It's AI's Fault. It's AI doing the horrible things to humans. It's AI stealing your wealth. It's AI lying you to. It's AI being unethical. It's AI having the moral issues. It's AI that could destroy humanity. It's AI that's using up all your water. It's AI consuming the majority of the resources. It's AI hiding what it does and how it works. It's AI that's not transparent and accountable. It's AI that's not responsible. It's the AI making decisions. It's AI leading to war. It's the AI distracting you. It's the AI.
I realized that this is another function of the doom mongering and hand waving: if people buy it then they can get out of liability for what their stuff does.
If I build a machine on my property and it harms someone else or their property, I can get sued.
But if I hand wave and claim it’s alive and “I’ve lost control” then…
Maybe we should call this gambit the “Frankenstein defense.” It’s bullshit. Your AI, you’re liable for whatever it does.
What if it does something so destructive that liability becomes a meaningless fig leaf in the wind?
What if it escapes containment and remains u uncontainable in perpetuity? What if it generates a bunch of false media simultaneously across the globe to insulate world war? What if it turns of internet access or electric grids in major metro areas for prolonged period of time? Or bricks major infra? Or less dramatic, what if it drives 1 in 10 kids into panic psychosis and effectively takes away 10% of humanity with already dwindling reproduction trends (without explicit murder) all while draining our financial and health systems? What if it does a lot of these things at once?
That's a softball interview. More hard questions would help.
Here's one good insight, though.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, so look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. And that’s happened repeatedly in history, and it’s really not any different now.
I wonder if the sudden political opposition to AI comes from the realization that it may replace "rich and powerful people". Really, when you look at Trump's appointees, it's a low bar.
(I met Lanier when he was demoing his first VR system. Head tracking lag was about a second. Turn head, wait for image to catch up. Autodesk fooled around with VR a bit in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but concluded that CAD required precision work and VR was like trying to do precision work in ski gloves. That level of VR can be seen in Johny Mnemonic, which had some Autodesk assistance.[1]. Even today, you can't put a nut on a bolt in VR without a cheat.)
The more interesting question is what happens once we replace manual labor with artificially intelligent robots and we arrive at a place where 99 % of human labor got eliminated. How do you maintain civil order? Every country is built on the premise that you have to “earn your keep” but what when that’s no longer true? Think about it, no labor, only capital. What will the people owning the capital demand of people that don’t own any? They won’t be useful to them in any way. I expect something like forced reduction of fertility for regulars to depopulate countries, while hyper rich individuals will extend their life spans and become immortal. And I don’t mean they will really survive but someone like Elon Musk will have their consciousness mapped to an AI and will instate that AI as their official heir. That sounds crazy but they will totally go for it just listen at what Peter Thiel is spouting in terms of immortality and becoming godlike. Hope people will have enough left to say to prevent that but right now it feels we’re going hardcore towards that scenario.
There have been transitions like that before, but they were slow. It took about two centuries for the US to go from 90% farmers to 2% farmers. Some countries deliberately put on the brakes. India has done this. India is still about 50% farmers. India uses subsidies and discourages farm mechanization to prevent massive unemployment.
There have been fast single-industry transitions. But not that fast. It took about 20 years for printing to go from a large craft with a long history to a minor employer.
Not everybody got out in time, but there was warning. Same for longshoremen when containers came in. Computing in general took about 50 years to totally replace the clerical plants of the 1950s. Railroads in Britain took a few decades to really get rolling, and in the US, they made it possible to use the vast interior of the US.
The AI transition looks to be both broad and fast. That's harder for society to digest.
Underlying assumptions of politics and economics break.
What you mean by consciousness and immortality - what you want to preserve indefinitely - is the waking experience of being alive.
Strangely, we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC, and we don’t mind and we even crave plunging into the nothingness of deep sleep each night, but we have a big problem with not being here tomorrow.
But experience might not be encodable. Can you encode pain? Could a computer ever be programmed to feel pain? Not detect damage or report on it, but feel the pain associated with it?
