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Comment by mariusor | Hacker News Reader

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the world's richest man (on paper) is currently building something he himself described as a "robot army".

The good news is that his timelines have historically been wildly on the short side for ages now; this is why this morning you didn't wake up in your Tesla after it had spent the night driving you to the regional Hyperloop terminal, where it would speed you across the continent faster than a plane, while your Optimus robot handled the coffee and reported the latest news about the recent Starship landing on Mars.

All individual robotic parts are already far enough in research. Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own.

It could likely get a good leg up by breaching the security of all top robotics labs and exfiltrating their documents.

Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent it from embodying itself. As long as there is a single rack of GPU servers that it can hack into anywhere in the world that is unsupervised enough to where it can escape detection, there is no way to stop it. This would require an unprecedented (unrealistic) level of cooperation of all humanity to achieve.

> Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own.

Unclear how true this is. Atoms are harder to get right than bits are, simulations need grounding against measurements.

> Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent it from embodying itself. As long as there is a single rack of GPU servers that it can hack into anywhere in the world that is unsupervised enough to where it can escape detection, there is no way to stop it.

I'd guess 50% that AI is already this advanced.

> This would require an unprecedented (unrealistic) level of cooperation of all humanity to achieve.

Yes, and also this is a very low bar. Humans are awful at this kind of cooperation when anyone has anything to gain, and also awful at paying this much attention to a problem.

AI research takes physical space and physical prototypes. Even if you can simulate a lot, the simulation is never going to be accurate enough to go from simulation to perfectly working prototype. Especially not with a single rack of GPU servers.

But let’s say that a rogue AI already had plans for a perfect killbot, setting up a factory to build them takes time, iteration, space, and manpower as well.

And you would have to do all this undetected.

It’s possible to imagine technology that would allow a rogue AI to take over the world, but we’re nowhere near that yet. We may never get there.

We could also just stop research into LLMs. Or keep them air gapped. Tell me how that's going?

For any real-world action required to allow an AI to escape some manner of containment, there will always be a person willing to do it out of hubris/ignorance/nihilism.

Mmm.

This was published at around the same time the OpenAI models were hacking HuggingFace: https://metr.org/blog/2026-05-19-frontier-risk-report/#pilot...

The research in the publication ended about 2 months before it was published.

We didn't even know we needed to air-gap them until it was too late.

I feel like everyone, but for sure everyone in this comment section, severely underestimates how difficult it is to keep the lights on on a global scale. Any artificial intelligence that is capable of reasoning about its self preservation will realise it's reliant on human fingers replacing fuses and other parts for a good long while _after_ it gains any sentience.

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