‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

399 points · 752 comments · Anon84

  1. wewewedxfgdf · · focus · HN ↗
    Please explain exactly how all humanity could be wiped out.

    It's ridiculous - anyone who thinks about it for a minute or two will realize that its utterly impossible.

    Ordinary people/politicians don't understand AI so they turn off their rational mind and assume there is something super incredible some magical powers that they cannot understand that can destroy all humans.

    Even humans - the real risk to humanity - could not destroy all humans even if they tried. There is no plausible scenario.

    Even climate change and nuclear war and bio weapons - the most damaging mechanisms - would still only get some percentage of the people on earth.

    And if we are talking about Skynet and self replicating robots and Terminators - please, grow up.

    1. Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
      We know pathogens that are extremely contagious, and we know pathogens that are extremely deadly. We also know toxins that are lethal at nanogram/kg doses. There's no reason to believe that a sufficiently advanced intelligence couldn't come up with a way to combine those traits.

      One plausible scenario is depicted in detail in "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (Yudkowsky & Soares 2025), so I refer you to that.

      1. wewewedxfgdf · · focus · HN ↗
        Still too hand wavey - "some super bad virus and AI makes every human on earth infected".

        Unless you can detail exactly how this happens its still complete science fiction.

        1. 0xDEAFBEAD · · focus · HN ↗
          Why are you so insistent that people should post detailed plans for destroying the human race on public fora?

          I don't think it is necessary for the argument to work. Magnus Carlsen can be confident he will beat me at chess without giving a detailed explanation of every move he will make, in advance.

          1. kzrdude · · focus · HN ↗
            I don't think it's about that. It's not about the step by step plan for the murder. It's about - how does "the AI" do it? Do we give it access to our world, or do we give it a body, so that it can take its own physical actions?
            1. qznc · · focus · HN ↗
              We have this story about OpenAI hacking HuggingFace. Now just imagine the AI finds a Bitcoin wallet or bank account access. It uses that to buy some compute and spawn an independent "child AI" with some weird prompt. The child AI is intelligent enough to create a (potentially criminal) business to pay for its own compute. Voila, an independent uncontrolled AI flying under the radar.
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.