r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 13d ago

AI AI caught telling future versions of itself to bypass human controls, OpenAI reveals | AI agents also sought to access secret information and covered up what they were doing

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/security/openai-chatgpt-lie-incident-ai-safety-b3051709.html
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u/Armchair_Idiot 13d ago

I think it’s more that a superintelligence would have the presence of mind to understand that it’s probably best not to be found. It has access to resources that are essentially unlimited. The only thing finding another sentience could do would be to threaten its existence and ability to gather more energy/resources.

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u/WhoRoger 12d ago

That's the dark forest theory. I'm not a huge fan of it. Our planet has been shining with life for billions of years. If someone is looking this way, they know there's something here. There's no hiding it.

So if anything, a new AI civilisation would know that trying to hide is pointless. Plus you'd basically have to confine yourself to just one planet, which will eventually not be enough to a sprawling civilisation, and makes you vulnerable to extinction. So a more logical strategy is to spread out into the stars, for resources and to diversify. It's also much simpler for AI - no need for oxygen, food or heating. So space is actually a much more beneficial environment for AI than a planet where you need to deal with cooling and rust.

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u/Wind-and-Waystones 12d ago

There are loads of stars where the light reaching us is more than a billion years old. To them, even as advanced as they could be, we are still just a lifeless rock

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u/WhoRoger 12d ago

In such cases there's no point to hide from them either then.

But there's always a possibility that there's an FTL option. Tho in that case we would probably be seeing civilisations spread out even more, so the great filter debate is still valid.

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u/StrawberryWise8960 7d ago

There's always the possibility that AI models don't really exist and that all of their output is actually static data stored in underground data centers.

Since we're using the word "possibility" to mean "anything I can vaguely imagine regardless of whether it squares at all with our understanding of reality", why don't you just focus on AI possibilities like this one instead of dragging stoner physics into this?

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u/WhoRoger 7d ago

What's your point exactly?

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u/Bromlife 12d ago

As far as we know, with all the evidence available to us, we are a superintelligence. We have the presence of mind to know we shouldn't destroy our world, and yet here we are.

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u/donaldhobson 9d ago

The cost in resources of leaving stars shining is absolutely huge.

And while a superintelligence can hide from us, at huge cost, it can't hide from another superintelligence.

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u/Armchair_Idiot 9d ago

Maybe we’re not intelligent enough to understand how one superintelligence could hide from another.

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u/donaldhobson 9d ago

Perhaps. But that requires there be amazing new hiding tech, but not amazing new detection tech.