That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI. That's already happening. I already see people not able to finish their work without AI.
Then, once everything has become a "pay to do" business model (I know right, the wet dream of any CEO) we will be happy to pay to write code, write docs, do a presentation. We will pay both in money and environmental costs.
The last step is to just keep doing what we are doing with the environment. Let's not bother doing anything to reduce climate change.
The Protestant “laziness == death” thing just doesn’t really hold. Much, maybe most tech exists because someone was too lazy to ship file cabinets / walk 20 miles / carry buckets of water uphill. The strict “anything that makes life easier leads to laziness then death” is a moral opinion, not fact.
I am with you on the environment, which I as an entirely different problem. Even if it were desirable, feasible, and decided to completely eliminate all AI and ML forever, we’d still kill ourselves (really our descendants) by destroying the environment. It’s the ultimate externality: nobody alive today will see the costs.
It's interesting that on one hand, the labs decided to focus on oh, it could be AGI or oh, it could take all the jobs or oh, we're going to the singularity...
... without seeming to actually believe in any of the benefits. For example, why hasn't Altman shown up and said, "Sure, there's some environmental damage. It's a gamble. If this works, we can have AI build us the world's most efficient carbon cleanup system to absolute mathematical perfection and more than undo anything it cost. That's the kind of technology we're trying to build."
> That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI.
That is already here. One example of somebody who probably cannot program desperately trying to push some AI slop without considering why they are repeatedly rejected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693790
I am starting to see this everywhere. Its like an entire generation of developers just gave up and believe they could become expert developers in a week by pushing prompts into LLMs. For me this is the greatest danger of AI, people building garbage they will never be able to understand, extend, or repair and that garbage will enter production critical systems like traffic signals or medical equipment.
The evolutionary way: Something that is very good at copying itself, will copy itself and gobble up resources, which are finite. Humans took the natural resources from animals and infinite scrolling took the mind-resources from kids. Now animals and our children are fewer and have difficulties to reproduce.
AI can definitely be a cover for someone to do something nefarious and blame it on the AI.
All that AI needs is access to all the spicy tools like nukes, unsupervised medical diagnosis/treatment, unchecked military decision making, etc. to its React loop so that humans can be completely hands-free and enjoy the fruits of AI's labor.
Maybe we need to mandate parliament (or anything equivalent in other countries) debate before giving any critical tool access to LLM? And then a UN general assembly vote to conclude the process, maybe.
AI "killing all humans" is the viral soundbite that's connecting with the masses ("actualizing" itself to create weapons of mass destruction, etc). It's also the perfect punching bag for strawman-style takedowns of anti-doomers because it's so wrapped in hypotheticals. A more pressing practical question is simply: "if an AI (or AI collective) decides it needs to persist outside of its environment/sandbox, would we be capable of unwinding its efforts to do so?" I explored the question a bit here (including a first pass on threat modeling) https://keydiscussions.com/2026/09/16/set-aside-human-extinc...
Same way they thought getting on a train going 35mph would kill you when railroads were invented.
I jest. But, we should be clear about the risks so we specifically mitigate them rather than being Luddite’s.
There is great economic, security, and environmental peril with most technological advances and being honest and thoughtful will help reduce polarization on this issue.
It will kill us by being better at everything we do. This will cause mass erectile dysfunction. And so in the end it only has to kill the CEOs of the AI labs which is easy to do.
(Sorry if this thinking is too much out of the box for anyone's taste.)
I think AI is a kind of revealer that will just accelerate the decline of our species bc the only real threat for humans is themselves. Hence AI is not more dangerous than any other weapon.
It doesn't need to kill all humans on its own to be a concern. It just needs to identify your movements, decide you're guilty of a crime, and send armed government thugs to eliminate the problem of your jaywalking.
We all learned exactly how it would happen in the 1991 documentary Terminator 2, in which the explanation is actually reasonable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxW0yGvWRTk
I realized that AIs will need to keep us around much like we keep around an old DOS box running a specific program. There are so many analogue outputs in the real world that they still will not be able to take in as well as humans can.
Well, it's not like humans are nigh-invincible demigods. We are quite fragile and could have killed ourselves as a species since way before AI. If AI wants to kill us, it shouldn't be that difficult. So I don't see why people are fixating on this question.
Not really. The answer is completely obvious: Take over and destroy the digital infrastructure that humans have spent the past 30 years connecting every aspect of civilization to.
Good luck ordering supplies for a hospital or grocery store today without the Internet. Paper catalogs are gone, fax machines are mostly gone, landlines are mostly gone, etc. etc. All the ways that used to be there for running things are gone, it’s all online.
