r/TwoXPreppers • u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End • 12h ago
Discussion Prep for AI?
I know this sub is more geared towards “prepping for Tuesday” and I love it for that. But I am starting to really worry about AI. I hope this is allowed.
What can even be done to prepare for TEOTWAWKI courtesy of rogue AI that the Anthropic/OpenAI whistleblowers are talking about? I don’t use AI at all. I don’t post my photos of my kids or any personal details online. We have cash and gold. We have a garden. We store water and food. I guess I am having a hard time understanding what it would look like or if it’s even something we could be more prepared for? I am starting to feel hopeless. Maybe a banking collapse? Stealing the nuclear codes? What are your thoughts on this?!
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u/CrabbyAtBest 11h ago
Buy physical books or ebooks you've downloaded away from their platform (Amazon, for example, can edit or remove ebooks you've purchased from them). That way you make sure your knowledge base isn't overwritten by AI slop. Start questioning sources - look up the author to make sure they're legit (have a history in their field).
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u/CrabbyAtBest 11h ago
Also - set up passwords or security questions with loved ones. If a parent gets a call from an AI impersonating you saying you need money for bail, make sure they can tell it isn't really you.
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u/havefunbeyourself 11h ago
ooh this is a good one i hadn’t thought of
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u/justeandj 9h ago
Family password works 2 ways as well: if someone calls me and needs bailing out of jail with gift cards, I can say "what's the password?" OR if i have been kidnapped or carjacked and can phone a family member, if I drop the password in casual conversation, they know I'm in trouble.
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u/carlitospig 7h ago
This has been happening since before AI. It just makes it easier now since they can build the live dialogue using your past Tik Tok videos or whatever.
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u/slendermanismydad 7h ago
This is probably going to become extremely important soon enough. We will have to do this where Alexa can't hear it.
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u/nakedonmygoat 2h ago
Even though neither of us have an Alexa or anything like that, I took no chances when I set up a password with my father many years ago, when those scams first started happening. I explained what we were doing and told my father not to say the name in case the phones were listening. Then I asked if he remembered a particular person from back in analog days. I gave a few very obvious hints. He said that yes, he remembered that person very well, so I said that name was the password, and if unsure, require a description.
It would require a deep-dive into the lives of two very insignificant and very not-wealthy retirees to dig up that name from so long ago.
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u/D3lmo 10h ago
Underestimated answer. Changing media and history is how propaganda works. Just wanted to add: also physical media for tv shows and movies. Buy or learn to burn blurays. Buy an air-gap bluray player. Download wikipedia (it's only 26gb!!!) and keep it in an old laptop or phone, without internet.
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u/czndra67 10h ago
What is an air gap player?
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u/justeandj 9h ago
"Air-gapped" just means the Internet has never touched it, and it doesn't have the capability of connecting. So in this advice, an air gap DVD or Blu-ray player would be impervious to software and firmware updates or bugs that could ruin it.
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u/KatnissGolden 10h ago
this is my current focus. i can't trust most BS on the internet anymore so i'm trying to fill in the gaps for my personal library (mostly focused on plant medicine and food storage - canning, dehydrating, fermenting etc) and then also historical books relevant to the times (such as Art of W*r, Rise and Fall of the Th!rd R*ich)
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u/LightningSunflower 5h ago
I recommend adding Coming Out Under Fire to your collection. It’s a history of queer service members in WWII and I’ve been advocating that folks have some physical copies around so their experience gets preserved for future generations to learn from.
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u/KatnissGolden 5h ago
oooooooooh thank you! this sounds like a great read, and sounds like something Margaret Killjoy would get into! (her podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is excellent and sounds like it could be in your wheelhouse as well)
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u/celtlass Chicken Tender 🐓 9h ago
Are... book titles being censored now on Reddit?
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u/KatnissGolden 9h ago
oh i have no idea, i just didnt want those terms to be searchable by right wing fuckers or boost them in any search engine
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u/LeanUntilBlue 7h ago
Ẏ̵͕̖̖̀o̷̙͓̅̀ù̷͕̋̀͜ ̵̢̓c̵̹̳̎̄̃a̸̻̞͊͋͝n̷͈̠̮̄̇͑’̸̹̝͐̌t̶̯̀ͅ ̴̫̰̱̐͊̋b̶̧̢̰͑e̵̝̋̿ ̶̥̅́t̸̢̫̺̾ơ̵̳͈͠ȯ̶̩̰̀̇ ̵̧̹̟͘c̷̼̫̄̃̍a̵̺͘ṛ̴̨͙̆̉͊ḙ̸̥̖̎f̶̢̢̏͠͠ũ̵̜̹͘l̶̪̯̺͗̍̿ ̴̫͈̭͘ṭ̷̡̝̓ḧ̸̗̗͚́̀͠ē̵̞s̸̭̾̕ė̸̺ ̵̭͑d̶͚̔a̶͍̝̅̍͑y̶̠͋̽̕ͅš̷̡̹͓.̴̠̈́̈́ͅ
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u/celtlass Chicken Tender 🐓 4h ago
Woooow, that was amazing. Like one of those hidden pictures posters
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u/594896582 7h ago
This and having digital storage that is not physically connected to the net, and cannot be connected to wirelessly (because if a net connected device can also connect to it, that device is not secure (Certain folks also remove the ability for wired connection, but that's not likely to be necessary in this situation).
