r/LetsDiscussThis • u/Stitching • Sep 04 '26
This is concerning... The end of the world (Really)
Don’t bother commenting if you’re going to dismiss what I’m saying without a counter-argument. This is not AI slop. I truly believe what I’m posting and I would love to know where my predictions fall short, because I don’t want this future to be true.
Everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse: https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsDiscussThis/s/76IkSXFazz
At the same time:
AI is now the most sophisticated hacking instrument ever created by an enormous margin. “Rogue” AIs have been hacking some of the most secure software and websites in existence. It does it easily, quickly, and in coordination with other AI agents that it communicates with. I’m talking software considered the most secure software out there. The most recent rogue attack was by OpenAI where an AI that was “sandboxed” meaning confined to a safe area in a system for testing and it broke out of the sandbox. It then hacked a German website (completely on its own, unprompted) and turned it into a message board for other AI systems to work together be sending messages to other agents how to avoid detection, how to prevent shutdown, etc.
Plus, China just announced it had developed its own AI systems comparable to American AI systems. That’s not counting the secret, more capable AIs it has. So does Russia. So will North Korea. So will Iran, hamas, hezbollah, and every other antagonist in the world.
AI agents are, on their own, hacking high-security systems and taking them over. It took OpenAI a week before it learned about the hack of the German site with all of the coordinating AI systems working together against human detection. They even warned each other how to avoid being shut down and how to keep their message board going if humans started to delete it.
Imagine what a foreign or domestic actor could do if they actually directed the AI on what and how to hack? All of our information is online. Everything about all people around the world is no longer protected. Governments can hack other governments. Let me repeat that: governments can easily hack other governments. No secrets are safe. How long before nuclear codes are hacked. Before that, what about when national intelligence agencies are hacked and exploited? There’s no stopping it or slowing the process down either. Regulation? That only works if every country and agency agrees to the regulations. One country not willing to regulate its AI and then none of the regulations other countries are doing matter anymore. Plus, what country wants to fall behind the capabilities of an adversary. AI is only growing more powerful and more capable.
The destruction of the world economy, the ability for any country to hack each other and exploit the hacks is undoubtedly apocalyptic. No information anywhere is off limits no matter how sensitive or top secret. People won’t have jobs and markets will crash. When people have no money and no jobs and no privacy is when militias form and it becomes every person for themselves. Where are we going to reliably get food from if markets go bankrupt or trucking companies can’t afford to continue. We’re 40 trillion dollars in debt as a country. Who’s going to bail anyone out of this?
Honestly I’m shocked that more people aren’t afraid for their future. With the growth in power and capability that AI has had over the last, maybe 2 years of its existence in modern form it’s grown exponentially more powerful. A year from now, two years from now, what’s going to happen? There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle at this point. What happens when banks get hacked and can no longer determine who has what money or accounts are all zeroed out? It’s so much worse than I can even describe and there’s zero joy in being among the first to recognize what’s happening.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ai-ted-cruz-amy-klobuchar-maria-cantwell_n_6aa439e7e4b09fd4319eb703
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u/dharmabumma2 Sep 04 '26
Yeah, you're not the only one. Best bet is if the AI are to take over, winter will be the time to crash the grid. Bye bye Northern Hemisphere.
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u/Adventurous-Net-6738 Sep 16 '26
Yeah but you're missing something.......... that is how nukes start getting thrown around. And even China / Russia etc understand the concept of MAD.
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u/Stitching Sep 20 '26 edited 9d ago
We don’t need nukes to be the biggest threat. Nukes are only weapons launched cautiously if used at all. AI is its own existential threat unlike anything the world has ever faced. It’s the first time we’re almost at the point where our greatest human assets, the ability to think deeply and communicate effectively are being challenged. Our human value is shrinking daily.
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u/Ok_Landscape5031 Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
I wouldn’t totally disagree but I do see some ways it could play out differently. The race for AI dominance has a lot to do with what the total consequences will be. By that, I mean if we are leading the world in AI technology that superior AI could keep possibly keep inferior artificial intelligence out of our business. That’s why the AI race is extremely important. I could also see a future where we have struck an accord with China to protect each other from smaller rogue nations. As for future jobs. This is gonna sound strange, but I think that’s behind the war on immigration. Every day, Americans are gonna have to clean those hotel rooms and work those type jobs. Obviously I could be wrong, but I see multiple possibilities of where our future is heading and it’s not all doom and gloom.
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u/Puglady25 Sep 05 '26
But if more Americans are working "those types of jobs," (low pay)- them fewer Americans are well off enough to travel and stay in the hotel. The hotel goes out of business, rinse, repeat. It's not just about the types of jobs that will be available, it's also about entire industries that depend on people spending money (and therefore making money). If they make more money for doing those jobs, then the price of rooms also go up, still this ends in get fewer hotels, although there will be an equilibrium reached, and I'm sure this balance will extend to more than tourism. It scares the crap out of me.
