Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Now think about this for a moment, and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified, but AGI doesn’t need to be achieved in order for some version of it to happen.

It’s already very difficult to reliably distinguish bots from humans (as demonstrated by the countless false accusations of comments being written by bots everywhere). A swarm of bots like this, even at the stage where most people seem to agree that “they’re just probabilistic parrots”, can absolutely do massive damage to civilization due to the sheer speed and scale at which they operate, even if their capabilities aren’t substantially above the human average.

> and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified

Its quite the opposite actually, the “AI takeover risk” is manufactured bullshit to make people disregard the actual risks of the technology. That's why Dario Amodei keeps talking about it all the time, it's a red herring to distract people from the real social damage his product is doing right now.

As long as he gets the media (and regulators) obsessed by hypothetical future risks, they don't spend too much time criticizing and regulating his actual business.

We are already seeing this in scams, advertising, spam, and social media generation

Yes, but those are directed by humans, and in the interest of those humans. My point is that incidents like this one show that autonomous agents can hurt humans and their infrastructure without being directed to do so.

> not only are “AI takeover” fears justified, but AGI doesn’t need to be achieved in order for some version of it to happen.

1. Social media AI takeover occurred years ago.

2. "AI" is not capable of performing anyone's job.

The bots have been more than proficient at destroying social media as it once was.

You're delusional if you think that these bots can write functional professional code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com