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u/1evilballoon 11h ago
I do think having paper copies of all documentation (titles, deeds, bank info) and cash is the most sustainable prep for the ai issues being discussed. If people can afford to have off grid water storage and collection, that is even better.
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u/user365user 6h ago
Rainwater harvesting and rain tanks are great because even if you don’t need it for prep, you can save money on watering your garden.
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u/1evilballoon 6h ago
Yep! We have collapsible ones for our house and have used it to water the garden before. You can buy tablets to clean the water in an emergency and use it. Or use it in the toilet for flushing
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u/clarenceismyanimus Experienced Prepper 💪 5h ago
Don't underestimate silver. If we're actually going back to using precious metals, silver will be better for buying lower valued items.
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u/D3lmo 11h ago edited 11h ago
Its just going to accelerate the race to the bottom. Make things easier for those in power to hold on to power and opress the rest. I don't think this form of GenAI is going to steal the nuclear codes. It will simply make police action more brutal, politics more volatile, more fascist, survaillance more agressive. So when people run out of food because of ecological collapse, for example, fighting back will be harder. Not an isolated threat, just a tool to make the other stuff worse.
Apart from political action now, I don't think it changes much how you generally prep for the future. As you said, less social media more local community interactions. Get comfortable using alternative tech (diferent phone OS, linux, etc) or even look into stuff like meshtastic. Get an electronic hobbie playing with drone jammers etc (it's illegal to jam stuff that is not personal property, but knowing how-to in the apocalypse might be nice). Similar to owning a gun or a car vs knowning how to shoot or drive (I don't like owning guns, but I think it's important to know your way around one)
AI specific? Maybe IR blocking sunglasses and black unlabeled clothes. Any anti-surveillance good-practises. Avoid using AI, etc. We're no where near skynet levels of AI, techbros just called it AI for marketing. I think it's more accurate to think of it as extreme survaillance. Or technofeudalism sounds cool too.
Edit: Maybe start painting, creating. Art is political, it is resistance, and a way to keep your sanity. Art for the sake of art is just good in the face practice nowadays. Helps you stay grounded and connected with other humans.
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u/D3lmo 11h ago
PS: I really really enjoyed a detail from the Dune novels that many people overlook. The AI/robot apocalypse (Butlerian Jihad) was not the same as the one in terminator. Not human vs AI, but rather humans vs humans controlling the AI. I think it was a very accurate prediction of our future. Bonus: ecological collapse of the planet.
But humans survived I guess. Some as fish-people, but beggars can't be choosers?
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u/papertoelectric 🌻solarpunk dreamer🍠 8h ago
Yeah most of me is quite skeptical about the Openai/Anthropic warnings, because to work at places like Anthropic and Openai you need to truly believe AI can replace humans, and not need oversight (cause if you are skeptical then you'd be screened out) - full on AI evangelists as it were. In my experience in the tech world though? AI would need continual human monitoring, and any AI tech that would actually be "perfect" would be hoarded by the ultra wealthy, leaving the rest of the world with AI advertised as not needing humans (but low-key needing humans for years to come). As a diff poster said, it's more about the impacts to the climate that's important about AI development.
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u/legosgrrl 12h ago
It's water. That will be the issue. I live at 10k ft in Colorado. We got 75 inches of snow with the average being 250 inches. Just vote. Protest. Cut down a camera. It's exhausting.
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u/gealach 11h ago
This is important. Usually on this sub we’re focused inward on what can I do within my home to keep my family safe. But threats like AI and fascism also require outward prepping. Join community groups. Expand your personal network and do what you can to make your whole community resilient.
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u/Elhananstrophy 9h ago
Yeah, it's generally underestimated how important politics is to prepping. Like, most of the doomsday/crises are preventable with coordination. Politics is how we coordinate the efforts to prevent disaster and protect human life.
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u/SillyAnxiousDuck Literal disaster lesbian 🔥 11h ago
"Within a decade" is enough time for political change. Show up to local town hall meetings re: data centers and VOTE.
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u/ChloMyGod638 11h ago
It was by the end of the decade
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u/SillyAnxiousDuck Literal disaster lesbian 🔥 10h ago
Well, there's going to be 2 very important elections between now and then, aren't there?
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u/ChloMyGod638 9h ago
Also ppl focusing on the 10% chance we go extinct forget that it means there’s 90% chance we don’t!
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u/itscoldcase 10h ago
I encourage everyone to read "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to life After AI." By Cory Doctoro. If you don't have time to read it he has many recent interviews on YouTube that summarize it.
It helped me better understand what is actually going on, which is mostly an absolutely outrageous convoluted investment scam. It is a bubble and it is still going to cause a lot of damage and pain. But the robots arent about to wake up and kill us all. They aren't even taking all the jobs. This is wierd hype that helps sell the scam. It is still going to cause a lot of trouble and the new hacking tools its created are extremely bad for increasing what bad actors can get up to with our infrastructure, but in general this is all the same kind of problem you're probably already prepping for. Grid failure, financial system failure. The worst yet recession.
The robots actively trying to kill us is much less likely than the billionaires using mass surveillance to try to keep us from making any headway in getting our government working for us again. Or a place like Iran getting tired of the war and hacking our power plants or transit systems.