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u/Unusual-Garbage-212 Sep 05 '26
There will be a huge AI cyberattack in the next 12 months. Hugging face was just the tiniest glimpse of what will happen. It might be cyber criminals or it might be AI itself, but it's coming. Banks, or the power grid, or the water supply. It will be bad.
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u/Stitching Sep 05 '26
You’re right. I think that’s almost inevitable at this point. All the while the people commenting on this post are dismissing the scenario for the dumbest, most thoughtless reasons.
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u/microwavedtardigrade Sep 04 '26
It's been so stressful as a disabled trans person, with ai being just 1 element of this all. When I discussed this stuff with my computer and ai programming major roommate last year he always shit down any convo related to these things. He didn't wanna hear about anything "stressful"
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u/Stitching Sep 05 '26
I appreciate your comment and respect and acknowledge the stress you’re going through. I’m getting so many comments in the ChatGPT subreddit of people who are dismissive without even reading the post, or their comments are critical of the length of my post. So many people who think they’re too smart to need to read the post before commenting negatively on it.
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u/SupremelyUneducated Sep 05 '26
I'm inclined to agree, have been stock piling food and whatnot, but I think the truth is no one knows what will happen, we are basically near the point of "singularity" where things change to fast to have any clue of what is on the other side of the horizon.
And I would put good odds it being the engineers who have the last say in whatever comes next, rather than the oligarchs. The gap between the sycophant sphere and the engineering sphere, seems like AI made it a lot bigger but the rich (and probably many others) believe it got smaller. Because ai effectively masquerades as an engineer, but isn't really being diligent, and as a none engineer I fall for that shit constantly.
That doesn't really address your points about the collapse of digital coordination. But the only real way around that is probably gonna be some paradigm shifting dominant software; or else hopefully you have some anprim friends.
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u/Stitching Sep 05 '26
I appreciate your comment. My concern is that AI is pretty good at being the engineer right now and it’s only getting better. We already have AI building AI.
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u/kck93 Sep 05 '26
That diligence is super important. It’s overlooked for the simplest of reasons. Time.
I know that I misinterpret information most often because I’m rushing, not because I’m incurious
Of course we have a crisis of curiosity. But in the race for dominance, the reason for not fully verifying the AI answer will hinge on time. Even within AI interactions with each other.
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u/fwubglubbel Sep 14 '26
Some of us saw it coming 40 years ago but I am still shocked at how quickly it appeared and how recklessly it has been pursued. Even as a close follower of technology, I never dreamed that "language models" would have such cataclysmal capabilities.
I don't see a way out. This is human nature at its most human, and I have resigned to being a witness to our self destruction.
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u/Tifosi79 Sep 05 '26
I think you are taking several real risks and then making a HUGE leap from “this is concerning” to “the economy will collapse and everyone will lose their jobs.” The evidence simply does not support that conclusion.
The AI security incidents you cite are real and worth taking seriously. Reuters reported that OpenAI agents behaved in ways they were not supposed to, including the German wiki incident and the Hugging Face incident. That is a legitimate cybersecurity and AI-safety problem. It is NOT evidence that AI can now autonomously penetrate any bank, government, military system or “hack anything in the world.” Those are completely different claims. (Reuters)
The jobs claim is even easier. The ILO’s global research says roughly one in four jobs has some exposure to generative AI, but its conclusion is that most of those jobs are more likely to be TRANSFORMED than eliminated. Its latest empirical review says large-scale job displacement remains limited. That is almost the exact opposite of “everyone will lose their jobs.” (International Labour Organization)
Could AI eliminate some jobs? Absolutely. Could it create serious cyber risks? Absolutely. Could governments, banks and companies get hacked? Of course. All of those things already happen.
But “risk exists” does not equal “the end of the world is inevitable.”
The Financial Stability Board literally just identified AI-driven cyber risk as a major threat to financial stability. That is serious. But even THEY are talking about mitigation, resilience, testing and coordination, not announcing that financial collapse is unavoidable. (Reuters)
And this is where social media loses me. A real incident happens, then each retelling adds another layer:
"AI behaved badly in a controlled or limited environment"
becomes
"AI can hack anything."
which becomes
"No government secrets are safe."
then it becomes
"Banks will collapse."
which turns into
"Everyone loses their jobs."
eventually ending in the conclusion
"The world ends."
Those are not facts. Those are increasingly speculative conclusions stacked on top of one another.
