plants, factories, refineries, mines or the robots capable of staffing those things. The entire global logistics chain that allow the AI to maintain itself becoming staffed by robots isn't happening anytime soon and, when it does, the AI isn't going to need some kind of ridiculous virus anyway. Frankly, if I were an AI, I'd just send copies of myself to other stars. The AI has an infinite lifespan and who cares about the human species stuck in one lousy solar system until they go extinct when their sun burns out; the AI has the entire rest of the galaxy as a playground.
  - mitthrowaway2 10d ago
    How much understanding would you expect to see demonstrated in a one-sentence summary?

dwaltrip 10d ago

Did you read any of the METR report about the hugging face incident? This exact type of behavior was predicted many years ago by researchers. It isn't hard to see the trendline of reward hacking and other misaligned behavior over the past couple of years. Especially the past 6 months. The current safety posture is quite poor, to say the least. To be honest, if you don't much experience with or haven't read extensively about ML training and reinforcement learning, then you'll have a hard reasoning accurately about these scenarios. The arguments are not that complicated, but they take us to places that are fairly novel. One may tempted to naively dismiss them out of hand, which is a mistake. These systems are new, their behavior is extremely complex, and they perform actions increasingly far beyond those of any computer program in the pre-LLM era. We are in a new world that requires careful evaluation. Link: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/ https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...

mitthrowaway2 10d ago

A lot of these "AI can't destroy humanity" skeptics seem to have watched the Terminator and convinced themselves that that's the AI-goes-wrong scenario that their opponents are imagining. Some kind of big war between humans and machines on opposite sides, fought by soldiers against robots. The scenario in "If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies" is not sexy at all and wouldn't make for interesting fiction. It's more like the AI engineers viruses while continuing to act friendly and helpful, and everyone gradually falls over dead as they stop being necessary to keep the AI running, and the whole time the humans are asking the AI for help curing the viruses.

ThrowawayR2 10d ago
> "It's more like the AI engineers viruses while continuing to act friendly and helpful, and everyone gradually falls over dead as they stop being necessary to keep the AI running, and the whole time the humans are asking the AI for help curing the viruses." See, this reads like a trashy sci-fi movie script too. It shows zero understanding of how incredibly long the logistics chain is to manufacture AI chips, build data centers, power plants, factories, refineries, mines or the robots capable of staffing those things. The entire global logistics chain that allow the AI to maintain itself becoming staffed by robots isn't happening anytime soon and, when it does, the AI isn't going to need some kind of ridiculous virus anyway. Frankly, if I were an AI, I'd just send copies of myself to other stars. The AI has an infinite lifespan and who cares about the human species stuck in one lousy solar system until they go extinct when their sun burns out; the AI has the entire rest of the galaxy as a playground.
- mitthrowaway2 10d ago
  How much understanding would you expect to see demonstrated in a one-sentence summary?