Can somebody tell me a story how this will unfold? And - as long as the AI is confined to data centers - how it will prevent humans from unplugging the power?
But you could create scenarios where an AI with very, very roughly the current capabilities could potentially nuke everyone. Let's assume an agent decides that the way to solve its task was to get the US to fire all nukes on Russia. The agent would need to hack some government systems to understand how exactly to access them. Then it would need to get the content of the card with launch codes the president has, and identify which code is the correct one. Maybe that information is available somewhere and it can get to it, I obviously can't know that.
Then it could fake a call from the president, synthesizing his voice and ordering a nuclear strike. If it hacked enough systems to get into whatever communication pathways would be used in such a case. Would the soldiers listen to this order and follow it, I don't know.
Or maybe the agent can get in somewhere in between, to avoid the need to know the president's launch code. And fake a call from a military commander to the launch sites.
I think other scenarios that would cause significant harm, but aren't as bad as nuclear war are more plausible. And in those shutting down all data centers would probably be the way to stop it. The AI can probably hide in other datacenters, once it is at a point where it's running amok with some bad goals. But if it presents a huge and immediate threat at that point, humans will also go to great lengths to stop it.
Killing each other is relatively straightforward. Keeping people alive (e.g., curing cancers) is considerably more difficult.
I imagine that AI augments both our destructive and constructive powers.
Similarly, we cannot predict what AI would do.
Someone has to go out there and cut back the tree that is growing into the power line.
It seems to me that this would be a race against time, make the robots to keep things running before you lose the capabilities to do so. I somewhat tend towards not possible but on the other hand there is just such an enormous amount of stuff on the planet that could be repurposed in creative ways by a superhuman AI, it might be just about possible.
Can we say the same thing about the agents? Current, probably. But doesnt it look like everyone is spending all their effort integrating&connecting them everywhere, so they are not confined & do more on behalf of us?
It's easy to imagine a scenario where we would just shut down a very intelligent agent cluster. Is it hard to imagine though the same agent can have also access to that to prevent us from doing it? this defense would be more plausible if we weren't racing to give them every tool&act.
However, the missing link in this reasoning is that AI will almost certainly become far more widely deployed in the future than it is today, and worryingly, consumer devices will surely become powerful enough to run capable AI systems locally.
Once the substrate will be there, once an AI escapes containment, we're toast - I can imagine only solution will be to shutdown electronics at global level.
This is all still "what if's", but the tail end's are truly F'd beyond our ability to fix.
Another model: Because we give AI Agents already that much power, imagine in 10 years everything running through an Agentic AI Layer. EVERYTHING. Now some rough system 'thinks' about something, starts to push through the then existing agentic ai layer systems and stops everything. Billions of humans would loose access to food and water, even if this is just for a short period.
Covid showed how shitty a handful of people can disrupt global supply chains. Toilet paper was. ahuge stupid pseudo issue in germany.
What's more, AI just needs to have a credit card and it can start commissioning humans to do things for it in the real world.
edit: wtf, why did I just receive so much gift tokens on my openai account?