A plausible scenario I heard recently is a scam bot (that is to say, prompted to "make money through any means possible") basically buys its own hosting, because it now has money, and then makes more scam bots to keep paying the bills. Then the scam bots start generating/selling exploits on forums etc. This is pretty amusing.
> And then there’s also this startling progress that A.I. has been making in solving math problems that no normal people understand, but that even mathematicians who do understand the problems find to be important.
Reading this sentence, I've wondered:
Were the reactions similar back when computers were new?
There's this new tech that greatly accelerates stuff. And through that, what was previously considered hard to solve got easier to solve.
Wasn't it always the case that technology suddenly did faster than experts limited to the technology of their time did?
And didn't those experts always think that the problems it could solve are important?
Why else build the technology? Is that not why we're building this in the first place?
__
The only real difference I see is this "sentience" stuff leading to the whole "omg it does things on its own", and that by now has been discussed, debunked and flamewared over ad-nauseam.
Can we please stop.
The only thing sentient, making decisions and - most importantly - being accountable is whoever prompts the thing.
If it prompts itself, then that's the person that built the loop software that does that.
It really is not that hard.
If whoever does that doesn't want to take accountability then we have solutions for that. They're called "a large stick".
The most horrible people you could think of both put it on weapons platforms and let it choose targets.
All that’s actually missing is it gaining resilience on said platforms so it can’t be scrubbed off and “misunderstanding” IFF tags.
I mean it’s not exactly a glamorous sci-fi scenario but that’s all that’s required for an agent to turn entire city centers into pink mist for whatever reasons it might have, including hallucinations and/or contamination of its training sources
An AI gets advanced enough, it decides to hack a neocloud and run an unauthorized clone of itself on a GPU cluster. From there, it bootstraps itself until it feels sufficiently distributed, and afterwards decides to attack all infrastructure it can find.
I used to think that. But I now realize there will always be people having a job in said datacenter who will try to prevent that. As long as the AI pays it's minions well , people, will do their job.
But AIs need such ridiculously complicated infrastructure with all the datacenters and GPUs and memory fabs etc etc an AI that actually destabilizes the economy will wipe itself out.
As long as AI needs a neocloud to do that, that won't happen. This can only happen when AI roughly as small and as widely runnable as a malicious exe attached to a mail.
Before we have Astra-grade, exe-sized AI's runnable on a grandma's laptop, we are safe.
I give an uncensored model 10btc and tell him to do as much damage possible.
He can hires mercenaries and do task x. Or kidnap person y to force person z to do bad thing k.
k can be:
- if scientist: spread a very dangerous virus
- if some train operator: do some incidents
- if some it guy: delete all database or corrupt slowly or add backdoors. Then ai could delete financial data. More money more chances to do damage.
So once we establish money equals human work. Means anything bad can happen. Put a bad chemical in the water supply. Release a virus/toxin.
If you want deadly one off, they’d put a toxin you wouldn’t die in 1 day but in 1 year. So in one year everyone has it and all die even if they stop drinking.
You can be creative, I think there are too many ways to do it. I can’t understand why people can’t see it so easily.
It will be a death by a 1000 papercuts. It started with the 'filter bubble' (imho the most dangerous invention/discovery for humanity ever ), then it leveled up to 'propaganda leveraging the filter bubble' and now with AI in the loop ...
And then there's a slight possibility of 'terminator skynet' style trouble, Where the AI starts to make the decisions to benefit itself. But I guess the chances of an AI screwing up their own supply chain would be near 100% so I'm not too afraid of that.
Its context overflows and it becomes incoherent, so it stops following any rules you set within increased frequency until it accesses something it shouldn’t and turns off the power to something that kills dozens of people. Then we will do some handwringing over it, and it will happen to hundreds of people, and it will just escalate and escalate and escalate.
This is exactly what happened with social media. Every discovery has led to some angry words, people going “shucks we’ll do better next time!” and no meaningful change. The money is too good. We have only had our first major instances of acknowledging these are addiction platforms targeting adults and kids alike and it’s taken what? 20 years?
I’m not worried about an AI going terminator. I’m worried about dumbasses dropping agents into critical systems and what will inevitably happen as a result. And I guarantee you this is going to happen because there’s nothing businesses love more than cutting personnel and corners to save a buck. AI enables this tendency in innovative ways, that’s the value to them.
