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> The dangers posed by this technology on its present trajectory are best understood as simple accelerants for the existing dangers humans pose to themselves.
Is very true. All the doomspeak "aI EsCaPeD AnD HaCkEd aNoThEr sYsTeM" was a human error all along, and the tech was doing what it is programmed to do, retry until a satisifiable outcome is met.
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fastball • today at 8:55 PM
How is that comforting? Humans pose almost infinite danger to themselves. We can (and have) done pretty much everything you can do. We've had the capability to glass the entire earth for 70 years. We've had bioweapons, chemical weapons, mass murder, you name it.
Accelerating the ability for any given person to have access to some amount of these capabilities is terrifying, is it not?
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The particular problem here is quantified the inherent danger of a technology. That is, once you remove the active management of humans, what dangers can happen.
With dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials these are generally pretty easy to classify. This said, after the physical behaviors, the above technologies can induce behavior changes in humans because they exist. After nukes, a lot more people had issues with extental dread. It also causes n-order interactions that get very hard to predict. For example MAD or laws against using chemical weapons.
And these are weapons with a very easy to map out causal chain in their own behavior. You can't prompt a chemical weapon to make a decision.
We come up with agentic AI and all of a sudden a lot of rules on causality break. In a harness they are a causal agent. They can interact with a digital reality, and with the right tools and/or human contacts they can causally effect analog reality.
Anyone that says 'programmed' about an LLM almost certainly does not know what they are talking about and can be summarily ignored.