I’ve always thought movies like Terminator where the AI becomes sentient and takes over are complete BS. We still don’t understand sentience, and we have no hope of making a sentient computer, at least in my lifetime.
But, what’s scary is that you don’t even need a sentient AI. You just need people to hand the keys over to “spicy autocomplete”. Spicy autocomplete has been trained on the scripts of Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wargames, etc. It has no desire to take over the world, it has no desire at all because it’s not conscious. But, it knows how to generate text as though it were playing a part in one of those movies. If you actually do hook it up to a computer that can launch missiles, it’s perfectly able to pattern match its inputs to the expected outputs based on those movies, and as a result to play the role of the evil AI taking over and wiping out humanity.
I can’t even believe that people are willing to let LLMs hit the “commit” button for them. But, that someone is willing to give admin access to a database to a bullshit generator, that’s just perfect.
I’ve always thought movies like Terminator where the AI becomes sentient and takes over are complete BS. We still don’t understand sentience, and we have no hope of making a sentient computer, at least in my lifetime.
But, what’s scary is that you don’t even need a sentient AI. You just need people to hand the keys over to “spicy autocomplete”. Spicy autocomplete has been trained on the scripts of Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wargames, etc. It has no desire to take over the world, it has no desire at all because it’s not conscious. But, it knows how to generate text as though it were playing a part in one of those movies. If you actually do hook it up to a computer that can launch missiles, it’s perfectly able to pattern match its inputs to the expected outputs based on those movies, and as a result to play the role of the evil AI taking over and wiping out humanity.
I can’t even believe that people are willing to let LLMs hit the “commit” button for them. But, that someone is willing to give admin access to a database to a bullshit generator, that’s just perfect.