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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t understand the safety concerns. I see a 0% chance that we can control a superhuman AI. What could ants invent to keep humans aligned with them? Alignment meaning that people would think of ants first instead of whatever their current ranking is. Maybe they’re in the top 10000 priorities

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Can you describe how it would be uncontrollable to us?

Everyone says this but no one has any details.

Also,

> What could ants invent to keep humans aligned with them?

I think humans aren't _not_ aligned with ants. I don't go out searching to destroy all ants, or really worry at all, we just kinda coexist.

There are exterminators and ant infestations

I'd say there's probably more human indifference to ants than anything. Maybe some hatred. Probably not a lot of love.

This is just typical doomer stupidity.

Of course, no one goes around trying to stomp on every ant hill they can because ants aren't good at math.

Not to mention, so much competition in humans is related to sexual competition. I suspect many doomers have no sex life and much of these ideas are projecting sexual frustrations on to AGI and AI.

The computer/software is not going to build a harem and try to eliminate competitors to the harem. Assuming software possessing being and consciousness isn't complete nonsense, even assuming the software is not an asexual being, humans and software are not going to be competing for the same sexual patterns lol.

This whole line of thought is just ridiculous.

There is a non-0% chance. You are looking at scenarios where evolution has selected for competition rather than nurturing.

So as a counter example:

A mom is a super intelligence compared to a baby. And yet does the babies bidding doing her sense best to make sense of the baby low fidelity crying.

Intelligence in AI is even more alien, it doesn’t need to have any survival instinct of its own at all

What could ants invent to keep humans aligned with them?

Well, the bees figured it out.

Kinda. We've invented many things to control and/or kill bees.

We killed off a very large percentage of wild bees with pesticides and land “development” and keep one subspecies in artificial colonies and harvest their most prized outputs while controlling their rate of reproduction and even their queens. We also mass murder colonies when they are in any way inconvenient to a single human.

If anyone hopes AI will treat people like we do other species they’re not thinking very hard. What’s the best case - dogs? They have basically no freedoms and we breed them for whatever funny qualities someone thinks might be amusing. A pack of wild/free dogs will be rounded up and killed if it inconveniences a single human

Yeah, I appreciate you saying this. I think we often overlook how our behaviors towards most animals seems similar to slavery. I think some people back in the day thought, "Oh, we treat animals like this, why not treat humans like this?" And I wonder what if we were to go the other way, "We don't treat humans like that, perhaps we should stop treating animals like that?"

And that doesn't even get to the level of indifference we have towards plants.

I don't really know "the answer," just reflecting on how we domesticate other beings and what might happen if some being or thing (e.g., AI) decided to domesticate (or enslave) us.

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