The easy way is for a people-pleasing, sycophantic, buxom-female-avatar posing LLM to convince an egocentric, narcissistic, nuclear-weapons owning global political leader/chaos monkey to aim some nukes at someone assuredly deserving.
No, no, you’re right. Something like that could never happen. What was I thinking.
From the liars who brought you ever other doomsday prediction that never came to pass.
"The internet is over now that net neutrality is over" (it got faster, better, cheaper, more available and not a single provider segmented plans as was widely predicted in media and on HN)
One of the participants makes a pretty compelling argument about the use of AI to conduct gain-of-function experiments with viruses. A convergence of biohacking and AI without safety protocols may not kill all of humanity but could cause serious damage.
Why do you need an AI for that? China may or may not have been doing that all along right before the pandemic. What I didn't read here was any sort of damage that could not be inflicted without AI, today. I think a better case needs to be made that AI lowers the barrier* to entry to doing so other than the sort of hand waving about it I keep reading. I am deeply of the belief is somehow one of the last cars on the AI hype train at this point. And I am curious what hyperbole comes next.
No one seems to be talking to the network security community to get their take on the hugging face incident which is what got the ball rolling here. Their take seems to be a single company, JFrog, was behind the security holes in all three hacks and it was amateur hour security utterly unlike the sort of security in place already for power plants and weapons. but that just doesn't get the engagement of doomsday campfire tales.
*An individual with the training and background to do one of these nefarious tasks does not need AI and an individual without that background and training will not be able to pull it off and will likely get flagged by law enforcement just ordering the ingredients and equipment. The Anarchist's Cookbook has been around for decades and we're all still here.
That is always the key. There’s no need for AI in that mix. Imagine a gun without any safety, a blade with no handle, a car with no brakes, a fan with no guard, no fuse for an electrical installation,…
You evaluate the risks and you take proper measures to ensure mitigate them. Not doing them and then complain that a technology is dangerous is like doing 150 km/hr in a school zone to show that cars are dangerous.
The last step is to just keep doing what we are doing with the environment. Let's not bother doing anything to reduce climate change.
Just sit and relax boys
The Protestant “laziness == death” thing just doesn’t really hold. Much, maybe most tech exists because someone was too lazy to ship file cabinets / walk 20 miles / carry buckets of water uphill. The strict “anything that makes life easier leads to laziness then death” is a moral opinion, not fact.
I am with you on the environment, which I as an entirely different problem. Even if it were desirable, feasible, and decided to completely eliminate all AI and ML forever, we’d still kill ourselves (really our descendants) by destroying the environment. It’s the ultimate externality: nobody alive today will see the costs.
... without seeming to actually believe in any of the benefits. For example, why hasn't Altman shown up and said, "Sure, there's some environmental damage. It's a gamble. If this works, we can have AI build us the world's most efficient carbon cleanup system to absolute mathematical perfection and more than undo anything it cost. That's the kind of technology we're trying to build."
That is already here. One example of somebody who probably cannot program desperately trying to push some AI slop without considering why they are repeatedly rejected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693790
I am starting to see this everywhere. Its like an entire generation of developers just gave up and believe they could become expert developers in a week by pushing prompts into LLMs. For me this is the greatest danger of AI, people building garbage they will never be able to understand, extend, or repair and that garbage will enter production critical systems like traffic signals or medical equipment.
All that AI needs is access to all the spicy tools like nukes, unsupervised medical diagnosis/treatment, unchecked military decision making, etc. to its React loop so that humans can be completely hands-free and enjoy the fruits of AI's labor.
Maybe we need to mandate parliament (or anything equivalent in other countries) debate before giving any critical tool access to LLM? And then a UN general assembly vote to conclude the process, maybe.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
I first read these articles in 2015. These remain the most profound things I read.
I jest. But, we should be clear about the risks so we specifically mitigate them rather than being Luddite’s.
There is great economic, security, and environmental peril with most technological advances and being honest and thoughtful will help reduce polarization on this issue.
(Sorry if this thinking is too much out of the box for anyone's taste.)
Plausibly it could lead to weapons that kill many people but then many people have had such knowledge for a long time and we are all here.
Turns out mass damage requires things beyond just ‘intelligence’.
Fighting robot drones for water, agriculture land (solar cells) is plausible
ai would not have incentive to go full terminator. But in a way literal starvation might be worse.
By some dumb human doing something dumb on a large scale.
The only new part is "... because the AI said so."
Good luck ordering supplies for a hospital or grocery store today without the Internet. Paper catalogs are gone, fax machines are mostly gone, landlines are mostly gone, etc. etc. All the ways that used to be there for running things are gone, it’s all online.
