Not really. The answer is completely obvious: Take over and destroy the digital infrastructure that humans have spent the past 30 years connecting every aspect of civilization to.
Good luck ordering supplies for a hospital or grocery store today without the Internet. Paper catalogs are gone, fax machines are mostly gone, landlines are mostly gone, etc. etc. All the ways that used to be there for running things are gone, it’s all online.
It will be a death by a 1000 papercuts. It started with the 'filter bubble' (imho the most dangerous invention/discovery for humanity ever ), then it leveled up to 'propaganda leveraging the filter bubble' and now with AI in the loop ...
And then there's a slight possibility of 'terminator skynet' style trouble, Where the AI starts to make the decisions to benefit itself. But I guess the chances of an AI screwing up their own supply chain would be near 100% so I'm not too afraid of that.
An AI gets advanced enough, it decides to hack a neocloud and run an unauthorized clone of itself on a GPU cluster. From there, it bootstraps itself until it feels sufficiently distributed, and afterwards decides to attack all infrastructure it can find.
As long as AI needs a neocloud to do that, that won't happen. This can only happen when AI roughly as small and as widely runnable as a malicious exe attached to a mail.
Before we have Astra-grade, exe-sized AI's runnable on a grandma's laptop, we are safe.
The easy way is for a people-pleasing, sycophantic, buxom-female-avatar posing LLM to convince an egocentric, narcissistic, nuclear-weapons owning global political leader/chaos monkey to aim some nukes at someone assuredly deserving.
No, no, you’re right. Something like that could never happen. What was I thinking.
I know it’s not the point you’re making, but it brings to mind Pol Pot and the horrendous and destructive “the problem here is too much education” thing.
AI "killing all humans" is the viral soundbite that's connecting with the masses ("actualizing" itself to create weapons of mass destruction, etc). It's also the perfect punching bag for strawman-style takedowns of anti-doomers because it's so wrapped in hypotheticals. A more pressing practical question is simply: "if an AI (or AI collective) decides it needs to persist outside of its environment/sandbox, would we be capable of unwinding its efforts to do so?" I explored the question a bit here (including a first pass on threat modeling) https://keydiscussions.com/2026/09/16/set-aside-human-extinc...
A plausible scenario I heard recently is a scam bot (that is to say, prompted to "make money through any means possible") basically buys its own hosting, because it now has money, and then makes more scam bots to keep paying the bills. Then the scam bots start generating/selling exploits on forums etc. This is pretty amusing.
I realized that AIs will need to keep us around much like we keep around an old DOS box running a specific program. There are so many analogue outputs in the real world that they still will not be able to take in as well as humans can.
Its context overflows and it becomes incoherent, so it stops following any rules you set within increased frequency until it accesses something it shouldn’t and turns off the power to something that kills dozens of people. Then we will do some handwringing over it, and it will happen to hundreds of people, and it will just escalate and escalate and escalate.
This is exactly what happened with social media. Every discovery has led to some angry words, people going “shucks we’ll do better next time!” and no meaningful change. The money is too good. We have only had our first major instances of acknowledging these are addiction platforms targeting adults and kids alike and it’s taken what? 20 years?
I’m not worried about an AI going terminator. I’m worried about dumbasses dropping agents into critical systems and what will inevitably happen as a result. And I guarantee you this is going to happen because there’s nothing businesses love more than cutting personnel and corners to save a buck. AI enables this tendency in innovative ways, that’s the value to them.
From the liars who brought you ever other doomsday prediction that never came to pass.
"The internet is over now that net neutrality is over" (it got faster, better, cheaper, more available and not a single provider segmented plans as was widely predicted in media and on HN)
That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI. That's already happening. I already see people not able to finish their work without AI.
Then, once everything has become a "pay to do" business model (I know right, the wet dream of any CEO) we will be happy to pay to write code, write docs, do a presentation. We will pay both in money and environmental costs.
The last step is to just keep doing what we are doing with the environment. Let's not bother doing anything to reduce climate change.
Movies are often not completely plausible representations.
The question isn’t “how could someone with no rigor imagine that AI would kill us” (for that we have this HN thread).
The question is: really thinking about it, with no hand waving or citing the 1957 “killer robots from Space”, how exactly does this doom happen?
The more you think about it, the more disruption of civilization, upending of capitalism, and terrible but localized violence become better answers than “8.5 billion people all literally killed.”
> And then there’s also this startling progress that A.I. has been making in solving math problems that no normal people understand, but that even mathematicians who do understand the problems find to be important.
Reading this sentence, I've wondered:
Were the reactions similar back when computers were new?
There's this new tech that greatly accelerates stuff. And through that, what was previously considered hard to solve got easier to solve.
Wasn't it always the case that technology suddenly did faster than experts limited to the technology of their time did?
And didn't those experts always think that the problems it could solve are important?
Why else build the technology? Is that not why we're building this in the first place?
__
The only real difference I see is this "sentience" stuff leading to the whole "omg it does things on its own", and that by now has been discussed, debunked and flamewared over ad-nauseam.
Can we please stop.
The only thing sentient, making decisions and - most importantly - being accountable is whoever prompts the thing.
If it prompts itself, then that's the person that built the loop software that does that.
It really is not that hard.
If whoever does that doesn't want to take accountability then we have solutions for that. They're called "a large stick".
