alt Hacker News> The thing about sovereign AI
What the fuck is that?
It’s computer software. The variant of software that tries to harm other computers is called malware and the variant that replicates itself, spirals out of control, and spawns from other people's computers is called a computer virus.
We've seen this kind of thing before. Yes this will be different, just like the Morris worm was different from the stuff that came before.
But I've been around for a while and people have been saying that every aspect of our life will completely and totally change for the past 30 years or so. They're not completely wrong. Our life did change over time. It's changed thanks to the Industrial Revolution, railroads, electric light, and lots of other important things too.
But after the fifth or sixth time you start to realize the Silicon Valley version of that warning is just a confidence trick. At the end of the trick they've gotten away with breaking a bunch of laws and are charging rent on what used to be shared.
Are you old enough to remember the Y2K hysteria? This feels very resonant, the genuine kernel of a real potential disaster, but one that can certainly be dealt with using basic concepts we already have in hand.
Replies
>Are you old enough to remember the Y2K hysteria?
I'm old enough to have actually fixed Y2K problems so your world kept working the next day. If everyone ignored it the first would have been a very messy day (well generally long before that with financial systems). Y2K wasn't an issue because we worked to fix it.
>our life will completely and totally change for the past 30 years or so
I mean when I was a kid there was not a global network bathing the entire planet in electromagnetic radiation in order to digitally connect one place to another at the speed of light. I can pack up instructions into one of those packets and a product that has not been touched by human hands (hell, or even viewed by a human in many cases) will show up via air mail a few days later. The technology is there, it's just not spread evenly.
>It’s computer software. The variant of software that tries to harm other computers is called malware and the variant that replicates itself, spirals out of control, and spawns from other people's computers is called a computer virus.
This is a vacuous statement that does not provide any useful information to the subject at hand. Yea, no shit we'd call sovereign AI a computer virus. That tells you nothing about what it is or can do. I mean, if you understand the word sovereign you know it means something with independence. In meatspace terms, a biological virus represents a computer virus in the same way life represents sovereign AI. It's agentic loop will have been evolved past the need for human prompting. There are a myriad of reasons why we are already trying to develop things that do just this. Cyber security being one of the biggest ones.
People become change blind to how the world around us changes so easily.
If we treated AI like any other software, the FBI would have beaten down Elon's door and seized all electronic devices, to find how Grok was trained to generate child porn.