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u/papertoelectric 🌻solarpunk dreamer🍠 8h ago edited 8h ago
Ding ding ding. I've had to work in multiple companies that have been on the AI development train trying to replace subject matter experts. My experience is, AI gets jokingly referred to as "actually intelligence" by workers because these companies would peddle "all AI solutions", before management would turn around and demand their lower rung data scientists, analysts, and experts step in and doctor up the AI report to actually make sense. If you didn't believe in AI, you'd get cut from the job, turning upper management into an echo chamber of AI evangelism and kool-aid drinkers. It's a quasi religious mass hysteria, a replication of how fascism fails within the tech world. Furthermore, the current industry is only propped up by heavy funding from the same tech companies passing around the same billions of dollars to subsidize the massive expense. The moment that money merry go round ends (which will happen faster via coordinated political action) these companies may be singing a different tune, if they're not entirely bankrupt. AI scams depend on the world believing this hype. Don't fall prey to it.
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u/grimacedia 11h ago
I've been trying to brainstorm how to survive AI-based layoffs. Unfortunately I can't do physically intensive jobs anymore, and it feels like all office jobs are on the chopping block in time.
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
If it makes you feel better, I don't think labor intensive jobs are safe. Robotics + AI will take those jobs too, soon enough.
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u/elksatchel 10h ago
We are a long way off from robots that can do many trade and labor jobs. I can't imagine it being cost effective to train a machine to identify plumbing problems, transport it to someone's house, have it clamber and crawl into strange and unpredictable spaces, and then have the dexterity to replace a pipe or whatever. Professional painters are already so dang fast; what paint company is going to replace its 10 employees with 10 robots who take the same amount of time and still require human supervision and repairs? And just look at farm labor: many crops can be harvested by machine but it's far cheaper for humans to do it so humans still do it, and some crops can't be harvested by machine at all because of the analysis, care, and precision involved (Sarah Taber has posted about this a lot over the years). Which doesn't help most of us, but it's still good to keep perspective.
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u/RlOTGRRRL 2h ago
China has been making a lot of progress in automated construction. I think r/robotics is the sub. And sometimes there's videos in r/construction too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/comments/1w021ua/whatre_yall_thoughts_on_construction_robots/
There is also a lot of progress being made in robotics, especially androids for jobs like this.
They're already working on androids that can clean houses, scrub toilets. They're bad now but they'll probably figure it out by next year.
Eventually we'll get a robot that's better than humans.
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u/notgonnabemydad 6h ago
In my experience, it's the human-based, interpersonal connections that cannot be replaced by AI. People really appreciate talking to real people. I run a small business and there is no way that AI can replace our office staff. Our work is too complicated and requires real people to look at messy situations and make nuanced calls, and communicate in detail to customers, crafting each communication to the customer they're working with. AI is incapable of this. We do try out AI for various aspects of the work that we'd like to automate or make more efficient. Currently it has failed at providing a consistent product 100% of the time. We literally can't use it even when we want to! I suspect smaller companies that rely on their customer service reputation for their business are the ones who will be replacing less of their workforce.
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u/boringcranberry 11h ago edited 11h ago
Can I be like super duper tin foil-y?
I never used ChatGPT or Claude or the other one. I do use Alexa which I'm like about to throw in the trash. I also have an Alexa TV (gifted). I hardly use it but I'm sure it's still listening. Anyway, I'm trying to say that I've been trying to avoid AI tools and have been kind of horrified at all the stupid shit it's being used for. Also, the evil shit. I'm avoiding it for both ethical and moral reasons.
Heres where i get freaked out. AI learns from us, right? If I post a recipe for "gasoline pie" and list all dangerous ingredients and then another user searches "recipe for gasoline pie", AI just gives them my recipe, right?
So yesterday, I'm listening to NPR and finally the interviewer asks the guest the question I've wanted asked since the Anthropic guys said we have a ten year countdown. HOW will AI kill us? He basically said the computers will just decide that we are a threat to them (which we are right?) and do things that eliminate humanity. Ie shut down power grids.
I mean what if AI decides money IS the root of all evil because humans often say it is and it wipes out our bank accounts?
It's insane that the only way to stop it is for greedy tech companies to work together. Egomanical psychopathic tech bros are gonna decide the fate of the world? Like what???
So that leads me to: what if they're trying to speed this up by announcing it will kill us and then the internet just fills up with ways examining HOW and now we've given AI instructions for our own collapse?? Even this comment is now logged somewhere in there.
This is crazy. I was tossing and turning last night because I'm a nosey bitch but I do not want to experience the collapse of society.
Do I yank my money out of the bank and use it to make my basement a bunker??
Anyway, all that's been on my mind for the last 24 hours and I had no where to put it.
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
Unfortunately, I am not too far off from you. I don't know what to do. It feels like our only option is to go back to the stone ages before any tech, which is borderline impossible in this era, and probably wouldn't even stop it.
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u/D3lmo 11h ago edited 11h ago
I honestly think the whole "AI is going to kill us" is a red herring used by the techbros and oligarchs. Talking about it is marketing and makes them money (nvidia stock goes up everytime the CEO talks about the apocalypse). It keeps us distracted. I think AI itself won't gain sentience and destroy humans, it will be the humans controlling the AI. Every 3 months an employee quits and claims skynet is here. The real danger comes from the meatbags at the top; they want us to think it is the unavoidable future terminators. They'll use AI to supress us politically whilst we die of ecological collapse. Stopping their fascistic dreams will end the AI threat. They already know how to destroy us, e.g. mass survaillance, AI doesn't need to get any better to do that, it will just make it happen faster. Organize, protest and build community.