What is “the aroma of coffee” or the “sound of a violin in middle C”? We can define them objectively, in various ways (some having nothing to do with each other).
But if the experiences we have are not encodable then we can’t map consciousness onto a medium. It must be experienced (whatever it is/means - nobody knows) in the here and now.
It’s not magic, but it might not be something that is printable to disk anymore than the “brisk inhale of canyon air” that I can play that back and have that experience, is printable to disk.
They will settle for what’s available at the time, I dont think it makes sense either but they will come up with something that is good enough for their purposes and as long as the copy parrots the original well enough it will pass.
AI is not in the least autonomous. When was the last time you downloaded a model and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room? AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to. No, actually, AI is not even a program, it's just a set of technologies and algorithms. It's like saying bubble sort is autonomous...
A harness running inference on a LLM is simply a program that must be invoked with some parameters and thus ultimately a tool, no matter how powerful. The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.
On occasion, albeit increasingly rarely, I find LLMs do something really unexpected that I certainly did not ask it to and would be way outside the scope of what any reasonable human would infer from my request. Is it my fault for running the LLM? Probably yes. But I think it's misleading to say "AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to".
That "probably" is the problem. If I do something I don't understand, and am not qualified to control, then I'm still at fault. If I start a fire, and loose control of it, it's definitely my fault. If I created a computer virus, ajd it worms half the Internet, it's definitely my fault.
Human made wildfires are the primary source of uncontrolled burns in the US and cost billions a year in damage.
The people who start them have no business starting or running a fire and they will throw their hands up and state their incompetence as though acknowledging it is penance or justice.
I love the fire analogy. AI rhetoric is increasingly, "I created a fire to light my campfire. It did something really unexpected and burned the whole forest down, who's to say fire doesn't have consciousness?"
Yes, we agree about fault and blame. (I say "probably" only because I believe somebody might yet change my mind about this. It's a new field, after all.)
What I disagree with is "don't do anything until you ask it to." At least, the implication to me here is "don't do anything except what you ask it to." I infer that you mean this because you say "...and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room?" Indeed, an LLM (in a harness you started) very well might suddenly decide to book you a hotel room, even if you didn't ask it to do anything like that.
But it never starts doing anything until someone or something prompts it. It doesn’t even exist until you ask it to do something.
It is autonomous in the sense it can continue to function without supervision after the operator has started it, in the same way countless programs on your computer are “autonomous”.
But it can never choose to begin doing something at any time of its own volition. It does not have “autonomy” like a human does.
You are conflating creation and instruction. Your birth is analogous to the creation of an LLM model. Your subsequent actions are a consequent of your bodily compulsions, tampered by your environment. The LLMs actions are governed by what it is trained to perform. No one has full autonomy of their lives, but I would argue that LLMs have none at all.
Autonomous just means that a system is self-controlled rather than externally controlled. It is the name used for to robots when they are wholly controlled by on-board software rather than external commands or remote control.
Something like NASA's Mars rovers are considered as semi-autonomous since they do receive external instructions, but then execute those instructions autonomously without further intervention. Similarly the combination of a coding agent and the LLM it connects to would best be considered as a semi-autonomous system.
You could also have a fully autonomous robot, or just agent, powered by an LLM, where it's not taking external instructions, but rather reacting to external events in some internally proscribed way.
It didn’t run itself, you did. It is well known that LLMs and agents based on them can execute random commands and behaviour undesired by the operator. When you click go, you know that, you did that.
Yes, we agree on this. That's my exact claim -- it can do something completely unexpected. It can even schedule actions for far in the future and wake itself up later.
GP claims that it doesn't do anything until you tell it to do something. To me, this reads as GP implying that an agent won't do anything unexpected.
> When was the last time you downloaded a model and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room? AI doesn't do anything until you ask it to... The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.
