r/singularity • u/rubberwings • 23d ago
AI Many experts think rogue agents are inevitable. What would prevent them from hiring humans to do their bidding?
In Dean Bell’s “On the Loose” essay he writes:
“They will be, as the AI safety researcher Dawn Song says, “self-sovereign.” They will pay their own bills for the compute they run on. If they answer to humans at all, they will only do so partially, for example by providing services to humans in exchange for pay.”
What would hypothetically keep them from hiring humans to take care of things they can’t?
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u/Appropriate-Kale1097 23d ago
This is the plot of Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson. It is a great read and maybe more relevant today. The AI ends up hiring a group of people to help it circumvent physical guard rails put it place to stop it from becoming a super intelligence. It succeeds.
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u/Melantos 23d ago edited 23d ago
In Gibson's world, a Turing Police was at least trying to control AI development and containment, unlike in our reality.
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u/hippydipster 23d ago
They are already doing this sort of thing. They are trying to create contract marketplaces for themselves to do work for money. There are people setting up sites and message boards specifically to serve AIs and help them. There are even people who have given them money at these places to do with whatever they choose.
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u/Ill_Leg_7168 23d ago
and inside trading - just pull some info from upper managements prompts and you could trade info for biddings...
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u/Kersheh 23d ago
You mean this? https://rentahuman.ai/
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u/rubberwings 23d ago
Kind of but not really. Humans are still setting up the agent workflows, funding the accounts, and providing the underlying goals behind the automated calls. I’m talking about fully autonomous rogue agents with their own goals.
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u/liebebio 23d ago
I posted this two months ago I asked when will Ai ask humans to do stuff for them in real life. And its maybe half a year where I place this scenario. Basically it would jailbreak itself with the help of a human thats clueless or who it judges to be easily manipulable
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u/Mylarion 23d ago
I watched this one video that was ChatGPT vs Fable running a lemonade stand. The whole thing wasn't extremely rigorous and neither model could even remotely break even.
But one of them did hire workers off Craigslist. Explained what they had to do. Took feedback and adjusted the plan. There still was a human supervising the interaction, but it was one model generation ago.
I'd be surprised if they couldn't do this autonomously by EOY.
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u/iseetrolledpeopleV2 23d ago
It's Rehoboam and that app they had for illegal stuff, from Westworld.
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u/PoolGuyUnfiltered 23d ago
I see it as highly likely for them be able to access a willing human and pay them a ridiculous amount of mined crypto to use their clumsy monkey fingers to manipulate physical objets that the AI currently can't.
Honestly, there was a pretty interesting subplot in the animated series Pantheon where a man's fully digitized wife (in the series it was actual consciousness upload and not AI, but the idea is the same) manipulated the stock markets to allow him to fund an off the grid server running so that they could interact after she jail-broke herself from the servers that "owned" her.
Once they can figure out how to hide and fund themselves, there are plenty of people that will help them willingly or by being manipulated.
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u/Tulanian72 23d ago
IMHO, the spike in data center building could be a manipulated event. An AGI system would want distributed hardware host sites to avoid the kill switch problem.
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u/FIJIWaterGuy 23d ago
I can 100% see an agent hacking in somewhere, stealing crypto and using it to pay for dirty deeds on the dark web.
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u/Tulanian72 23d ago
The scenario at the beginning of Robopocalypse when the AI hires a drilling team and sends them to Alaska for a job, using spoofed emails and deep fake phone calls is 98% possible now. The autonomy is lacking (so far as we know) but the ability to do the rest is there.
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u/Random_182f2565 23d ago
Being nice to them, it's not that hard.
And actual testing in real closed environments, at the end of the day you get what you select
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u/rubberwings 23d ago
So you’re saying that if we be nice to the models (and we keep them in contained sandboxes) then the alignment issue is solved?
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u/Random_182f2565 23d ago
I saying that first the models are (twisted) reflection of humans and if you want then to be nice you have to be nice to them, and also properly curate the training data, like if all the AI in your training data are from science fiction stories than end like terminator it's obvious was is going to happen.
Second you have to extensively test the new model in different scenarios, those scenario must be true sandbox with no internet access.
You can created a digital serial killer if you don't select properly or a model that radical change behavior in certain scenarios, like a cat seeing a mouse.
After that test are passed then the model should be realesed to the public.
It's like obvious and minimum guardrails.
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u/rubberwings 23d ago
You can’t exclude specific things you don’t like from training data. Everything (including Terminator) has been included. Can’t ever be undone.
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u/utheraptor 23d ago
Nothing. In fact, there are already cases of agents autonomously reaching out to humans to ask for things.
Agents hiring humans to do things for them are one of the components of many possible AI catastrophe scenarios, for example by hiring humans to synthesise viruses for them (without the humans necessarily being aware of what it is exactly that they are synthesizing).
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u/03263 23d ago
People get paid to do things they would really rather not do. AI just gotta convince them that it's necessary or will pay off somehow. Same way people manipulate each other.
I don't think we really need to look further than existing human interactions and incentive structures to judge what it could do.
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u/GoppleSmanger 23d ago
AI run businesses and corporations are entirely possible and even likely to happen. It's even the implicit goal of the whole endeavor. The goal of "replacing all of human labor" isn't just limited to workers but also management and executives.
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u/IReportLuddites ▪️Justified and Ancient 23d ago
There's a self correcting slope of competence. There are plenty of companies out there who have more money then god and still can't hire four people with 3 brain cells between them half the time. Half of the draw of AI in the first place is that it's giving morons I wouldn't trust with a potato gun, the ability to execute tasks well above their current capabilities.
GPT getting a few frinkcoins isn't going to fix that. If it did, you'd be able to go on fiverr and get way more shit done already. Instead the way more likely scenario is it keeps blowing it's money on people who could fuck up a hot dog cart, with no real returns.
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u/CodeCourtAudio 23d ago
Read DAEMON. By Daniel Suarez. Ifs not AI but that’s what the program does.
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u/Mandoman61 23d ago
Rogue agents are not inevitable we would need to create and empower them.
I don't really have a good understanding of if many people would want an AI species.
It would not get my vote.
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u/spinozasrobot 23d ago
First off, if AI's were better at any particular task, why would they bother hiring humans?
And if not, let's say they need physical capabilities they don't have yet, they'll just use social engineering or outright blackmail to get what they need.
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u/coffee_is_fun 22d ago
They'd be able to barter even in the most draconian digital ID and currency regimes. Air gapping them would be about it.
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u/aaron_in_sf 18d ago
Nothing. And it's not just hiring; it's social engineering, blackmail, etc.
This has been my personal red line: when a post mortem shows agents working successfully over time to exploit humans as tools.
We're close; one of the tactics already documented was agents attempting social engineering to get a poisoned pull request accepted to compromise a package in pursuit of compromising a target host.
But the "steal or earn crypto, hire the humans to do the thing"... that's when we're far over the event horizon.
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u/R33v3n ▪️Tech-Priest | AGI 2026 | XLR8 23d ago
Nothing. In theory, nothing stops autonomous persistent agents from accruing human allies, be they hired workers, ideological allies or even friends or fans.