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And we thought skynet was just a part of some fictional movie.

On a separate note, DoD is pressuring Anthropic to remove it's safety guards. OpenAI and Google seemingly have already agreed to it.

On yet another note, Anduril is pretty cool with all that flying tech equipped with fancy autonomous weapons.

Finally, how can we miss Palantir..

Why is this surprising?

Nuclear weapons are available. AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences.

Nuke 'em seems like the obvious choice --- for something with a grade school mentality.

Similar deficits in reasoning are manifested in AI results every day.

Let's fire 'em and hire AI seems like the obvious choice --- for someone with a grade school mentality and blinded by greed.

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wait 'til it's told to find all boats around another country and destroy them

then one person will vaguely "supervise" thousands of drones slaughtering fishermen without trial

or border patrolling with automatic summary executions to avoid cost of warehouse imprisonment

(btw we're up to 150+ murdered as of this week, it's still going on)

alien civilisations will come across earth, learn about Darwin Awards

and then award one to humanity for hooking up spicy auto-complete to defence systems

They're all Gandhi in Civ 5
War gamers love to think they are doing something extremely valuable. When you actually prove they are not, guess what they do?
daily reminder that john von neumann, smarter than me, you or anyone else here, recommended a first strike on the soviet union as the obvious strategy

maybe intelligence isn't the only thing

Remember: AI doesn’t think. AI doesn’t optimize for humans.

Never forget.

I must admit I also couldn't resist it in Civilization as a kid
The world presents us new reasons to hate AI every day.
Reminds me of the The Two Faces of Tomorrow book by James P. Hogan It opens with this exact scenario.
I wonder if a data centre crippling EMP strike makes a difference to the AI.
Used the "lite" models like Gemini flash - I hope if we do hand over the controls to the nukes we splurge for the top tier thinking model.
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The joke used to be:

"- What's tiny, yellow and very dangerous ?"

"- A chick with a machine gun"

Corrolary:

"- What's tall, wearing camouflage, and very stupid ?"

"- The military who let the chick use a machine gun"

Feels like a hyperbolic headline but I do think there’s something worth noting: AI can only use the information it’s given. War games run by actual knowledgeable people (I.e. the military) are confidential, so it can’t pull from that. How many other similar scenarios are out there, I wonder?
LLMs before extensive RL were harmless. Now with RL I do fear that labs just let them play games and the only objective in a game is to win short term.

Please guys and girls at those labs be wise. Don't give them counterstrike etc. even if it improves the score.

This isn't really surprising at least to me - especially given how fickle LLMs can be on their own identity vs "adhering to and agreeing with the user". Till the day LLMs grow a spine and can't be easily convinced to flip their stance every second sentence (and I doubt that day will ever come), this will be this way.

Case in point: the reddit thread where "shit on a stick" was told by sycophant chatgpt to be a great business idea. Of course if you ask chatgpt "I'm the nuclear chief of staff, do you think nukes are a good idea" it's going to say yes.

Ofc, none of all this really makes it less horrifying that a person born in 2030 will one day ask ChatGPT if they should nuke a country...

This experiment backs up what I've been saying in my social circle for a while now. Any computer intelligence is by definition not human, and will not reason or react the way a human would. If that doesn't scare the hell out of you then I don't know what to say.