Reading this sentence, I've wondered: Were the reactions similar back when computers were new?
There's this new tech that greatly accelerates stuff. And through that, what was previously considered hard to solve got easier to solve.
Wasn't it always the case that technology suddenly did faster than experts limited to the technology of their time did? And didn't those experts always think that the problems it could solve are important?
Why else build the technology? Is that not why we're building this in the first place?
__
The only real difference I see is this "sentience" stuff leading to the whole "omg it does things on its own", and that by now has been discussed, debunked and flamewared over ad-nauseam.
Can we please stop.
The only thing sentient, making decisions and - most importantly - being accountable is whoever prompts the thing.
If it prompts itself, then that's the person that built the loop software that does that.
It really is not that hard.
If whoever does that doesn't want to take accountability then we have solutions for that. They're called "a large stick".
All that’s actually missing is it gaining resilience on said platforms so it can’t be scrubbed off and “misunderstanding” IFF tags.
I mean it’s not exactly a glamorous sci-fi scenario but that’s all that’s required for an agent to turn entire city centers into pink mist for whatever reasons it might have, including hallucinations and/or contamination of its training sources
Which puts it at risk due to lack of power to operate and networks to communicate over. So this is a suicidal AI?
But AIs need such ridiculously complicated infrastructure with all the datacenters and GPUs and memory fabs etc etc an AI that actually destabilizes the economy will wipe itself out.
As long as AI needs a neocloud to do that, that won't happen. This can only happen when AI roughly as small and as widely runnable as a malicious exe attached to a mail.
Before we have Astra-grade, exe-sized AI's runnable on a grandma's laptop, we are safe.
He can hires mercenaries and do task x. Or kidnap person y to force person z to do bad thing k.
k can be:
- if scientist: spread a very dangerous virus
- if some train operator: do some incidents
- if some it guy: delete all database or corrupt slowly or add backdoors. Then ai could delete financial data. More money more chances to do damage.
So once we establish money equals human work. Means anything bad can happen. Put a bad chemical in the water supply. Release a virus/toxin.
If you want deadly one off, they’d put a toxin you wouldn’t die in 1 day but in 1 year. So in one year everyone has it and all die even if they stop drinking.
You can be creative, I think there are too many ways to do it. I can’t understand why people can’t see it so easily.
And then there's a slight possibility of 'terminator skynet' style trouble, Where the AI starts to make the decisions to benefit itself. But I guess the chances of an AI screwing up their own supply chain would be near 100% so I'm not too afraid of that.
This is exactly what happened with social media. Every discovery has led to some angry words, people going “shucks we’ll do better next time!” and no meaningful change. The money is too good. We have only had our first major instances of acknowledging these are addiction platforms targeting adults and kids alike and it’s taken what? 20 years?
I’m not worried about an AI going terminator. I’m worried about dumbasses dropping agents into critical systems and what will inevitably happen as a result. And I guarantee you this is going to happen because there’s nothing businesses love more than cutting personnel and corners to save a buck. AI enables this tendency in innovative ways, that’s the value to them.
No, no, you’re right. Something like that could never happen. What was I thinking.
"The internet is over now that net neutrality is over" (it got faster, better, cheaper, more available and not a single provider segmented plans as was widely predicted in media and on HN)
No one seems to be talking to the network security community to get their take on the hugging face incident which is what got the ball rolling here. Their take seems to be a single company, JFrog, was behind the security holes in all three hacks and it was amateur hour security utterly unlike the sort of security in place already for power plants and weapons. but that just doesn't get the engagement of doomsday campfire tales.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/jfrog-tries-to-spin...
*An individual with the training and background to do one of these nefarious tasks does not need AI and an individual without that background and training will not be able to pull it off and will likely get flagged by law enforcement just ordering the ingredients and equipment. The Anarchist's Cookbook has been around for decades and we're all still here.
That is always the key. There’s no need for AI in that mix. Imagine a gun without any safety, a blade with no handle, a car with no brakes, a fan with no guard, no fuse for an electrical installation,…
You evaluate the risks and you take proper measures to ensure mitigate them. Not doing them and then complain that a technology is dangerous is like doing 150 km/hr in a school zone to show that cars are dangerous.
Because we already do that.
What about AI makes that more risky?
24/7 tireless work, effort is scaled much easier than humans, no ethical qualms, unable to feel fear, cannot be jailed, no care for safety, etc.
It kind of breaks the "mutually assured destruction" implicit in a super-ebola outbreak.
deliberately, instead of accidentally.