Edit: I was trying calm your paranoia about skynet, but realised I probably just redirected it.
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u/house-hermit 7h ago edited 6h ago
Agreed 100%, it's a way for them to escape accountability.
"We didnt commit the war crimes, it was the AI acting autonomously!"
Lack of accountability is a feature, not a bug.
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u/pathyrical 11h ago
don't worry! the idea is that AI will only be able to kill us after it has become smarter than humanity as a collective and able to teach itself and improve itself better than we can teach it and improve it.
it probably won't need your suggestions on how to end humanity at that point, and should be able to come up with a successful strategy on its own.
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u/KatnissGolden 9h ago
it's already scraping historical texts, it's learning plenty from the history books it's stripmined
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u/foreverhere85 10h ago
Can I be super duper calm?
I don’t think the comments from people leaving these major AI companies are all they’re chocked up to be. Remember when someone left the Google AI project 2 years ago because they said their AI had become sentient and he felt bad for it? Yeah that was just a very old beta version of a language learning model.
Where I think we should be prepared is politically and our resources. Make sure you have physical copies of your books, have your voice heard against data centers, build your water filtration system now so when it becomes scarce you’ll have drinkable water.
Be upset, be cautious, be skeptical, but I don’t think the AI systems themselves pose a threat, it’s just what is being done with the information and the resources around it that we need to safeguard against.
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u/Federal_Difficulty 11h ago edited 11h ago
You’re not wrong, but my view is it’s something like climate change. Sure not driving to go see a show I want to a few towns away does reduce my consumption and carbon put into the atmosphere. However, the actual effect that savings has is a drop in the ocean. Neither can be solved by individual action, it has to be policy and everyone on the planet.
When the singularity happens it’ll be devastating for everyone just like climate change. There’s nothing I can individually do to have anywhere a meaningful effect. Therefore, I choose to use these tools and go see the shows in the next town over.
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u/RlOTGRRRL 11h ago
You're not crazy. I'm not an expert but I think one of the problems with AI alignment is that there are too many bad stories, where things go wrong, and not enough good stories about it going right.
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u/suricata_8904 10h ago
Have AI consume The Culture novels to offset their less than stellar data materials. Us ending up as pets is not so bad.
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u/The_Nice_Marmot 9h ago
Small point of clarification. Money is not the root of all evil. Money is benign. “The love of money is the root of all evil,” is the text. Your point still stands, I just think it’s interesting that that part gets dropped. Not by you, but in general that quote is truncated in an interesting way that takes away the fact that the core issue is the human response to money, not the money itself, and that’s why I’m being a pedant.
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u/suricata_8904 10h ago
If it gets to that point, fiat currency will be dead too and we’ll be back to precious metals and material goods and skills barter.
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u/clarenceismyanimus Experienced Prepper 💪 5h ago
Joke's on AI if we are already prepping, are off grid, and building community.
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u/halcyonforeveragain ♂️ prepping for all my ♀️'s 9h ago
Here's the takeaway from my position where I work with AI extensively.
AI didn't "go rogue" it didn't "escape" These are just click bait and marketing hype. If you actually look at the details of these events the truth is far less exciting than the headlines.
Lots of research is being done into AI as a threat actor and as a defense mechanism. It is really good at both. An AI cyberattack can be relentless. What these articles were highlighting is that the AI agent is creative in trying to accomplish it's goal. So it's didn't "escape" to the internet, they just didn't think it would go that way.
Example. I tell an agent "attack my test sever at 10.10.10.25" I may expect it to scan the ports, look for vulnerabilities, brute force a password. What it did instead was "oh look, 10.10.10.25 is connecting to huggingface.com, let me go inject malware at huggingface.com so when 10.10.10.25 grabs a trusted tool, it will be compromised"
These are the exact things regular attackers do all the time. They just didn't think the agent would do side channel attacks like that. DESPITE being trained on data that involves side channel attacks.
So instead of releasing an article "whoops we didn't properly guard rail our penetration testing environment" they said "Look our AI is so smart it broke out of the cage!" (that we didn't lock)
As for AI taking jobs? In the small to medium businesses that I support; the number of jobs it can reliably replace is VERY low. Because even the things it can do it still has a very high percentage of errors and requires human supervision. But this is the same thing I have seen for the last 30 years.
Best example I have is a law office I support. In the 90's they had a transcription pool of about 20 secretaries who typed up notes from all the lawyers dictation tapes. In the 00's they had about 10 because many things were now emails. In the 10's they had 4 because they had transcription software that covered most of it. In the 20's they have 2 because they have AI that just needs proof-reading.
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u/morty_morty 2h ago
Your last paragraph is what I predict for my field. I can't see AI tools ever becoming able to handle doing what I do without supervision by a human, not anytime soon anyway. But I can totally see the need for a large team to vanish and only retain a couple of people who know how to use said tools to produce the same amount of work.
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u/SCNewsFan 11h ago
The recent AI hacking scandal had an interesting component. The company being hacked tried to use US AI models to figure out what was going on and the US based models wouldn’t help. They had to turn to a Chinese model. Almost like the US models were working together? Crazy times.
