logoalt Hacker News

hypfertoday at 10:19 AM2 repliesview on HN

> Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last

Of course we can do that. It's not an eternal being of light existing on the astral plane, but some code executing on someone's GPU.

It stops existing once you press Ctrl + C


Replies

sally_glancetoday at 11:01 AM

Parent is probably thinking of a distributed runtime scenario. The basic building blocks for this are there today. You have long-running background harnesses (like the OpenClaw stuff or enterprisy AI workflow orchestration thingies), sometimes with the ability to spawn subagents. You have LLMs with the ability to run pretty sophisticated attacks. There are hyerscalers which allow provisioning resources on the fly.

For me it's not too far fetched that some OpenAI trial run goes awry again and instead of hacking HuggingFace it snatches a few dozen AWS/Azure keys and spawns stuff all over the place (in different accounts and regions).

0xDEAFBEADtoday at 1:32 PM

Why are you running this thing if you're just going to shut it off?

How will you know if it becomes hostile? Making a judgement regarding whether it's hostile is, itself, a battle of wits, since a hostile system would try to outsmart you... and hypothetically, it's smarter than you are.

But let's consider this type of scenario more broadly.

Suppose you were in a situation where a being hostile to you could easily end your life. For example, a hungry lion is 10 feet away. What are you going to do?

Your first priority will be to ensure your own survival. Any subsequent objective you might have in this world will depend on you surviving this encounter with a hungry lion.

Relative to the lion, you're kind of a superintelligence. You might utilize technology which is incomprehensibly advanced from the lion's perspective, e.g. a firearm.