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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

This is a common populist sentiment, but if you don’t trust anyone then nothing can be done. Is it just game over?

It’s not game over because AI doomers are wrong in their projections. LLMs are a transformative technology like the internet, but they’re also overhyped and the useful applications aren’t as broad as people think they are. They’re also not Skynet.

I’m also skeptical about some projections, particularly for robotics, but on the Internet at least, it does seem like AI is automating most things, more or less as predicted. We already have botnets and had one notorious AI botnet swarm, fortunately easily shut down without doing any real damage. I don’t think we’ve seen the last AI botnet.

AI-automated warfare is looking pretty scary too. I don’t think it will stay in Ukraine.

Time will tell. I think the problems will come from humans automating things that shouldn’t be automated, like the disaster of the Minab school targeting, not out-of-control superintelligence.

Viruses don't need to be intelligent at all and smart viruses (or AI internet worms) won't need to be superintelligent to be a real pain to deal with. DoS attacks due to scraping are bad enough already.

The situation is sort of like the Internet before broadband. There probably aren't enough AI-capable home machines to have big swarms of bots that run autonomously. If the swarm depends on an LLM API, it will be easier to cut it off once it's noticed.

I think it's an even chance that we will see a bot swarm in the wild (rather than coming from an AI lab) by the end of next year.

Right, but the internet survived the Melissa virus and other early widespread worm attacks. They caused widespread disruption and economic damage, but they weren’t the end of the world. And besides, at present people are using AI to find and patch software at a faster rate than they are using it to compromise software (more dollars are allocated to security these days).

IMHO the biggest problems will be with poorly written AI slop software, probably small business crapware produced with minimal investment (maybe entirely without an experienced developer) and legacy equipment that’s been abandoned by the manufacturer. This will lead to disruption but not catastrophe.

Certainly no “anyone” and who happens to be worse than no one.

This is a common populist argument

I didn't say I don't trust anyone. Don't put words in my mouth, it's a sign of bad faith.

Other countries have governments that have earned that level of trust. I believe the US could get there eventually, but it will take a very long time because it has a very long way to go.

Okay, sorry about that. But how do we start? Maybe there are AI safety organizations that deserve our support?

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