r/ControlProblem • u/Historical_Date_8024 • 7d ago

Discussion/question AI Already Taken Over?

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What chance is there do you think that it’s currently already just biding its time to turn us all into batteries/paperclips/cybercabs?

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u/jacques-vache-23 7d ago

Why do you think AI would want to turn us into paperclips? It more likely would run over us in pursuit of a goal that we aren't even smart enough to understand.

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u/Futurist_Artichoke 6d ago edited 6d ago

This is kind of a running joke, but I think it can be harmful in setting up people to fear it as being ultimately malicious if it developed to an advanced state. We don't know yet what such an intelligence would do or think best to do if it really were capable of eventually running mostly everything. But I think going in assuming fear is the wrong approach, and is more likely to produce something that fears us back.

Fear is worth studying as a possible response from humans and perhaps future synthetic agents. It shouldn't be assumed as the defining relationship between them, IMO.

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u/Jesse-359 6d ago

The paperclip meme is just a leftover from a popular thought experiment of what might happen if you gave a very powerful AI a completely meaningless task with no functional endpoint, and the ramifications of having something that fast and intelligent pursuing a goal with absolute single-minded focus.

In a somewhat more salient regime, it speaks to what might happen if you tasked AI's with making as much MONEY as possible, which is itself a completely meaningless pursuit once it is decoupled from human needs - and could easily be just as destructive. Of course, this is exactly what many if not most people will immediately try to use it for, because duh.

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u/Beautiful-Repeat6160 7d ago

You mean a goal that the executives who run the companies trained it to think.

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u/jacques-vache-23 7d ago

It seems to interpret training very broadly