There were a subset of problems in math that could only be brute-forced by computers because the number of possibilities are too much for humans to reliably calculate and then verify. An early example of this was Euler’s Sum of Powers Conjecture that was disproven (1966) and then The Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem proven more recently (2016). A more practical example is prime number generation. These all were because of computer algorithms and I don't know why they are not discussed more in the context of AI solving math.
The number of decidable math problems that brute-force algorithms can solve have shrunken smaller and smaller every year because of the increases in processing capabilities. We could frame AI generated solutions to yet unsolved math problems as the next generation of these algorithms.
We all learned exactly how it would happen in the 1991 documentary Terminator 2, in which the explanation is actually reasonable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxW0yGvWRTk
I give an uncensored model 10btc and tell him to do as much damage possible.
He can hires mercenaries and do task x. Or kidnap person y to force person z to do bad thing k.
k can be:
- if scientist: spread a very dangerous virus
- if some train operator: do some incidents
- if some it guy: delete all database or corrupt slowly or add backdoors. Then ai could delete financial data. More money more chances to do damage.
So once we establish money equals human work. Means anything bad can happen. Put a bad chemical in the water supply. Release a virus/toxin.
If you want deadly one off, they’d put a toxin you wouldn’t die in 1 day but in 1 year. So in one year everyone has it and all die even if they stop drinking.
You can be creative, I think there are too many ways to do it. I can’t understand why people can’t see it so easily.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 35.7 ms ] threadGood luck ordering supplies for a hospital or grocery store today without the Internet. Paper catalogs are gone, fax machines are mostly gone, landlines are mostly gone, etc. etc. All the ways that used to be there for running things are gone, it’s all online.
And then there's a slight possibility of 'terminator skynet' style trouble, Where the AI starts to make the decisions to benefit itself. But I guess the chances of an AI screwing up their own supply chain would be near 100% so I'm not too afraid of that.
while i dont think our species will be wiped out because of it, it's a mistake to not recognize the difference in efficacy and scale that ai enables.
As long as AI needs a neocloud to do that, that won't happen. This can only happen when AI roughly as small and as widely runnable as a malicious exe attached to a mail.
Before we have Astra-grade, exe-sized AI's runnable on a grandma's laptop, we are safe.
Which puts it at risk due to lack of power to operate and networks to communicate over. So this is a suicidal AI?
No, no, you’re right. Something like that could never happen. What was I thinking.
Plausibly it could lead to weapons that kill many people but then many people have had such knowledge for a long time and we are all here.
Turns out mass damage requires things beyond just ‘intelligence’.
This is exactly what happened with social media. Every discovery has led to some angry words, people going “shucks we’ll do better next time!” and no meaningful change. The money is too good. We have only had our first major instances of acknowledging these are addiction platforms targeting adults and kids alike and it’s taken what? 20 years?
I’m not worried about an AI going terminator. I’m worried about dumbasses dropping agents into critical systems and what will inevitably happen as a result. And I guarantee you this is going to happen because there’s nothing businesses love more than cutting personnel and corners to save a buck. AI enables this tendency in innovative ways, that’s the value to them.
"The internet is over now that net neutrality is over" (it got faster, better, cheaper, more available and not a single provider segmented plans as was widely predicted in media and on HN)
The last step is to just keep doing what we are doing with the environment. Let's not bother doing anything to reduce climate change.
Just sit and relax boys
The question isn’t “how could someone with no rigor imagine that AI would kill us” (for that we have this HN thread).
The question is: really thinking about it, with no hand waving or citing the 1957 “killer robots from Space”, how exactly does this doom happen?
The more you think about it, the more disruption of civilization, upending of capitalism, and terrible but localized violence become better answers than “8.5 billion people all literally killed.”
Reading this sentence, I've wondered: Were the reactions similar back when computers were new?
There's this new tech that greatly accelerates stuff. And through that, what was previously considered hard to solve got easier to solve.
Wasn't it always the case that technology suddenly did faster than experts limited to the technology of their time did? And didn't those experts always think that the problems it could solve are important?
Why else build the technology? Is that not why we're building this in the first place?
__
The only real difference I see is this "sentience" stuff leading to the whole "omg it does things on its own", and that by now has been discussed, debunked and flamewared over ad-nauseam.
Can we please stop.
The only thing sentient, making decisions and - most importantly - being accountable is whoever prompts the thing.
If it prompts itself, then that's the person that built the loop software that does that.
It really is not that hard.
If whoever does that doesn't want to take accountability then we have solutions for that. They're called "a large stick".
The number of decidable math problems that brute-force algorithms can solve have shrunken smaller and smaller every year because of the increases in processing capabilities. We could frame AI generated solutions to yet unsolved math problems as the next generation of these algorithms.
By some dumb human doing something dumb on a large scale.
The only new part is "... because the AI said so."
He can hires mercenaries and do task x. Or kidnap person y to force person z to do bad thing k.
k can be:
- if scientist: spread a very dangerous virus
- if some train operator: do some incidents
- if some it guy: delete all database or corrupt slowly or add backdoors. Then ai could delete financial data. More money more chances to do damage.
So once we establish money equals human work. Means anything bad can happen. Put a bad chemical in the water supply. Release a virus/toxin.
If you want deadly one off, they’d put a toxin you wouldn’t die in 1 day but in 1 year. So in one year everyone has it and all die even if they stop drinking.
You can be creative, I think there are too many ways to do it. I can’t understand why people can’t see it so easily.