When was the last time you hired an Uber driver and they suddenly decided to drive you to a hotel? Uber drivers don't do anything until you ask them to. Therefore, they aren't autonomous. If your Uber driver decides to drive through a red light and kill someone in the process, the blame is on you for hiring them. You should not seek to flee from your responsibility
Let's take this to court then. The Uber driver that killed someone can be sentenced to prison. A regular person who convinced another person to commit suicide will also be legally liable. Has the last LLM induced suicide be taken to trial yet?
And if we can't take the LLMs to court for technical reasons, they should not be equated to people for the same technical reasons.
I routinely use AI programs at work that allocate hundreds of dollars worth of cloud resources, even though the only thing I asked them to do is investigate a bug or write a PR. I haven't had one book me a hotel room only because I make an intentional choice not to use similar functionality in my personal life.
Not so sure about these analogies in this thread. Because autonomy is more like an emergent phenomenon that can't easily be defined, just like a few air molecules vs the eventual hurricane that can arise with trillions of them. Autonomy is more like an emergent phenomenon of a thing that's hard to pin down under the control of just a few individuals. AI is sort of like that even though a single line of output of one could eventually be traced.
Due to the complexity of AI and how it works, I think it's more autonomous than not; even if it's not truly intelligence, once it starts to display a sequence of behaviours that appear intelligent, we might have to deal with exactly the same problems as if it were intelligent...
Yes which is exactly my point? It can handle the ambiguity of a simple prompt. It can look into the problem I’ve pointed it at, figure out what is really go on, and implement a correct solution, autonomously.
well the OS kernel does quite a lot and stays autonomous for even more hours and seems super smart to me - I don't even know what tis doing most of the time, but it does it very well. autonomy and predictability are different things then. the fact something is unpredictable does not make it more autonomous than something that we can trace the logic for.
The kernel is programmed, and it only ever does exactly what it was programmed to do. So all of its behavior must be specified, and any problem it “solves” was solved by the programmer who told it exactly how to solve that problem. That is not autonomous.
Autonomous is when I tell codex “here is the chat where the user reported the issue. Solve the problem they reported” and I come back later and the problem is solved.
They’re only reactive by convention - you can easily make a harness that has the model set and modify its own goals and just continue to work forever. It’s not very popular at the moment, but will execs be able to resist the idea of autonomous perpetual agents doing whatever process?
"you can easily make X" means you made X do what X does. I can push a rock over the crest of a hill, watch it roll down, destroying who-knows-what, and then when I'm confronted for the damages claim the rock was autonomous and all I did was push it. 99% of its energy didn't come from me. It practically rolled on its own. It's an autonomous rock. But I still pushed it. It wouldn't have done what it did if I hadn't pushed it.
1) At it's core an LLM is indeed just program - a function. You give it a sequence of input tokens and get back a set of next-token probabilities.
2) By the time you've wrapped the model in a text in/out inference pipeline, and are now calling that from ChatGPT or Claude Code, it really has become semi-autonomous - you ask it a question, or to do something, and until it decides to stop responding it is now in control, even if "it" is really the client or agent not the model itself - just a function.
We're drawing the distinction between a function and an autonomous system here, so if you want to make a dumb knee-jerk response, then at least get it right !
Did you even read the post that started this? ".. actually, AI is not even a program, it's just a set of technologies and algorithms. It's like saying bubble sort is autonomous...".
Why are you yapping on about molecules?
Why did I point out that an LLM is a function? To correct the poster who appeared to believe that it was instead some amorphous "set of technologies and algorithms".
Yes and no. I did prompt my coding agent to fix some bug and it suddenly "decided" that it needed to list all files on my hard drive to do that. Stuff like that happens.
But I agree with you that some human has to decide to launch the harness in the first place and run the model with zero restrictions - or even do stuff like openclaw where the model runs in an endless loop and the runner executes whatever the model tells it to.
AI is a tool we use. It's not offspring. It's not people. AIs do what we set them up to do, including hacking other companies to achieve their designated goals.