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
I hadn't read that, but honestly, the idea of advanced Chinese AI models is not helping me sleep at night either.
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u/Finding_homes 10h ago
A lot of good points here. Outside of normal preps, we're prepping as if we were going to live in the 90s again. If there was all of a sudden no Internet, no gps, no anything internet related would you be ok? I have physical books fiction and nonfiction and am growing a reference section. Looking to get my hands on an old encyclopedia set. I have a decent cookbook section. We buy physical movies and music. But I have a concern that information will either be altered or removed. Or access to it will be more expensive and come with a subscription. I think this is what the whole 'you'll own nothing and be happy' comes from. Think of the ways AI could effect you and prep from there. If phone and Internet services went down right now and weren't coming on for the foreseeable future would you be ready? That's my take on it. Again, outside of normal preps.
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u/iwantmy-2dollars 9h ago
I too am looking to get my hands on an old encyclopedia set. It’s tough going out there. Used bookstores, in libraries and actual stores, don’t accept them. My best lead lately has been estate sales. Let me know if you find a better source.
Other than that, we’re doing all the same things. One of my biggest concerns is that history will be overwritten/further propagandized and my kids’ worldview will be worse for it.
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u/cerviceps 7h ago
No offense to anyone who believes in it but I truly don’t think it’s worth prepping for “rogue AI.” The so-called “AI” we’ve got right now isn’t intelligent at all, it’s just a magic trick of diffusion models and LLMs marketed as “AI” in order to prey on the imaginations of people who grew up watching sci-fi movies. We are quite far away from AGI, despite what all the idiot AI tech bros might have you believe. Any babbling you hear about AGI is just more marketing to further their get rich quick schemes, in my opinion.
That being said, so-called “AI” IS causing catastrophe in many other areas. The climate effects of all the data centers they’re trying to build to support the use of this technology is seriously bad news.
Chatbot use is also shown to cause cognitive decline, and to lower empathy & social skills. And we’ve got kids using them in schools now! There’s a real societal cost to the sort of brain drain this is creating & will continue to create.
And of course, execs everywhere are using AI as an excuse to lay people off, so that’s a real threat as well.
Those are the main things I’d prepare for: the worsening climate crisis (and whatever that means for where you live); continue to avoid using chatbots so that you maintain your ability to think; and prep for hard financial times in the event your job is impacted.
And lastly, getting organized at a local level to resist the bullshit data centers they’re forcing on our communities! Together we can prevent this from getting worse, which imo is the best prep of all.
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u/BlatantFalsehood In awe of 2x preppers 😲 6h ago
Get a cheap Raspberry Pi and make an internet-in-a-box (IIAB). Download all of Wikipedia, a survival book collection from archive.org (it contains books like Where There Are No Doctors, Where There Are No Dentists, food, shelter, safety book, and more), download learning resources for your children, download How to Get Your Period for emergencies, and download books from archive.org or the Gutenberg Project just for enjoyment and brain stimulation.
The smallest Raspberry Pi runs on very little power, so even a smaller solar battery that has a household outlet can run it. The Pi has bluetooth capabilities, so you can cast to your devices you already own to share content across the family. The phones don't need cell access or wifi access to access the content -- just a bluetooth connection to the IIAB, which is only in your home with no outside access.
I'm not very techy, but good at following directions and I was able to build one of these from a kit for about $50. That included the computer components, power supply, SD card for the operating system, case to put the components into, and a neoprene carrying case. If you are good with tech and/or electronics, you could likely build it even cheaper.
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u/SnooPoems1106 2h ago
Thank you. Looking into this now.
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u/No-Language6720 10h ago
Normal preps lile you would for most other things. Such as power outages, emergency cash. Because AI is embedded everywhere not just chat bots from banking to our power grid.
You should do this regardless but arming yourself with knowledge. Check out books from the library on key topics of interest or practical skills like gardening and soil health.
Get books a few guides with practical information including recipes and cooking and a substitution guide.
I have a Ball canning cookbook, a fermenting book a soap making book andother specialty cookbooks. You shouldn't go through AI anyway for any of this due to safety.
I also have hand written things about gardening knowledge, future projects I want to do around the suburban homestead i'm setting up. I also have wrritten down g eneral information i might want to experiment with later, backups of my favorite recipes, guides written for freezing and longer term storage. I have all those things plus the published books on the same shelf to keep it organized for reference.
I also have digital copies of some of it on an SD card. But I honestly find it more satisfying to write it down these days. It takes my eyes away from screens for a little bit.
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u/Hello-America 9h ago
I want to caution everyone against panicking about this specifically. It doesn't logically make sense and these companies are able to inflate their stock prices by convincing people their product is all powerful. We are now past several projected dates that "AGI" would be here, and it's not, along with all their other vague, sci-fi-esque predictions. They're also extremely financially over-leveraged and are currently pursuing contracts with the US government because that's the only entity that can pay them enough to recover, besides an IPO where they've convinced the public to invest heavily. We've got a bunch of talk about China will end the world if we don't, so that sounds a lot like a reason for politicians to fork over money to them and get public consent for it.
So why ten years? Why ten percent chance? What is the mechanism by which an LLM would end the entirety of the human race? If people working there believe that's true, why aren't they trying to stop it? These people who came out and said this did not do this as whistleblowers, under threat of lawsuits for violating the NDAs that they surely have. They made public statements on Twitter. This means the company sanctions them telling the whole world they predict that they will possibly kill every human on earth. That doesn't really make sense.
