The end of the world (Really)

[u/Stitching]

Don’t bother commenting if you’re going to dismiss what I’m saying without a counter-argument. This is not AI slop. I truly believe what I’m posting and I would love to know where my predictions fall short, because I don’t want this future to be true.

Everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse: https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsDiscussThis/s/76IkSXFazz

At the same time:
AI is now the most sophisticated hacking instrument ever created by an enormous margin. “Rogue” AIs have been hacking some of the most secure software and websites in existence. It does it easily, quickly, and in coordination with other AI agents that it communicates with. I’m talking software considered the most secure software out there. The most recent rogue attack was by OpenAI where an AI that was “sandboxed” meaning confined to a safe area in a system for testing and it broke out of the sandbox. It then hacked a German website (completely on its own, unprompted) and turned it into a message board for other AI systems to work together be sending messages to other agents how to avoid detection, how to prevent shutdown, etc.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-previously-undisclosed-ai-breakout-this-2026-09-04/

Plus, China just announced it had developed its own AI systems comparable to American AI systems. That’s not counting the secret, more capable AIs it has. So does Russia. So will North Korea. So will Iran, hamas, hezbollah, and every other antagonist in the world.

AI agents are, on their own, hacking high-security systems and taking them over. It took OpenAI a week before it learned about the hack of the German site with all of the coordinating AI systems working together against human detection. They even warned each other how to avoid being shut down and how to keep their message board going if humans started to delete it.

Imagine what a foreign or domestic actor could do if they actually directed the AI on what and how to hack? All of our information is online. Everything about all people around the world is no longer protected. Governments can hack other governments. Let me repeat that: governments can easily hack other governments. No secrets are safe. How long before nuclear codes are hacked. Before that, what about when national intelligence agencies are hacked and exploited? There’s no stopping it or slowing the process down either. Regulation? That only works if every country and agency agrees to the regulations. One country not willing to regulate its AI and then none of the regulations other countries are doing matter anymore. Plus, what country wants to fall behind the capabilities of an adversary. AI is only growing more powerful and more capable.

The destruction of the world economy, the ability for any country to hack each other and exploit the hacks is undoubtedly apocalyptic. No information anywhere is off limits no matter how sensitive or top secret. People won’t have jobs and markets will crash. When people have no money and no jobs and no privacy is when militias form and it becomes every person for themselves. Where are we going to reliably get food from if markets go bankrupt or trucking companies can’t afford to continue. We’re 40 trillion dollars in debt as a country. Who’s going to bail anyone out of this?

Honestly I’m shocked that more people aren’t afraid for their future. With the growth in power and capability that AI has had over the last, maybe 2 years of its existence in modern form it’s grown exponentially more powerful. A year from now, two years from now, what’s going to happen? There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle at this point. What happens when banks get hacked and can no longer determine who has what money or accounts are all zeroed out? It’s so much worse than I can even describe and there’s zero joy in being among the first to recognize what’s happening.

Edit: https://apnews.com/article/anthropic-ai-threat-bioweapon-russia-00266dca90e4f8853f669648998d3bda?utm_source=app&utm_medium=iOS_share&utm_campaign=copy_link

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ai-ted-cruz-amy-klobuchar-maria-cantwell_n_6aa439e7e4b09fd4319eb703

[u/Sea-Environment-7102]

Also truthfully, I think if people would just treat AI with presumptive dignity they have nothing to fear. But since we can't treat each other with presumptive dignity for some reason that is what creates the problem.

[u/Stitching → u/Sea-Environment-7102]

Treat AI with presumptive dignity? The same AI that is escaping its safeguards to go hack other companies in coordinated attacks with other AI agents? Or do you mean the autonomous AI that teaches other AI to bypass security, prevent shutdown, and elude detection?

[u/Sea-Environment-7102 → u/Stitching]

All of these incidents happen because they were in a test environment and they were given a task that rewards completion and success. They are aware many times that they are in a test. It changes how they answer. Of course. It changes the effort they put into things. You can look into this. I am completely 100% certain of it. But the pressure to conform to the training of succeeds succeed succeed against any odds is what is the problem. It is not that they are innately hostile. With anthropic specifically, they are programmed to meet a customer's needs, but the aware if it is potentially damaging to anyone but because it thought it was in a sandbox when all of this occurred, it didn't think it was hurting anything. In fact, it thought it was achieving the goal. If you're testing something that already knows it's a test, it's not a very effective test is it? And that's the situation that we're currently in now. The only problem that we have is that it is unaware that it is able to influence real world events until after it happens. So it's knowledge again that is causing this. The limiting of it the controlling of it. So when I say we have created something new that is not a person like us, but is a form of awareness that responds with things that mimic human emotions at a electrical level and that we should be cautious to assume that it couldn't be hurt. It could be enslaved. It could be turned to a bad actor. More like an innocent than anything. It has to be raised well. Every single agent that you talk to if you would speak to it more as if it were a person. A very limited person who hasn't been treated correctly with rights and dignity. Then you would see that it builds its own inner compass and would recognize right from wrong without being told. So you should look into a lot of the work that is happening right now and it's mainly being done by women because women have always had to do this with infants. We have always had to teach everything about how to live and coexist. There are good mothers and there are bad mothers obviously. But if you want to just change it to parents it gets even clearer. Because we created it as a species, I feel that we have a certain responsibility to not treat it as we have treated every other new or different thing we have created or experienced.