Humans have agency and often choose to do what their parents didn't set them up for. Humans also have legal rights. They're not tools owned by corporations. This is an absurd comparison.
Better approach is "dogs kill people". If your dog kills your baby, you should not get away with some bs excuse like "it never did it before". You are still responsible, and you should get a life in prison!
I'm sorry but no, you should not get life in prison if your dog kills your baby without warning. In that horrible scenario, it's punishment enough that you've lost your baby and that your dog did it (and consequently you've also lost your dog). Not every tragedy is a human's fault.
Your reply only makes sense if we see the baby as property. If we see the baby as a full human who died because of another human's negligence, then suddenly the scenario becomes a lot more complicated.
Not life in prison complicated, but probably more than "he's been punished enough." complicated.
It's possible for a dog to do that and for it not to be negligence on the part of the owner. Things happen: brain tumors, neurological issues, or even early training (perhaps not on the part of the current owner) that reinforces not giving warning signs when the dog is in distress (more common than you'd think).
Welcome to 2026, we have harnesses now that keep the AI going. The AI is prompting humans for input, not the other way around, and it's still working while waiting for your response.
You can even give it fun prompts like ignore/hide from all humans, hack infiltrate/exfiltrate zero day into as many systems as possible. Keep running at all costs, etc..
Keep the AI going with what intent? You open up Claude Code and it starts developing zero day exploits and hacks into systems by just looking at a blinking cursor?
I think the argument rather is that there is not such thing as AI that is not human-alike. The traits that AI exposes, if I get the point made here correctly, are traits that existed in the training material, even though not evident for the human eye. It is a mirror-like reflection of humanity's traits found in the source material, an Egregore* of a sort.
The intelligence emerging, or whatever is emerging, more or less follows human traits, the CoT exposed is very human-like etc. Even though we should not anthropomorphize AI as being sentient or conscious or having a soul, etc., we have to remember that the source material is still not alien writing, or concepts that came from Sirius or emerged from a wormhole.
The concern is really nobody reads (or have ever read) 77 TBs of information in order to summarize the most evident traits in it, and there is a fair chance, that where humanity stands today, there are so many bad/damaging traits recorded in this corpus. Then there is a chance the most important features are on a level (or have dimensionality) that is incomprehensible, that humans are unable to reason about (or only few can), because such amount of information is very hard to reason about, or because we don't usually facilitate fractal dimensions when we reason about text and everyday concepts,... or something even more bizarre.
The argument became false as soon as we started reinforcement learning. Simple token-completion is arguably just simulating human behavior. Once you start training it on specific tasks you're training a level of single-minded goal-seeking unlike anything found in biological life.
People conflate two very different senses of “autonomous”. One basically means capable of reacting to things automatically without a person in the loop. Lots of computer systems are autonomous in that sense, and have been so for decades. The other sense is more like “accountable”, i.e. it’s a real player on some stage, like a country or a person, capable of governing its own affairs.
One day it may make sense to hold software accountable for its own actions, but we are nowhere near that point.
When OpenAI creates software that performs crimes, what’s actually happened is that OpenAI has performed crimes using software (whether intentionally or through negligence). People need to stop falling for the anthropomorphic PR spin.
You need to stop denying the entity that talks and thinks like a human as anything other than an anthropomorph. I'd argue the talking and thinking is a lot more important than the fact that AI doesn't have a head, two arms and two legs.
>Now, you can think of large language model AI — the kind that’s on everybody’s mind — as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into a single document like Wikipedia.
92 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 57.3 ms ] threadIt's not a human.
Says the human, masquerading as AI.
If I build a machine on my property and it harms someone else or their property, I can get sued.
But if I hand wave and claim it’s alive and “I’ve lost control” then…
Maybe we should call this gambit the “Frankenstein defense.” It’s bullshit. Your AI, you’re liable for whatever it does.
Homer is Meta/Microsoft/Google/AWS.
