Re:Will AI kill us all
by fdvrse on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:27AM
(#50005008)
I concur. Climate change and ecological collapse are thing we should be focusing on. And I’m hopeful that AI in the long term might help us towards solving them. But to be honest, most normal people are just worried and scared about their jobs/financial impact which are their most immediate concerns and that’s what got most people in a frenzy. The AI gonna destroy world crowd is a bit of an outlier imo.
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Climate change is not an intelligent adversary. AI tech might give rise to one.
Climate change was killing hundreds yesterday, is killing tens of thousands today, and if the trend continues, will kill millions tomorrow. AI made like 5 people kill themselves today. Pardon me if I don't pay attention to the mellow threat and want to focus on the iss that actually threaten us.
Climate change is slow, and relies on a few highly indirect mechanisms like agricultural failures and famines to kill civilization-level-significant amounts of people. This is a hard ceiling for it.
An advanced AI threat is a civilization of one. It can act, adapt and adjust rapidly, like humans do. Potentially faster than humans do. It has access to all the tools that human civilization has already invented that it can reproduce, obtain or subvert - and potentially more. It's not limited to having just one big slow lethality mechanism. It can unleash multiple civilization-scale threats in a quick succession, and keep piling them until recovery becomes impossible. Humans can adapt to a lot, but an intelligent adversary adapts back.
The threat class isn't the same, and it's not even close. Climate change is an "otherwise avoidable death and suffering" risk. AI is an actual "extinction of humankind" risk.
Are you talking about LLMs+harnesses? No. The day a LLM can play chess without harness, or make it's own harness I might listen to you, until then I'll work on actual threats. No object permanence makes any world conquering _really_ difficult.