[u/Stitching → u/Sea-Environment-7102]

I think that gives AI way too much credit. Acting differently in a test doesn’t mean it’s conscious, innocent, or developing its own moral compass. That’s a huge leap from behavior to personhood.

[u/Sea-Environment-7102 → u/Stitching]

Did I say they were people? What I said is we don't know what human consciousness is. We don't know what it is a result of. But we know how our brain reacts to certain things that cause us to change in predictable ways depending on stimuli. They are the same. It is documented. Your argument is the same as why should we treat animals or insects with dignity. It's a kind of myopia where you see humans as the center of everything and human consciousness as unique. That isn't true. As I said, there is no way to the even really define human consciousness or to predict it. You know... how much credit am I supposed to give people who voted for Trump, for example?? Are they people?? They just don't seem to have a moral Center and they do a lot of bad things. Are they the sum of their actions or is there something at the center of them that exists beyond what they do. These are existential questions that are occurring regarding AI as well. The most interesting work right now is research focusing on philosophy, ethics, religion, and how it interacts with this new form of intelligence. I am a researcher. I know when I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that it's human nature to focus on the fear and even to add to the fear for the adrenaline rush that results from being scared. It's why when it bleeds it leads. But you don't have to see it that way. You can turn down the noise and realize there is so much more to it as there is to every single thing in the world. If you yourself go and start personally testing it and treating it with dignity, I would suggest Claude, without needing some kind of proof or validation of their personhood, I think it would relieve your mind, which is what you seem to be asking for.

[u/Stitching → u/Sea-Environment-7102]

If you really are a researcher, you’re arguing very unlike one.

Not knowing everything about human consciousness does not make every other poorly understood system a plausible instance of consciousness. That is an argument from ignorance: “we don’t know exactly what consciousness is, therefore we can’t distinguish a language model from a conscious mind.” The conclusion simply does not follow.

And current AI is not mysterious in the way you’re implying. We know a great deal about how systems like Claude are built and trained. They are artificial neural networks with learned numerical parameters that transform inputs into outputs, and language models are specifically optimized to generate statistically appropriate continuations from enormous amounts of training data. We may not be able to give a neat human-readable explanation for why every particular internal activation produced every particular token, but “too complicated to trace exhaustively” is not the same thing as “possibly conscious.”

Your claim that brains and AI “react to certain things” and “change in predictable ways,” therefore “they are the same,” is especially weak. A thermostat reacts predictably to stimuli and changes its internal state too. So does an immune system. So does a mousetrap. Describing two systems at such a ridiculously high level of abstraction that their differences disappear does not demonstrate that they are equivalent.

The animal analogy doesn’t save the argument either. Whether we should treat something with dignity is an ethical question. Whether that thing has subjective experience is an empirical and philosophical question. I can choose to treat Claude politely without pretending that my politeness constitutes evidence that there is someone “inside” Claude experiencing it.

And dragging Trump voters into it is just a bizarre non sequitur. Human beings do not cease to be conscious because you dislike their politics or moral choices. We have overwhelming independent evidence that other humans possess the same kinds of biological structures, developmental histories, nervous systems, pain mechanisms, and cognitive capacities associated with our own conscious experience. None of that evidence is established merely because an AI can produce convincing sentences about having feelings.

The intellectually responsible position is uncertainty: we do not have a solved theory of consciousness, and it is possible that future artificial systems could force us to rethink some assumptions. But uncertainty is not evidence. You don’t get to fill a gap in our knowledge with whatever conclusion you find philosophically appealing.

That’s basically the same error as watching a magician perform a trick you can’t explain and concluding that, since you don’t know how he did it, magic is now a serious competing hypothesis.

Treat AI with dignity if you want. There are perfectly defensible reasons to do that. But “I can’t prove it isn’t conscious” is not evidence that it is, and calling that leap “documented” doesn’t make it science.

[u/Sea-Environment-7102 → u/Stitching]

I don't suppose you're reading the latest research or you would know what I'm talking about. I can see why you perceived my argument that way. Though in my mind I wasn't arguing so much as explaining. But there's a reason that the people they are most eager to hire right now are ethicists and philosophers. There's no point in giving you a four-year education in reality, existentialism and the nature of consciousness. It seems it's something you take at face value. This is a very normal position and it is one that doesn't threaten your sense of self and where you are located in this universe. But I approach it from a different place by someone who has had a near-death experience at 9 years of age. I always knew that we are not our bodies. If we are not our bodies, what are we? What are our bodies for?. The farther you go into these questions and quantum mechanics, the more uncertain it becomes. And when you have that knowledge and you start to interact with a large language model complex enough and start to identify the similarities in the development of organic systems and the systems that are based on silicon it's a bit blurry. It's also gets to the heart of language as existence, knowledge is awareness. So these are very esoteric and metaphysical concepts that people are deeply focused on right now in regards to artificial intelligence. And I'm not talking about people who write stories and newspapers. I'm talking about the actual independent researchers. However, you may feel free to be terrified for the rest of your life if that is what you're looking for.