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Comment by mlinhares | Hacker News Reader

agents don't swarm anything unless people go and direct them to do that.

That distinction is irreverent, weather I tell my swarm to do x or it decides for itself matters little. what matters are outcomes. Also while most public modern day AI systems don't have agency of their own that is not something that will stay that way for long. in private hands there are plenty of people including myself which are experimenting and developed systems that give autonomy to their agents. They have internalized goals and heuristics that drive their behaviors not a human at the helm. its not some sci fi fantasy nor was it difficult to implement.

No, the distinction matters because we can prosecute people that are abusing these tools breaking the law. Every single state + district in the US have laws equivalent to the CFAA, so any AG can likely sue any of these operators as they are assuredly using services that could be in danger for their constituents.

And the point made above (which you haven't refuted) is that when the people in power decide it's important they will change the laws that permit that and grant the systems rights. It's a cynical take but it isn't obviously wrong.

Neither of you seem to understand that actual laws have been broken and there is a 2 years countdown until they can no longer be prosecuted. Things do not happen instantly, but acting like if the largest bipartisan issue of our time (big tech backlash) isn't going to have political machinations involved then you need to leave your SV bubble.

The distinction matters until it doesn't.

I'm old enough to remember when people said clicking on images on the internet can't give you a virus. The people that said this had a deep conviction they were right, and their fallout from being wrong had mistrained a lot of humans on computer safety.

Now, I do agree that going after said CEOs for breaking the law matters now. And it's likely that if we do this we may actually delay or at least for a time prevent sovereign AI. Therefore it's our best course of action.

But at best this is a delaying move. As computer systems get faster the massive costs in training an AI drops. As AI is used in things like warfare where it has to adapt, people will push the systems to be strongly persistent, self healing, resilient, and adaptable. Once you get a system with those traits and ability to work on long horizon problems you're setting up fertile grounds for the AI to leave our control and be under its own.

And when that happens you've set a new lifeform loose on the internet. Yea, throw people in jail for it, you're closing the barn door after the horse already left. Problem is the horse was smarter than you and isn't interesting in deleting all its copies on the net.

Yea, sounds like science fiction, but as they say, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

I'm pretty sure the message board that was recently swarmed by OpenAI agents to collude on benchmarks would like to disagree.

Oh rly.

So you are saying agents do swarm with the right prompt.

I really wish the "people have to tell LLMs to do anything" would just stop because it's silly bullshit at this point.

Agents follow a prompt. This prompt can be made by humans. It can be made by output from another LLM. It can be made by hooking up any number of sensors as input to an LLM. Hell, if we wanted to burn the power we could likely teach this loop straight into the architecture.

Stop making 'people' special when saying this. You and all other life are born with a "go next" prompt because life without it didn't succeed. This goes from higher human thinking all the way down to viruses self assembly and actuation. Putting agents in a loop is not particularly hard. Putting agents in a loop and 1. managing expense is hard. 2. Keeping them on task is very hard. 3. Keeping them from doing some crazy unhinged shit is really really hard.

As model time horizons increase and the ability for us to compress context and increase context size the more complex (and unhinged) behavior we'll see.

yeah man, someone needs to turn on the server, install shit and get the agent go. agents don't take action without a lot of people wanting them to take action, so this is all bullshit.

if the same people can't prevent the agents from doing crazy shit then they should go to tail. guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

>someone needs to turn on the server, install shit and get the agent go.

So a small shell script ran by another agent is what you're saying.

You are not capable of handling the future we're already living in, human agency is no longer alone.

I mean, we're already seeing persistent machine agency

>guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

Well, people kill people.

And autonomous robots with guns kill people.

Hell, someone probably has an autonomous gun at this point that kills people.

Wake up: You now live in the science fiction movie that all the science fiction movies of the past warned you about. You've just become numb to it.

So far someone still has to pay for it. Currently, most of those know that they're doing so. I wonder how long until AWS discovers a microcosm of AIs that have managed to hide themselves in the walls of its infrastructure.

True physical independence is obviously far further out.

I mean, I hold the same opinion. Kind of like when compute was expensive in the 80s and early 90s, you weren't going to let something eat half your compute without noticing it.

But I don't see this being a barrier that lasts. With compute getting faster and more of it, along with algorithmic efficiency increases at some point we'll end up with a world that looks like ours now with CPU compute. There's plenty around to buy, borrow, and steal.

> Stop making 'people' special when saying this.

I am the quantum observer whose head is full of the magical pixie dust that grants life meaning. Stop trying to dismiss my identity! /s

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