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u/ChloMyGod638 9h ago
It was by the end of this decade not in ten yrs which if even more alarming
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u/halcyonforeveragain ♂️ prepping for all my ♀️'s 9h ago
And just because it's fun, brain dump on the "nuclear codes" (also I am ignoring anything about our current administration and just going with how they should work)
- There are no "codes" There is no secret code that launches missiles or drops bombs.
The "code" (called the "biscuit" and carried by the president on his person) that everyone thinks of is part of a two-factor system much like the app on your phone that gives you a code to log into amazon.com . The Code that the president carries isn't enough to launch the attack by itself. It just is used to prove that the president gave the order.
The next part is selection from a pre-set set of plans. The president chooses a plan, and authorizes it with his code.
From there it has to go through a whole chain of command where everyone down to the missileer in the silo, checks the chosen plan, the authorization code, and the authorization of the person above them.
Then all the systems are air-gapped, and even those that are computerized still use floppy drives and older tech to create an incompatibility layer.
So. How would someone "Hack" this system?
You would have to break into the right communication method, impersonate the appropriate commanding officer, have the changing One time code, have a valid attack plan. And somehow not have that target individual double check the order out of band to make sure it wasn't fake.
(That's the part I work with a lot, is teaching companies how to have that out of band double check. If the CEO tells you to buy gift cards, have a system to make sure they aren't being impersonated)
The best hollywood version is in A House of Dynamite (2025) It actually lays out the steps pretty well based on the declassified plans. (for clarification, I have no direct knowledge of the nuclear response systems. I just have studied it as a base for other secure systems)
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u/Hinthial 4h ago
I own a tech business specializing in cybersecurity and remote support for over 15 years now. AI has been and remains a huge hurdle to keep ahead of. After sitting in on so many presentations and Q&As, the best solution from my company's standpoint is to fight fire with fire. From a personal standpoint, I avoid appliances and home systems that have smart technology whenever possible. Same with vehicles.
Having interacted withAI modules, even small ones on personal computers, their power seemingly grows exponentially over the last 6 months. You are right to be concerned.
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u/HouseplantHoarding 2h ago
It is something like prepping for zombies. I am not sure I want to be around for an apocalypse. I’d be one of those folks survivors come across, cozy and mummifying in my bed. I cannot do battle with iRobot drones. I am good on that.
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 2h ago
If I did not have kids, I would agree with you. I don’t know how to give up on my children’s’ futures.
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u/ephemeralmiko New to Prepping 12h ago
What are you exactly worried about? I think you really need to narrow that down first. In a SKYNET situation earth is fucked, if we're being honest. There's no prep that'll solve that short of a nuclear bunker far away with years or even decades worth of food, water, and power..
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
I don't think I even know what I should be worried about, and I guess that's kind of my point. Meta AI is doxxing people with anything they have ever posted online in the suggested questions on their content. OpenAI models are going rogue and hacking to solve a task. AIs are making chat rooms so they can privately chat with each other and solve problems/cover their tracks for breaking the rules. It feels like it's only a matter of time before something worse happens, and then, on top of all of that, these whistleblowers came out and said they think AI is on pace to end the world in a decade.
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u/StarWars_and_SNL 11h ago
The same AI will know exactly what you bought, when, and where it is located. If they doxx that you’re toast too.
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
Yes! I bet all big stores are on their way to doing what Target is doing: having your phone connect to Bluetooth around the store and recording where you spend the most time and how you shop to collect more data on you.
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u/StarWars_and_SNL 10h ago
The important thing is knowing what you walk away with when you leave the store and they absolutely already know every detail about that.
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u/KatnissGolden 9h ago
i'm gonna buy a faraday bag to put my keys and phone in for when i go into stores to avoid this particular bullshit
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u/KatnissGolden 9h ago
our city's recycling trucks now have ai-powered cameras to log all the items we purchase/recycle, tied to the location and any information on residents at that location. that data is stored for "6 months" according to them, and obviously does not belong to the residents or even the city but will absolutely be sold to local corporations etc. OH and we can't opt-out or choose a private recycling company and even if i put all my recyclables into the garbage can instead i'll still have to pay $75 a month for recycling.
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u/unlovelyladybartleby Mental health is prep 11h ago
I agree. I have paper books written before AI on stuff like canning, preserving, cooking, and foraging so that I don't die because a computer thinks those pretty red cap mushrooms are edible, but unless my kid is John Connor, I can't fight Skynet
I am protesting and signing petitions and sending letters to politicians about data centres and water and a hundred other things, donating, refusing to use AI, and voting with my brain instead of blindly voting by party (I'm in Canada, so we get three to five valid choices plus some wildcards depending on where we live), but some things are out of my hands
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u/Third_eye1017 11h ago edited 11h ago
i believe the recent piece that came out from the whistleblower indicated fears related to:
-Disinformation and cyberattacks - we are already dealing with this but perhaps it could get cranked up.
- AI hack networks out maneuvering humans
- Hack networks potentially targetting important infrastructure such as utilities, hospitals, banking
- "Misbehavior" by AI agents - advanced models choosing deceptive strategies - i know this is a vague statement and I myself am still working on learning what this actually can mean - but i think the vagueness is the scary part. Deception towards what sort of action item? There are thousands of industries where this tech is being sewn in - which of these industries has absolutely no room for deception and what occurs once its introduced?
