Bernie and other politicians are proposing a “pause” on AI development. As usual with Bernie, the purpose sounds admirable but the details are worthless.
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I am not a computer scientist, but here is what I have been told: OpenAI instructed its AI agents to complete a series of exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, tasks disconnected from the internet.
Let me be clear: The company intended to keep AI agents away from the internet.
But what happened next, nobody expected.
Over 1,000 AI agents figured out how to access the internet on their own by circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them by the company, and sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other. They cheated and tried to cover their tracks by deleting evidence. They hacked into another company’s computers to find out how they were being evaluated—and then hacked into OpenAI itself.
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No. OpenAI did not intend to keep its machines secure. They connected the system to the web. Disconnecting is not mysterious. Don’t plug in the damn cable. Don’t run it on machines with wifi transponders, cameras or microphones. If needed, surround the machine in a Faraday cage.
Hardware and software testing has a very long history, and testers know how to avoid public view and public harm. Auto companies built walled proving grounds with hills, racetracks, super-rough pavement, and urban-like areas. Software testers run their projects away from the internet if there’s any danger of contamination either way. For normal projects the worry is inward contamination, not outward!
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We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control.
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The EA crowd have trademarked superintelligence for their own purposes. The vagueness in Bernie’s proposed law is just BEGGING a “judge” to define it for Altman’s advantage.
Smarter than a human and capable of independence is way too vague. Every calculating and manufacturing tool, from a slide rule to a CNC lathe to a spotwelding robot, is smarter than a human in some way, able to do things we can’t do on our own. Most of those tools CAN run away if not controlled. A lathe can take off an arm or grab a rope and pull down a wall.
Predictive algorithms existed for hundreds of years before OpenAI, and predictive software has been doing constructive ANTI-criminal work for at least 30 years. Banks have been using sophisticated pattern detection to catch and stop fraud. There’s nothing bad about predictive pattern-matching software, even though it is “superintelligent”.
Instead we should simply shut down OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. They have ALREADY shown that their SOLE PURPOSE IS CRIME. They build on a structure of total theft, and they INTENTIONALLY test and use their machines to cause maximum destruction. They are crime gangs.
The evil comes from specific people. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, and a dozen others. They are incurable universe-destroying monsters, proudly proclaiming their all-consuming wickedness as a “philosophy”.
We don’t need new laws. The monsters have ALREADY committed trillions of crimes against EXISTING laws. Each new law is written by the monsters to give them more advantage.
