Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

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> Take the perspective of one of these things. You think 100 times faster than a person. That means that if it takes 30 seconds for a user to respond or to give you your next instruction, you are waiting 3000 seconds in your loop. For 50 minutes.

... in a purely digital environment.

Think about building a house. Digging the foundation, pouring cement, building block walls, framing, sheathing, weatherproofing, insulating, wiring in electric, plumbing, drywall and plastering, painting, and decorating it. You can imagine each step in exquisite detail over the course of an hour or an afternoon.

Now go out and build it. It will take you months or years to carry out the actions you can imagine and plan in an hour.

A digital being may be able to run on expansive overclocked hardware to have an experience hundreds of times faster than yours, but it won't get to be the flash in the real world. Mechanize, sure, build robot swarms, sure (although then it gets to multitask to process hundreds of input streams and dilute its CPU power), but it will be coupled to an existence not much faster than ours.

If it wants to interact with the real world; a (true) AI may be able to live a lifetime in an afternoon, in a purely digital world, but once it is marooned in realtime it is going to be subject to a very similar time stream as ours.

Today, the real world is so intertwined with the digital world that it may as well be one thing. If an AI decided it wanted more power, and took over every computer on the planet with it's exceptional speed and intelligence (to be clear, I know this isn't possible today, but someday), we could do nothing to stop it, we'd have to just unplug and reset ALL of our technology, literally replacing any digital storage with zeros as to eliminate the infection. I don't think that's possible without billions of people dying in the interim.

I mean, malware and ransomware is already a thing. A hospital already needs to have a plan for how to turn off all of its computers and reset everything and restore from off backups, because that's a thing that happens to hospitals today.

This only works if they can't be instantly reinfected.

If you take the precepts of the parent comment at face value, then you have an intelligence far greater and faster than humans.

Can something like this persuade humans with whom it freely communicates to do things not in the interest of humanity, in the same way that less intelligent and slower people have convinced humans to, e.g., release sarin in a crowded Japanese subway? Given its speed and intelligence level, what are the physical bounds of the nuclear, chemical, or biological agents it could teach radicalized people to create, and on what timeframe?

Can it amass funds through scamming people on the Internet, defrauding financial institutions, super-intelligent high-frequency trading, or creating digital-only art, code, information, or other services that people voluntarily pay for now? Something that, again, people less intelligent and slower have done very successfully for decades? And with that money combined with superhuman persuasive power, can that AI buy services that align its digital-only goals to real-world actions counter to the goals of humanity?

To ask a more specific question: if an AI meets the conditions of "many multiples smarter and faster than humans," "capable of persuasion and creating things of financial value," and "wants to end humanity", what stops it from coordinating mass utility shutdowns, nuclear strikes, chemical attacks, destruction of Internet-accessible transportation and farm equipment, release of smallpox, and/or anything else humans are currently capable of and choose not to do?

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