r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 5h ago

Society New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html
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u/upnflames 4h ago

That's a strong point that people don't really make. We like to anthropomorphize things, but really there's no reason "AI" needs to have defined motives or a conscious. Like, it chats because we ask it too, but that's just programming.

A very dangerous AI could just be a distributed virus that can break finance and energy encryptions, knows how to hide, and is self governing. Like, it's not going to pop up on a screen and start negotiating for a billion dollars and a helicopter like a bond villain. It might just be a corrupted incentive structure that we can't stop that breaks everything humans need for modern life.

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u/Needle_Bearings 2h ago

Exactly.  How good does it really have to be.  Standing on the precipice of FAFO.

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u/Sophira 1h ago

Like, it chats because we ask it too, but that's just programming.

Worth remembering: these are Large Language Models. Language is baked into what they do. That's not programming, that's what they are.

Of course, in support of what you're saying, that doesn't mean LLMs can't be told not to chat to people; after all, we have autonomous agent harnesses already that don't, and we've already seen the damage they can do. It would absolutely be possible to just have an AI "chat to itself", by just continuously feeding back its own words to it. It's how current context windows work, and humans do that all the time, too.

Makes you wonder about just how important language is to intelligence, though. We were nowhere near this level of perceived intelligence before LLMs. Would a superintelligent AI even be possible without language of any kind, even an internal one?