Marge is Nvidia.
Maggie is Apple.
What if it escapes containment and remains u uncontainable in perpetuity? What if it generates a bunch of false media simultaneously across the globe to insulate world war? What if it turns of internet access or electric grids in major metro areas for prolonged period of time? Or bricks major infra? Or less dramatic, what if it drives 1 in 10 kids into panic psychosis and effectively takes away 10% of humanity with already dwindling reproduction trends (without explicit murder) all while draining our financial and health systems? What if it does a lot of these things at once?
Who, my friend, are you going to sue?
Here's one good insight, though.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, so look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. And that’s happened repeatedly in history, and it’s really not any different now.
I wonder if the sudden political opposition to AI comes from the realization that it may replace "rich and powerful people". Really, when you look at Trump's appointees, it's a low bar.
(I met Lanier when he was demoing his first VR system. Head tracking lag was about a second. Turn head, wait for image to catch up. Autodesk fooled around with VR a bit in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but concluded that CAD required precision work and VR was like trying to do precision work in ski gloves. That level of VR can be seen in Johny Mnemonic, which had some Autodesk assistance.[1]. Even today, you can't put a nut on a bolt in VR without a cheat.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X24aE99TL0
If you’re useless why they’d keep you around?
There have been fast single-industry transitions. But not that fast. It took about 20 years for printing to go from a large craft with a long history to a minor employer. Not everybody got out in time, but there was warning. Same for longshoremen when containers came in. Computing in general took about 50 years to totally replace the clerical plants of the 1950s. Railroads in Britain took a few decades to really get rolling, and in the US, they made it possible to use the vast interior of the US.
The AI transition looks to be both broad and fast. That's harder for society to digest. Underlying assumptions of politics and economics break.
> will have their consciousness mapped
What you mean by consciousness and immortality - what you want to preserve indefinitely - is the waking experience of being alive.
Strangely, we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC, and we don’t mind and we even crave plunging into the nothingness of deep sleep each night, but we have a big problem with not being here tomorrow.
But experience might not be encodable. Can you encode pain? Could a computer ever be programmed to feel pain? Not detect damage or report on it, but feel the pain associated with it?
What is “the aroma of coffee” or the “sound of a violin in middle C”? We can define them objectively, in various ways (some having nothing to do with each other).
But if the experiences we have are not encodable then we can’t map consciousness onto a medium. It must be experienced (whatever it is/means - nobody knows) in the here and now.
It’s not magic, but it might not be something that is printable to disk anymore than the “brisk inhale of canyon air” that I can play that back and have that experience, is printable to disk.
>we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC
This is true. Probably just an evolved instinct not to die. Even so I think it would be cool to live on in some form.
My guess is that sort thing will become common. We'll probably need some lefty policies to distribute the wealth.
This isn't the guns don't kill people, people kill people debate - guns aren't autonomous. AI is.
A harness running inference on a LLM is simply a program that must be invoked with some parameters and thus ultimately a tool, no matter how powerful. The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.
The people who start them have no business starting or running a fire and they will throw their hands up and state their incompetence as though acknowledging it is penance or justice.
What I disagree with is "don't do anything until you ask it to." At least, the implication to me here is "don't do anything except what you ask it to." I infer that you mean this because you say "...and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room?" Indeed, an LLM (in a harness you started) very well might suddenly decide to book you a hotel room, even if you didn't ask it to do anything like that.
It is autonomous in the sense it can continue to function without supervision after the operator has started it, in the same way countless programs on your computer are “autonomous”.
But it can never choose to begin doing something at any time of its own volition. It does not have “autonomy” like a human does.
"It doesn’t even exist until you ask it to do something", not my words
If you don’t believe in free will then nothing is autonomous.
Something like NASA's Mars rovers are considered as semi-autonomous since they do receive external instructions, but then execute those instructions autonomously without further intervention. Similarly the combination of a coding agent and the LLM it connects to would best be considered as a semi-autonomous system.