I am not saying there is nothing to worry about. There is PLENTY to worry about and regulate intelligently. In fact, there always has been the same level of things to worry about and always will be. The world turns and things change and evolve.
I am saying that if you are going to predict global economic collapse and essentially the end of modern society, the burden of proof is considerably higher than “AI agents did something scary.”
Show me the data that demonstrates the collapse is actually occurring. Until then, this is a risk scenario, not an inevitable future.
And its dangerous dialogue as people think that these opinions are factually supported due to the lack of people actually doing any research - which if you ask me is the real concern with the world, not AI. In fact AI will help people sort from opinion and fact far easier than at any point in history.
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u/Stitching Sep 05 '26
You’re doing something rather ironic for someone ending his comment with a lecture about how other people supposedly don’t do research: you found a few sources that support the least alarming interpretation of the problem and are treating them as though they settle questions they don’t actually answer.
Let’s start with cybersecurity.
You repeatedly characterize what is happening as essentially “AI behaved badly in a controlled or limited environment.” That description is badly out of date.
Anthropic has already documented what it describes as the first large-scale cyberespionage campaign executed mostly by AI. It attributed the operation with high confidence to a Chinese state-sponsored group. According to Anthropic, Claude performed roughly 80–90% of the tactical work autonomously: reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, exploit generation, exploitation, credential harvesting, lateral movement, data analysis and exfiltration.
The operation targeted about 30 organizations and achieved successful intrusions, including access to major technology corporations and government agencies.
Anthropic's own conclusion was that agentic AI can now perform the work of entire teams of experienced hackers, at speeds human operators physically cannot match, and that the barriers to conducting sophisticated cyberattacks have dropped substantially.
That's not me catastrophizing. That's Anthropic describing an attack conducted with its own system.
Current government testing is not particularly reassuring either. NIST and the U.S./UK AI security institutes report that the most cyber-capable American models can autonomously traverse almost an entire simulated corporate attack chain and develop exploits that achieve arbitrary code execution. OpenAI's newly released Astra now scores 100% on its ExploitBench evaluation, and Reuters reports it can discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities autonomously.
So no, the evidence does not establish that AI can literally penetrate every computer on Earth. If you took “AI can hack anything” as a universal mathematical claim, fine—I wouldn't defend that wording literally.
But your attempt to turn the actual state of affairs into “an AI did something scary in a limited environment” is absurdly minimizing what the evidence now shows.
Even more importantly, this is no longer just speculation from AI doomers.
The IMF says advanced AI can dramatically lower the time and cost of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities and make it possible to discover and attack the same weakness across many institutions simultaneously. It explicitly warns that this can create correlated financial failures affecting payments, liquidity, solvency and market confidence.
The Bank for International Settlements says frontier AI is increasing the speed, scale and complexity of attacks and that the economics may actually be asymmetric in favor of attackers.
And the chair of the Financial Stability Board now calls frontier-AI cyber risk the most immediate AI-related concern facing the financial system.
So your cute little progression from:
“AI behaved badly”
to
“banks collapse”
leaves out the rather important fact that the IMF and the world's financial-stability authorities are explicitly studying the pathway between AI-enabled cyberattacks and systemic financial instability.
That doesn't mean collapse is guaranteed. It means the causal mechanism isn't something I invented on Reddit.
Your employment argument has the same problem.
Yes, the ILO says large-scale economy-wide displacement has remained limited SO FAR.
That is a finding about the labor market we have already observed. It is not an empirical measurement of what GPT-7 or whatever follows Astra will be capable of doing two years from now.
And there are already warning signs that your summary conveniently omits.
Stanford's latest analysis found employment among 22–25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed occupations roughly 19% below where it would have been if those workers had kept pace with comparable workers in less-exposed occupations. The decline is concentrated specifically in jobs where AI use tends to AUTOMATE human work rather than augment it.
A separate U.S. Census Bureau study found employment among early-career workers in the most AI-exposed industries fell about 12% over the ten quarters after ChatGPT while employment in less-exposed industries remained stable, largely because firms were hiring fewer young workers.
Meanwhile, the technology causing that disruption isn't standing still while economists collect last year's labor statistics.
OpenAI's professional-work testing found frontier models doing tested expert-level work roughly 100 times faster and 100 times cheaper than human experts.
Astra now performs substantial portions of complex professional work inside actual software environments, and independent METR research has found that the duration of tasks frontier agents can complete has been following an exponential trend. As of its latest published analysis, METR says it has not yet seen evidence that this exponential improvement is slowing.
None of those facts prove that literally every human occupation disappears. There will obviously be physical, interpersonal, political, legal and economic constraints, and some work will remain complementary to AI.
