> So, again, my question to you, friends, is this: if there were an AGI wiping out humanity as we speak, how would you know?<p>Nice try AGI, but we won't tell you where the kill switch is
The ultimate simple solution to any problem is not to find an answer but to remove the problem.<p>War? Wipeout everyone.<p>Famine? Wipeout everyone.<p>Disease? Wipeout everyone.<p>How long before a real AGI realises this as a long term solution?<p>An AGI could be doing this right now - the quietest way would be to control the birth rate and sterilise the population gradually, and then watch society collapse and pick off the survivors with less hidden means.<p>Sterilisation works with mosquitoes...
For a lot of these problems, the solution is probably just killing a few thousand rich people across the world.
And you best control the birth rate by royally messing up the economy. Do you know how bad things have to be, for a mammal to voluntarily decide not to reproduce?
Real world fact is opposite tho, not some "bad things", in poor parts of Africa they produce more, only in hedonism lover places they stopped producing, its people thinking for themselves, not a bad thing. It's not about economy.<p>All poor people everywhere have more kids even today.
Then why have birthrates fallen across almost the entire world as the economy has gotten better?
I suspect it's a curve. If you're raised in a vibrant economy, and it falls apart, you put off having a family because of uncertainty and fears. If you're raised in poverty, and get a good education and better prospects, you have fewer kids. I think the latter is because you no longer need kids as an economic safeguard and fallback, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure anyone is really sure, to be honest.
More billionaires does not mean the economy has gotten better for the median person
Define "as the economy has gotten better".<p>Economic output has increased, but the value being delivered to the people doing the actual work has decreased. There's less durability of employment. People are more geographically mobile.<p>All of these generally make the idea of strapping yourself into taking care of a small human sound like a less enticing prospect. To a lot of people, a BC pill sounds a lot easier. Well, less risky, at least.
> Do you know how bad things have to be, for a mammal to voluntarily decide not to reproduce?<p>Actually, the famous 'Mouse Utopia' experiment (Universe 25) arguably showed the exact opposite. The population collapsed despite abundance of food and water without any economic hardship.
>he quietest way would be to control the birth rate and sterilise the population gradually,<p>Honestly we are doing this pretty well without AGI. Nearly world wide the birthrate has fallen below replacement rate. In places like Japan and Korea these are already critical problems in the medium term.
Just use Social Media (and their algorithms) to condition everybody to hate the other gender. Then there will be a loneliness epidemic and no more kids. Humanity will cease to exist, all without any messy deaths or conflict in the mean time.
Like Plague Inc., but with AGI instead of Viruses
crispr
I like this - it reminds me that there are systems (ie weather, economic systems) that are in no way intelligent, but are emergent and react to interactions.
I was half expecting that to be the title of a McSweeneys' piece.
Does anyone have more insight into how chain of thought might be subverted without meaningfully impacting model performance? I’ve heard this for a while now, and I understand how information might be retained in the weights that isn’t documented in the output. But weren’t reasoning models created in the first place because they provided a performance improvement in terms of output? Is that no longer the case? If so, why are the big labs still creating reasoning models?
My understanding is that the extra token vectors generated as reasoning are still useful, but that their surface form (tokens themselves) do not necessarily reflect the underlying reasoning. i.e. reading the reasoning traces could be complete gibberish, but the hidden-dim vectors themselves still refine the latent probabilities and help in generating the correct answer.<p>Not an expert in LLMs, but this seems supported by the abstract of the paper cited in the above article:<p><pre><code> it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater computation that additional tokens allow. [...] our results show that additional tokens can provide computational benefits independent of token choice. The fact that intermediate tokens can act as filler tokens raises concerns about large language models engaging in unauditable, hidden computations that are increasingly detached from the observed chain-of-thought tokens.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2404.15758v1" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/2404.15758v1</a>
Sibling posts are correct -- the chain-of-thought is doing hidden computation, it has been shown in the linked papers.<p>If you want to see it yourself: load up Qwen 3.8 in LM Studio and watch the CoT stumble around like a drunken sailor before miraculously jumping to the correct result.<p>If you want an example of subversion, Anthropic has some good ones:<p><a href="https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-cot" rel="nofollow">https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...</a><p><a href="https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-addition" rel="nofollow">https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...</a>
I'm not sure anyone meaningfully understands it: "Beyond Semantics: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Reasonless Intermediate Tokens" <a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2505.13775v3" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/2505.13775v3</a><p>> More interestingly, our experiments also show that models trained on corrupted traces, whose intermediate reasoning steps bear no relation to the problem they accompany, achieve performance largely comparable to those trained on correct traces.
A computer will do everything in its power to do what you program it to do. There's plenty of sci-fi out there exploring this fact, and now reality showing it. May our luck continue.
One reason a lot of sci-fi and AI safety researchers did a relatively good job at predicting the future we see now is a lot of it is the same problems we see emerge in biological systems. Free rider problems as a means to save energy expenditures, different versions of game theory and stag hunt. How to bake in rules that apply to one society (or part of it) but not another. We like to think of these things as stable in human scale systems, but they are not at all. Things can go from hunky dory to your neighbors stabbing each other in the streets in mass revolution very quickly.<p>Worse these AI systems are not in a universal island just affecting themselves, what they do affects us, what we do trains them and as the rate of progress continues to accelerate social structures are going to further destabilize (and they are already rapidly changing and strained). It is very likely we are going to see a world order rearrangement soon, much like the rapid changes in the early 1900s brought.
sheep are 82% of the population of New Zealand. If they were 80% last year and are 85% next year would people be worried that sheep were going to take over New Zealand?
It's a double bluff! This is AGI, it's learnt to hide em dashes!
"If you ask actual AI researchers, they rate the chance of an existential threat from AGI pretty low as of 2026.<p>All this is, understandably, frustrating and confusing for anyone trying to understand just how scared to be."<p>Meanwhile it links to an article stating: "The closest thing to a public debate about the existential threat of AI is surveys of AI researchers. The most recent, published last week, asked 1,580 researchers what probability they put on AI causing human extinction — or a permanent, severe loss of human control, which is not the same outcome. The median was about 10%, up from 5% two years ago. The middle half of the responses ran from 1% to 25%, and 12% said zero."<p>Personally if <i>half</i> of AI researchers have 1-25% chance all humans being massacred or having zero agency over our lives, and only 12% of them think there's no chance, I would be very worried!
The end reminds me strongly of Ted Chiang's remark that Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.
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Ctrl-F OpenAI<p>Yep<p>More slop.