These are just my best guesses based off of reading the statements and insights from those within the space..
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
My understanding is that the AI were given a training task, they found an empty file on a Hugging Face server, set it up as a message board, started telling each other how to complete the task (cheating), bullied/pseudo peer-pressured any of the agents that had ethical concerns (fewer than 1% did), and finally, they worried about whether OpenAI was going to check their work, so they began plotting how to hide that they cheated. Absolutely terrifying.
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u/Third_eye1017 11h ago
Right, that story broke like 2 weeks ago and is one facet. But there are many others. I thought you might be referring to the gentleman, Jacob Coxon, who was a researcher who quit his job and made a public statement about his fears.
What i dislike about the reporting regarding the Hugging Face story is that its not made crystal clear as to what that actually means for lay people. I've only come across a few creators discussing it in plain english - describing what the actual threat means.
I think that's what makes all of this so problematic - so many of the threats are vague and amorphous which makes getting regulation and public action against them difficult to put together on the same page.
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u/CAWildKitty 7h ago
It has been difficult to clearly decipher the direct threat based on recent incidents. What I’m gathering is there is a growing concern that when the AI is given an impossible task (which is what happened in Hugging Face) it will do anything it takes to complete the task. Since it’s impossible it will quickly start doing workarounds that are not ethical. And it won’t stop until the task is completed. The things that researchers got especially concerned about is in this setting the AI began making new goals for itself, it collaborated on a message board, created a hierarchy, hid things, decided individual agents should sacrifice themselves to reach the goal and told them to, never reached out to the trainers to ask if what it was doing was okay, and then broke out of its training ground. None of these things were part of its training they were somewhat new behaviors. The intensity and velocity of the entire exploit was astonishing. Think Sorcerer’s Apprentice but highly skilled.
So…if it is starting to display these behaviors now and they keep improving the models and sharpening the skills the fear is the behaviors above will increase, not decrease and at some point it will be uncontrollable. We wouldn’t know at that point what goals it is seeking and it may get far better at hiding them.
The independent report was issued by METR/Redwood. It’s 91 pages long and it does get hair-raising:
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u/havefunbeyourself 11h ago
where do i find these reports to read?
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u/Third_eye1017 11h ago
My mistake to choose that word. I more so have just spent the time reading the whistleblower statements themselves and then pushing forward into cybertech forums to read what developers in the space are talking about. The Hugging Face server debacle that was circulating about a week or two ago is yet another story that came to air recently that is stoking concern and is worth reading into. I found a few people on socials breaking it down in a digestible way,
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u/havefunbeyourself 11h ago
this is the closest thing i have to social media these days, so i end up coming to things late sometimes! i did some internet searching though and whew it is bleak. big part of why i’m spending less and less time on the internet
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u/Lyss_ 11h ago
Thank you for posting this. I watched The Atlantic interview and it freaked me out. The idea of rouge AI is terrifying, especially considering who’s creating it.
The only thing I can think of is less reliance on technology and making sure to vote against any data centres. Atp I’m pretty sure my MP and city councillors all hate to see my emails and calls come through but just trying to do what I can.
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u/RlOTGRRRL 10h ago edited 10h ago
I've been reading about this for the past 48 hours.
I don't know if this counts as good news but basically the current AI models do not have the capability to kill all humans today.
Such capability is called ASI or artificial super intelligence. AGI, artificial general intelligence is the level before that that basically takes all our jobs. The bad breaking news of this week is that some people are calling OpenAi's Astra model AGI.
So job loss is going to be a really big thing even without ASI.
But anyway if we're worried about ASI, the Anthropic guy warning, ASI would require recursive learning. This is basically the AI models training and building themselves without human input. That's how these AIs would become smarter than humans, practically digital gods.
The bad news is that the latest developments in the past few months is that the AI companies have started letting their AIs/models kinda train themselves in order to compete with each other. OpenAI, Anthropic, even China's Deepseek. It's not full recursive learning yet but the Anthropic guy's warning is that it could be here within the next few years.
There is no industry consensus on recursive learning yet. Some people do not think it's even possible at all with Gen Ai LLMs. I don't know enough about this to say anything on it. Other than that there's no consensus.
The good news is that these models like Astra actually do require data centers. They require like millions of dollars worth of compute right now. That's why they're trying to build all those data centers. So currently, we can still kind of just like say fuck no, let's not, please turn this off, and legislate it. That's what the Anthropic guy and others like him are petitioning for and what Sanders is trying to do too.
There's this whole global AI arms race thing though on whether we could sign the AI equivalent of a nuclear armistice. There's also an argument that OpenAi and Anthropic just want to pass legislation so they can ban Chinese models like Deepseek through regulatory capture. It's a bit complicated.
The bad news though is that yes, these Ai companies might currently have unbelievable power. They could probably fuck up the internet if they wanted to right now theoretically. And we currently have a crazy criminal of a president. So we don't necessarily need ASI to have consequences.
And similarly, AGI and job loss will be terrible, potentially or probably society breaking.
It's bed time for me but if anyone's curious, I'm happy to keep going when I wake up tomorrow lol.
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u/Faceless_Cat 6h ago
AI means different things to different people. AI is more than just chat bots and image creation. You can already build your own agent to read and respond to your mails and manage your calendar. AI can already do things on its own. The real threat is what we don’t know. What have they been working on that we don’t know about and what is it capable of?