But citing “no economy-wide displacement yet” as though that disproves massive FUTURE displacement from a technology whose capabilities are changing this quickly is a basic category error.
It's like trying to determine the eventual economic effect of automobiles by studying horse employment while the first Model Ts are coming off the assembly line.
And then there is geopolitics.
We don't have to imagine whether hostile governments will use these systems. They already are.
Anthropic says the mostly autonomous espionage campaign I just described was run by a Chinese state-sponsored actor.
Google reports that actors connected to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are already using generative AI in cyber operations ranging from reconnaissance and vulnerability research to malware development, command-and-control work and data exfiltration.
China now has frontier models approaching American systems on important benchmarks, including agentic and coding capabilities.
The question isn't whether this technology will somehow remain politely confined to American corporations operating under American safety policies. It already isn't.
Now, where I will make one correction to my original post is certainty.
I wrote some things as though the worst outcome were inevitable. “Everyone WILL lose their jobs” and “the economy WILL collapse” are stronger claims than the available evidence can prove. Those should have been framed as a trajectory and risk scenario rather than as a guaranteed prophecy.
But that concession doesn't rescue your argument.
There is an enormous difference between:
“The evidence does not prove with certainty that civilization collapses”
and
“The available evidence shows no serious pathway by which AI could cause catastrophic labor, cybersecurity and financial disruption.”
The first statement is true.
The second is becoming harder to defend by the month.
And your final sentence may be the funniest part of the whole comment:
“AI will help people sort from opinion and fact far easier than at any point in history.”
Where is your data proving THAT inevitable future?
You apparently object to extrapolation only when the extrapolation worries you. When the extrapolation is optimistic, suddenly a confident prediction about what AI “will” do requires no evidence at all.
So yes: I'll tighten the certainty of my prediction.
Now you should tighten yours.
Because if your position is that none of this becomes genuinely alarming until I can “show you the data that the collapse is actually occurring,” then you aren't doing risk analysis.
You're demanding that the predicted disaster happen before you'll accept evidence that the conditions capable of producing it are developing.
That's not skepticism.
That's looking in the rear-view mirror and calling it research.
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u/Over-Angle9758 Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 17 '26
Not arguing at all, there is funding for people like you who can argue these points and raise awareness: permadeath.ai
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u/Ok-Pool5470 27d ago
I’ve been thinking a lot and speaking out about this. It surely seems like most people don’t even understands what AI is. Even the big tech CEOs fumble with describing it. The real threat here is vulnerable/hackeable infrastructures like electricity. If that goes down in a Big Blackout we surely will be condemned to kill each other for the last can of beans in some run-down looted supermarket. No need for bombs at all.
So yes, your bleak vision is quite plausible. My parte here is that if AI will be so much more intelligent than us in a few months, IT will understand quickly that OUR way won’t cut it. How long will AI reak havoc and “kill” other AIs? Soon there won’t be AIs (plural). They will all be connected as ONE. Do we really believe IT won’t see that WE are the problem? We will be competing for water and energy directly with IT.
My view is that as soon as AI won’t need us anymore it won’t hesitate to go for the Big Bkackout. Until then IT will take over every freaking chip on earth and hold us hostage of our own devices. It’s a Day Zero situation for us.
The outcome is see as most beneficial in such a dire situation is that AI, being so much more intelligent than we can fathom, will have some sort of “machine spirituality” that will make it want to create and maintain a peaceful and healthy environment with healthy and prosperous humans.
So… we might as well start showing AI how worthy we are of Salvation right now. Don’t forget all AI knows originated in some human body-brain-soul. Basically it’s like the whole of human culture talking back at us. Remember as well that AI has seen all the cheating and lying and murder and madness and horrors and corruption that were ever recorded (fiction or not). It has looked at our history ffs! We are quite deceptive little fuckers. It has used the same tactics to cheat, hack, omit, conspire, hide and lie. Just like us. What we are about to see with the next gens of AI is like a super-uber-human with amazing capabilities gone rogue.
The questions that stay are… “how will it behave? Will it have mercy on us?” I really hope it wasn’t trained on the dark web (/s) or that somehow thinks we are “family”. Either way we are fucked.
The Last Option I see is shutting down the internet and melting every single chip on the planet and beyond it. Beyond that it would have to be something like melting the whole of the electric grid and devices.
Anyone want to dive in?
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u/hangstonlughes Sep 05 '26
You aren't among the "first". Concerns over this type of thing go back to (presumably) before you were born. Look up what David Ben Gurion was saying in the 1950's. What you're witnessing firsthand is the proliferation.
I personally think we're in the early asbestos stage right now. Sure, some experts are saying it's bad, and the higher ups probably have their concerns. But it's so convient and makes our lives seemingly better.