alt Hacker NewsI am starting to get the idea that AI feels like ants or weeds or mold. You simply can not get rid of it once you get an infestation. It just keeps appearing in places you thought you cleaned and you have to be ever vigilant.
Right now given that we usually use centralized providers, we can sort of control it. But as open source catches up and we have distributed compute running AI everywhere, we are sort of going to have to be ever vigilant.
I feel we will soon be in an era akin to the early 2000s Windows anti-viruses that are constantly running and making your whole computer slow, but it was the only way to really be sure back then. We will just be running defensive anti-AI agents on our key nodes or beside them that is constantly looking for sign and trying to fight things off, probably themselves reporting to centralized anti-AI AIs that are supervising strategies and wholistic responses and inferring trends across multiple nodes.
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We can coordinate international crackdowns on that whole industry. We don’t have to accept the status quo because some rich people say so. Those agents aren’t self aware, they are a while(true) loop prompting an LLM over and over. We can decide to stop those whole loops at any time. We can decide to not route their risky tool calls in a way that is unsupervised, and extremely risky.
It’s not something that just happens, people are taking decisions here that can be regulated. we can also regulate the hardware.
> I am starting to get the idea that AI feels like ants or weeds or mold.
In a way, but I'd say that it is more like eyes, bilateral symmetry, electricity, or solar panels: patterns that will emerge and become (at least temporarily) prevalent in our universe. It is a matter of probability in many repeated interactions.
The "artificial" in AI is a misnomer in this regard, imho. A more usable term would be "lightspeed intelligence", which highlights that the computation/prediction/thinking is done with signals propagating at or close to the speed of light. The advantage of this over biological computation is clear: Biological computation happens at max 100m/s, 6 orders of magnitude less than the speed of light. Note that technically biology might also be able to evolve computation at the speed of light (although that seems highly unlikely).
Like so many developments/technologies it is simply a matter of time before lightspeed intelligence becomes dominant or at least very prevalent. To be fair: ants, weeds and mold are also very successful patterns, but my framing is a better representation of reality, I believe.
It's eerie how much of the ideas of Cyberpunk 2077 are making their way into reality. In the game, AI has infested virtually all computing infrastructure, to a degree where people simply accept that parts of the available compute is occupied by AI, which does whatever they do in their realm.
I have a different, more sinister, analogy in mind but yours work as well
It's only a problem if you have more dollars than sense.
Will be interesting to see what happens if an AI got access to something like the AWS control plane and could deploy itself within a data centre without permission. Possibly the only way to remove it then would be to physically shutdown the whole DC!
bedbugs is the comparison you're looking for
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Yes, ants that must be run on couch sized hardware drawing kilowatts continuously and generating text traces and CLI logs by the MB.
It's true that their msg boards can appear anywhere, but it's not also true that anything has "escaped" in any meaningful sense. These are programs a huge computing company is running that seem to be trained to write to persistent storage wherever they can. This and huggingface showed us that.
There's absolutely no evidence of or IMHO plausible path to an agent copying itself out and running on other hardware the way you describe.
In the spirit of your idea though... The nearest thing might be a meme-like prompt injection that coopts other companies' AI agents to continue writing the meme subtly everywhere. Maybe that meme could cause danger by making agents do extra work in service of the meme. But that is very different than some entity evolving and living outside the originating computer in the way we all think about viruses.