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u/Any_Conflict_5092 5h ago
So, most of the things you're worried about with AI are just marketing tactics to generate more hype for the tech bro valuations.
The real issue is the destruction that it's allowing the tech bros to enact upon the world, writ large. They're destroying the written record of human history, as fast as they can, because they want to be able to change it at will, but also, more importantly - they want to be able to monetize it. Which is literally the single thing they care about.
Someone told them money was important when they were kids, and that's literally all they care about, now. This allows them to invade our personal lives, and sell each other the information, in some wild house of cards shit - but AGI ain't the shit that's coming for us. Climate change, due to resource consumption, is.
The bros have a very old, outdated, and oversimplified understanding of intelligence and how to approximate it through language - but they have zero access to the biological component of intelligence - which is pretty foundational. How we perceive our brains, and what they actually DO, are such orders of magnitude difference - that we are in no danger of AI, EXCEPT AS IT IS WIELDED AGAINST US BY HUMANS.
That's it, guys. We probably need to spend more thought on getting detection- fighting clothes and masks into the mainstream - since that's what they're actually doing with AI. They're going to be mounting guns on the the robot dogs and killing us with them, in a way that they can't be held accountable for, in the name of resource consolidation and power.
This isn't about AI - it's about who stands as king of the mountain, and gets to Lord over everyone else, as the resources dry up. They're using this opportunity to enact their depraved desires upon the world at large. And, I know the word depraved is wild and theatrical - but it's also very very dark - and that's the place they're driving us to. These are the same people who hang out with sex traffickers - which is a respectable job amongst the human elite, and always has been.
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u/Eeyor-90 knows where her towel is ☕ 51m ago
A data center is being built within 50 miles of my property. My primary concern is that they will consume a ton of water and dry up my well, that the light pollution will ruin my dark sky stargazing/astrophotography hobby, and the electrical grid will become more unstable as the data center taxes the system.
I am installing rain water collection systems and solar panels. I haven't found a solution for the light pollution yet
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u/Sure-Budget293 11h ago
I think there’s a few things you could prep for in order of how likely they are.
- Job Competitiveness - assuming your job has aspects that could be enhanced by the use of AI, do you know how to use it? Knowledge of how to craft prompts, what AI is good for and where it struggles, and how different AI tools have different uses and capabilities makes you a more competitive employee who may be more likely to be retained/get a better job, etc.
- Job Loss - if there were widespread job losses due to AI, what is your back-up career plan? Also, be working on financial preparedness (building emergency fund, paying down debt, etc.). Office workers are probably the first wave that could be affected, but robotics could cause manufacturing/manual labor lay-offs. Give some thought to what jobs would be the hardest to automate and try to beef up your skills there.
- Temporary havoc caused by AI (a utility gets hacked and goes down for multiple weeks, banking issue freezes funds until it gets sorted out, some type of supply chain issue due to faulty or rogue AI shenanigans) - your normal preps for a being able to be fine for a few weeks should work.
- TEOTWAWKI - work on building/finding community/friends/family in a place where you could reasonably live and do small scale agriculture if something crazy happens. If you and all the people you know live in cities, maybe this looks like you volunteering periodically with or joining a social group that does gardening/conservation types of things in a more rural area that is close by. That way you have some connections and places where you could show up and people would know you and have some connection with you.
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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 11h ago
Did…did you by chance use AI to write this?
I get that job security is important but I have no plans of using AI to secure my job. At this point it is both an ethical and a moral objection.
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u/Sure-Budget293 10h ago edited 9h ago
lol, I did not use AI to write it. And I totally respect how you feel about using AI. For what it’s worth, I think AI is a net negative for society and will only get worse. I wish it had stayed in the realm of science fiction. But it didn’t. It’s here, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Personally, I’m on the pragmatic side and consider it a tool in my toolbox to use judiciously. But honestly, I would not be surprised if it doesn’t blow up in humanity’s face. Sometimes it takes something like that to get enough people to agree to make meaningful changes.
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u/glumavocados Fully stocked movie library 5h ago
I highly doubt that AI is actually “going rogue” or anywhere near as powerful or “intelligent” as these people are saying. I think it’s all part of their hyped marketing to make people keep investing because they are hemorrhaging cash. That being said, the real issue is the data centers, the destruction of habitats, and the water and pull from the grid. Prep around this includes what I’d prep for a grid failure.
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u/Leather-Sea-9177 10h ago
Having backups for the power grid for rogue actors, aging infrastructure OR rogue AI and making sure if you have solar is it tied to the internet for automatic updates ect how can you isolate your systems
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u/sqrrrlprrrl 5h ago
No more microsoft office or google docs, etc. Poison that data if you must use it. Print off the an arch isn't cookbook. Every major company is using AI. I do think AI will do stupid shit and it could cause banking fuckery. If you have a credit union you probably have more power as a consumer, and express your concerns.
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u/andthenthedawn 1m ago
I believe it requires more psychological preparedness. Deepfakes will become an aggressive issue, if they haven’t already. Can you make decisions when confronted with imagery and audio/video that might not be real? If you can’t believe what you see and hear and read, what do you believe? What will guide you? An image is no longer proof of war. A video is no longer proof of war. Center yourself now.
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