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There are so many practical problems with rogue AI being a threat to humanity that are still not even decades away with being solved that it should be a serious
by MrDrMcCoy 6d ago
There are so many practical problems with rogue AI being a threat to humanity that are still not even decades away with being solved that it should be a serious concern for no one. There's plenty to be afraid of regarding AI from a financial or ecological perspective, just not from it taking over the world or directly killing humanity. Here's some of the reasons a rogue AI won't kill humanity:
1. The most advanced robots still lack human dexterity. None of them have flexible spines and can easily be knocked over or outrun.
2. The energy density problem is not solved. Robot batteries last hours, while a solid meal can keep a human running for days.
3. Robots still heavily rely on humans for design and assembly.
4. Robot parts are fragile and rely on an even more fragile supply chain.
5. The brains of the murder machines will have nowhere to hide if they want to work well enough to mount any kind of offense. Datacenters are physically vulnerable, also subject to fragile supply chains. Distributing a species-ending AI across all smaller hardware solves compute, but latency and throughput choke models in the most finely tuned datacenters. WiFi will completely cripple a distributed one that's large enough to cause real damage.
6. All noteworthy military hardware is not reachable on the internet for AI to seize control of.
7. The small arms that robots might seize will run out of ammo before citizens and the military have time to organize a counteroffensive.
In the absolute worst case, we cut the power to the areas with AI datacenters and wait for the backup generators to run out. Now that that's out of the way, you can go get some sleep ;)
- elomnusk 5d agoAll the AI has to do is attack power generation/distribution nationwide, water treatment, etc., and wait a week.
- MrDrMcCoy 5d agoThe same power that the datacenters need to run off of? Brilliant move! If somehow it targets power that hurts a lot of people without killing itself, that would not impede a citizen with a backhoe from cutting the fiber to the datacenter. Humans could restart power generation pretty quickly after that.
- brokencode 5d agoI was mostly kidding about the actual killer robot part. I think a rogue AI could try to manipulate society through hacking, propaganda, etc., though. To what end? Not sure. More likely, it’ll be used by rogue human actors to steal money or cause major disruptions to critical technology of an adversary.