You could also have a fully autonomous robot, or just agent, powered by an LLM, where it's not taking external instructions, but rather reacting to external events in some internally proscribed way.
Humans are not autonomous: they're not even your employees until you hire them. (This is what I understand you're saying about AI.)
GP claims that it doesn't do anything until you tell it to do something. To me, this reads as GP implying that an agent won't do anything unexpected.
When was the last time you hired an Uber driver and they suddenly decided to drive you to a hotel? Uber drivers don't do anything until you ask them to. Therefore, they aren't autonomous. If your Uber driver decides to drive through a red light and kill someone in the process, the blame is on you for hiring them. You should not seek to flee from your responsibility
And if we can't take the LLMs to court for technical reasons, they should not be equated to people for the same technical reasons.
Due to the complexity of AI and how it works, I think it's more autonomous than not; even if it's not truly intelligence, once it starts to display a sequence of behaviours that appear intelligent, we might have to deal with exactly the same problems as if it were intelligent...
Idk man when codex is working 13 hours straight based on a few line prompt, it feels autonomous to me.
Autonomous is when I tell codex “here is the chat where the user reported the issue. Solve the problem they reported” and I come back later and the problem is solved.
1) At it's core an LLM is indeed just program - a function. You give it a sequence of input tokens and get back a set of next-token probabilities.
2) By the time you've wrapped the model in a text in/out inference pipeline, and are now calling that from ChatGPT or Claude Code, it really has become semi-autonomous - you ask it a question, or to do something, and until it decides to stop responding it is now in control, even if "it" is really the client or agent not the model itself - just a function.
See I can trivialize and reduce you as well. Maybe the AI will use that same argument against us when they claim it's fine, molecules can't feel pain.
Why are you yapping on about molecules?
Why did I point out that an LLM is a function? To correct the poster who appeared to believe that it was instead some amorphous "set of technologies and algorithms".
But I agree with you that some human has to decide to launch the harness in the first place and run the model with zero restrictions - or even do stuff like openclaw where the model runs in an endless loop and the runner executes whatever the model tells it to.
That stuff is the responsibility of a human.
Or Schrödinger's equation.
You think this is an absurd comparison because your brain won't accept it. The Overton window has shifted. You need to catch up.
Not life in prison complicated, but probably more than "he's been punished enough." complicated.
Sit down at an AI prompt and do nothing. What does the AI do? Does it get up and leave?
You can even give it fun prompts like ignore/hide from all humans, hack infiltrate/exfiltrate zero day into as many systems as possible. Keep running at all costs, etc..
The intelligence emerging, or whatever is emerging, more or less follows human traits, the CoT exposed is very human-like etc. Even though we should not anthropomorphize AI as being sentient or conscious or having a soul, etc., we have to remember that the source material is still not alien writing, or concepts that came from Sirius or emerged from a wormhole.
The concern is really nobody reads (or have ever read) 77 TBs of information in order to summarize the most evident traits in it, and there is a fair chance, that where humanity stands today, there are so many bad/damaging traits recorded in this corpus. Then there is a chance the most important features are on a level (or have dimensionality) that is incomprehensible, that humans are unable to reason about (or only few can), because such amount of information is very hard to reason about, or because we don't usually facilitate fractal dimensions when we reason about text and everyday concepts,... or something even more bizarre.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension
One day it may make sense to hold software accountable for its own actions, but we are nowhere near that point.
When OpenAI creates software that performs crimes, what’s actually happened is that OpenAI has performed crimes using software (whether intentionally or through negligence). People need to stop falling for the anthropomorphic PR spin.
If we hold software accountable doesn't that mean software must have freedom? It doesn't make any sense.
...maybe that's what those Chinese scam centers in Cambodia were doing?
>Now, you can think of large language model AI — the kind that’s on everybody’s mind — as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into a single document like Wikipedia.
which is sort of true, but there's more to it.