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Comment by Loquebantur | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think, the scenarios in question here would be "silly"?

Is it that "chatbots" can't come out of the screen to immediately harm you physically?

Let's say they simply manage to take down the internet. How many would die?

So what. Various attackers managed to take down large chunks of the Internet on a frequent basis before LLMs even existed. This killed very few people. The great thing about the Internet is how resilient it is.

Darling companies of this very website have mistakenly brought down large portions of the internet thanks to our old friend BGP. No attacks required, just small oversights and unfortunate concentration on the business/IP space! This happens regularly.

Anyway, to your point, things can be resilient. They tend to be or not be... because we made them that way. Don't poke your bruises, and all that. Life support is deployed on-campus but relies on a single-point IPSec tunnel to us-east? Easy fix: stop that.

It is that they are chatbots. If it were real AI, an actual singularity, I would worry, maybe. But it isn’t. They are absurdly powerful automation tools that can handle logic better than a human can dream of. They take care of the grunt minutiae without complaint. But they are not going to end the world in their current form.

So we're going to wait till after they can adopt a form they can end the world in?

And he'll, we need to examine all the risks. AI ending is a large but lower risk problem. AI giving people the power to end us is a problem that is starting to happen now.

And that's not even counting 'minor' problems like society falling apart.

> Let's say they simply manage to take down the internet.

geez, don’t threaten me with a good time.

I think a month without internet would be a fucking amazing lesson for what it means to make things durable and reliable.

That Simpsons episode when Marge managed to get Itchy and Scratchy banned briefly.

The kids opening their houses front doors into the outside, rubbing their eyes and looking around at this new world.

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