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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hero defeats the hostile onboard computer by entering its logic core and manually disconnecting its memory modules.

That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX is planning to do. You can't disconnect. You can't shoot it.

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It’s also not happening. They’re saying that because they need to somehow explain how there’s synergy between their space side and their Grok side. It doesn’t work, but that doesn’t matter to investors as long as they don’t actually do it.

>It’s also not happening.

People said this about every one of Musk's big ideas, from Falcon 9 landings to Model 3 mass production, Starlink, and FSD.

And extending the human race to Mars, and Hyperloop, and frontier AI model, and DOGE cutting $2 trillion per year in government spending...

You don't think the human race will be extended to Mars?

As for frontier AI model: let's see Grok 4.8 before drawing any conclusions there.

> You don't think the human race will be extended to Mars?

About the same probability as SpaceX running AI racks in space :)

To be fair, the vegas loop is operating - shipping a few racks to space to save face/muddle the issue won't be a problem. Operating/scaling it in a commercially viable manner is the issue.

> You don't think the human race will be extended to Mars?

Not in any meaningful capacity. Probably not even as much as we extended to the polar circles during our lifetime. It's a dead rock, there is literally nothing for us there, even with hundreds of years of extra climate change at the current rate and earth would still be a thousand times more suited for us than mars

Yep in the current state of human capabilities, it’s a supply chain nightmare to sustain life there, unless somehow there’s something discovered on mars that is useful to humans on earth at a scale that can fund the infrastructure to maintain life there.

I suppose it may be possible for new technologies to emerge that would allow synthesis of life sustaining “stuff”, the universe does seem to hold a lot of hidden surprises

Not in anything resembling permenant habitation any time soon. We can't even make a self sustaining biosphere here on Earth, how would being on Mars make that any more possible instead of harder?

You can shoot them. But also, you can just stop sending them to space. It’s not like an AI will build and control space ships to replace and maintain its network in space… It’s sort of absurd how human agency is ignored in all those sci-fi scenarios

Do you feel like you have much agency in the economic and political systems that rule our lives? The problem does indeed always come down to humans, but the specific humans with the most agency are generally quite eager to take away the agency of everyone else to increase their own share. And by the time they themselves are actually affected, it's generally too late.

well apparently the US now has "space weapons" which by definition have to be remote control

and that means unlike nukes which hopefully still need a 2-man manual switch, the "space lasers" could be taken over by "AI"

and then "AI" just blackmails and threatens the right people with those "space lasers" to get what it wants or even just stay online

there was a 1970 movie based on a 1966 book which predicted this

"Colossus: The Forbin Project"

the book it was based on was written before we even landed on the moon

decade before Wargames

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

did terribly in theaters, I guess people didn't think "AI" was plausible then

way ahead of its time, they should do a remake

trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI

> You can't disconnect. You can't shoot it.

Yes you can shoot them. The US has had this capability for a long time. Anti satellite missiles exist and they can be launched from an F-15 at it's highest altitude.

SpaceX has 11,000 satellites in orbit (growing rapidly) and the US never had more than a couple dozen anti satellite missiles, which could not reach satellites in geosynchronous orbit anyway.

Well if "kessler syndrome" is likely, you won't need many missiles.

edit: what satellites are in geosynchronous orbit that are running AI workloads?

None yet... we are talking about the next five years.

SpaceX's FFC application is for 1 million Starmind satellites.

That's if SpaceX AI doesn't hack into the systems that control this capability first. And this is why physical access is important, as depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

SpaceX AI will be busy generating child porn...

> That's hard to do if the AI rack is in space as SpaceX

Pretty much every analysis I've seen concludes this isn't going to be a practical concern

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