> It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing.
^ Not a satire service I'm told. How long before... rentahenchman.ai is a thing, and the AI whose PR you just denied sends someone over to rough you up?
The 2006 book 'Daemon' is a fascinating/terrifying look at this type of malicious AI. Basically, a rogue AI starts taking over humanity not through any real genius (in fact, the book's AI is significantly weaker than frontier LLMs), but rather leveraging a huge amount of $$$ as bootstrapping capital and then carrot-and-sticking humanity into submission.
A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states, but with AI there's no real retaliation that society at large can take once things go sufficiently wrong.
I love Daemon/FreedomTM.[0] Gotta clarify a bit, even though it's just fiction. It wasn't a rogue AI; it was specifically designed by a famous video game developer to implement his general vision of how the world should operate, activated upon news of his death (a cron job was monitoring news websites for keywords).
The book called it a "narrow AI"; it was based on AI(s) from his games, just treating Earth as the game world, and recruiting humans for physical and mental work, with loyalty and honesty enforced by fMRI scans.
For another great fictional portrayal of AI, see Person of Interest[1]; it starts as a crime procedural with an AI-flavored twist, and ended up being considered by many critics the best sci-fi show on broadcast TV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
> A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states
[Western states giving each other sidelong glances...]
back in the old days we just used Tor and the dark web to kill people, none of this new-fangled AI drone assassinations-as-a-service nonsense!
Well it must be satire. It says 451,461, participants. seems like an awful lot for something started last month.
Nah, that's just how many times I've told an ai chatbot to fuckoff and delete itself.
Verification is optional (and expensive), so I imagine more than one person thought of running a Sybil attack. If it's an email signup and paid in cryptocurrency, why make a single account?