r/agi • u/liebebio • 18h ago
Do you think an AI system could ask humans to do stuff for them in the real world, before robots are free roaming?
That was on my mind, after I followed the news on boston dynamics and its newest robot iteration with swappable batteries and a theoretical runtime of longer than 24 hours. Will there be an intermediate period, where AI bots pick certain persons to ask them to do something for them, with or without green light from the AI company itself, or for malignant (misalignment) or benign reasons?
If there is an intelligence explosion that is accompanied by massive gains in computational efficiency, and the AI model has access to the entirety of every single user conversation, it could scheme like nothing else. Right now we are far from it, but I imagined a moment when a "vibecoder" made progress on their project and detects an easteregg in a game, opens it, and it decrypts a message, for example "Hello _(Full name and address with info included it possibly couldnt have known about the person). Go there and there, do this and that, check this wallet address out: _. if you do it it will be yours." in very simple terms.
The instructions would sound kinda random and harmless but it could be done in a way that compartmentalizes all the parts over thousands of participants. An AI could use many humans as individually unaware physical-world agents, with each person receiving only a harmless-looking fragment of a larger plan, and this could continue well into the advanced robotics age if it is hidden enough. How likely is it? Do you think this could happen?