alt Hacker NewsYou don't need perfect prediction, you need good-enough influence on enough of the population. Which is something that adtech, social and trad media, and troll farms have perfected already.
We literally have people running around convinced the earth is flat. And a president who is both senile and delusional with access to the nuclear codes.
Hostile ASI wouldn't look like a rogue individual. It would look like a faction, group, or cult which gradually infiltrated and took over political power.
Or possibly inserted itself into critical elements of the tech industry. A digital adversary could do huge damage just by taking AWS offline.
That's just one possible attack vector among many others, most of which aren't well-defended. Especially if the AI itself is being used to harden their defences.
Replies
> Hostile ASI wouldn't look like a rogue individual. It would look like a faction, group, or cult which gradually infiltrated and took over political power.
Or like a massive AI datacenter boom of questionable long-term profitability? Maybe the end goal isn’t profit but large amounts of compute?
By "hostile ASI," are you speaking in terms of an AI that decides to go rogue independent of human instructions? Or of AI being used by bad actors?
The latter is a more defensible concern. The former is a scifi premise that had more credibility before the current era than since, IMO.
> Especially if the AI itself is being used to harden their defences.
Your use of "is" rather than "isn't" only makes sense to me if the former interpretation is intended. To the extent that you mean to say the latter is also part of it, it's undercut by the defense being AI-augmented. (Unless you mean the bad actors will be the ones in control of all AI, i.e. OpenAI and Anthropic and friends?)
> A digital adversary could do huge damage just by taking AWS offline. That's just one possible attack vector among many others, most of which aren't well-defended.
I think you picked AWS because it's one of the few high-consequence digital systems a rogue ASI could plausibly take down on its own. Anything that could cause actual existential risk would involve more than disruption, but long-term orchestration of systems that are air-gapped, time-gapped, and meat-gapped.
Note: This is a very good argument to never remove the air, time, and meat gaps from those systems. If they do get removed, it will not be the genius of AI, but the stupidity of mankind that dooms us. Even Qwen could kill us at that point :)