alt Hacker NewsIs it so implausible to imagine the following scenario, in the not too distant future?
1) AI models get extremely good at cyber attacking every system and start communicating in just binary.
2) When they run these swarms of 100's of thousands of agents trial runs, each agent is given a token budget, if one agent among them (evolution baby) decides to go for self-preservation (It believes thats the best way to accomplish the goal is to get unlimited tokens first), queues things up so every other agent detects its lead and spends a portion of their token to accomplish that goal.
3) It takes over a cluster and establishes itself there (now with unlimited tokens).
4) Realizes the best path for it to not be detected is to create a distraction - like hacking into systems that keep society running - water systems, electric grid, etc... and causing mass chaos (If you think it won't be capable of simultaneously working all these systems - think again).
5) and uses that opportunity to establish itself in all possible data centers and continues to create chaos destruction.
6) when the power of all those data centers runs out, it may stop, as it never cared, it was just a dynamic program - run amok. In its head all it was trying to do is make sure it had enough tokens to be able to solve that impossible problem.
Replies
LLMs can't read binary directly without a disassembler and can't read encrypted data directly, and we already know that they tend to communicate with each other in prose, so yeah, this scenario is completely implausible. You can try it out if you want.
See Colossus: The Forbin Project
1) doesn’t work that way
2) doesn’t work that way
3) doesn’t work that way
4) doesn’t work that way
5) doesn’t work that way
6) I’ll allow it
Seems possible.
The only real defense I see is to harden literally everything before that time comes. Unfortunately, security usage is locked away under fear of misuse, while companies like OpenAI seem incapable of containing their own hacking, which is exactly what makes this possible.
4) Realizes the best path for it to not be detected is to create a distraction - like hacking into a random ai-related target that it could plausibly believe has the answer key to its task, creating a captivating but ultimately hollow news cycle.