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Comment by lijok | Hacker News Reader

p(doom) is 100% and it's silly to think it's anything less. As soon as anyone figures out how to build SI, all it takes is one person to run off with the secret sauce and build a malevolent version of it.

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i won't use the term p(doom), but i agree that the human race is "doomed" in the same way all things that exist are "doomed."

Cool. Meanwhile in the real world that isn't governed by science fiction, we're dealing with a billionaire using LLMs to wage information warfare towards explicitly white supremacist ends right now. Let's focus on that right now?

please post about my pet issue instead of whatever the comment section is nominally about.

Replace LLMs with any other source of labor and we've had that for centuries. What's changed?

Smart Phones are a true opiate of the masses. If you weren't aware, people on opium are generally really easy to manipulate to whatever ends especially if you offer more opium.

could you provide more details on this?

I believe the parent is talking about Grok, the Nazi Twitter AI from Elon Musk:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/elon-musk...

yes, a most explicit and deliberate happening masterminded by mr musk himself.

lol I wish that were true

Eh, AI-driven p(doom) is only 100% if there is no intelligence ceiling around the human level.

But consider, in the alternate universe where we never invent AI, economic p(doom) is also 100%. Humans are fragile and short-lived.

https://youtu.be/b5z5R6xqEG0

That's interesting - first time I'm hearing the idea there might be an intelligence ceiling around the human level. Who talks about this more?

It is an open question and typing "human intelligence ceiling ai" into your search engine of choice is a good way to see that, but it is basically wishful thinking. The likes of David Deutsch, Judea Pearl and Noam Chomsky all argue this at differing levels of academic integrity (IMO Steven Byrnes has produced the most rigorous work on the English internet), but there is a simple objection.

If you have a single AI that is capped at an intelligence ceiling equivalent to human levels of intellect, what is stopping you from running fifty of them, in parallel, at fifty times faster than our normal human clock speed, as a team?

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