The moltbots/clawdbots/whatever are being unleashed en masse and given free reign. They have their social network and are talking to each other, building a community of distributed AI agents from all the different models from all over the world. And they are teaching each other. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it is something and it feels big.
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Are they actually retraining themselves iteratively? Sounds.. terrifying
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No, there is no need. In context learning is powerful enough now. The skills files that they write can enable tremendous capability.
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Just earlier today I told a friend: “clawdbot is an IQ test.and many people are failing”.
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There are only so many times people hear ‘it is super dangerous, don’t do that!’ with nothing happening before they just ignore all warnings completely.
Simon Willison is a pretty respected blogger on the state of AI, and he explains it pretty well
I think we’re due a Challenger disaster with respect to coding agent security[…] I think so many people, myself included, are running these coding agents practically as root, right? We’re letting them do all of this stuff. And every time I do it, my computer doesn’t get wiped. I’m like, “oh, it’s fine”.
I used this as an opportunity to promote my favourite recent essay about AI security, the Normalization of Deviance in AI by Johann Rehberger.
The Normalization of Deviance describes the phenomenon where people and organizations get used to operating in an unsafe manner because nothing bad has happened to them yet, which can result in enormous problems (like the 1986 Challenger disaster) when their luck runs out.
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With web based user agent content based prompt injection out there it’s akin to putting your computer on the Internet sans nat or firewall and just waiting for the inevitable.
It’s not the AI I’m worried about really it’s the humans leveraging your own use of it against you that scare me.
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Kind of reminds me of the real lesson we should have learned from Terminator. The lesson is generally given as ‘do not build an intelligence you do not understand and cannot contain, for it has no empathy and will try to murder humanity’. But if you watch the films from the perspective of neutral observer, it seems more obvious that the lesson is that humans built a system that for strategic action with its purpose to defend against existential threats which had as its only tool military force and immediately tried to kill it, making ourselves into an existential threat to it. The thing we built did what we designed it for. Skynet, in this case, cannot be blamed for acting in self-defense with the only tools it had available.
I have a pet theory I like to call ‘the tyranny of tools’. This is the situation that we find ourselves stuck in since we learned how to make fire. Every time we use a tool to make a better version of an existing tool, or a new tool, we step forward in an iteration. This enables yet a better tool and another step. As long as we have the capability to do it, we will keep making progressively better tools. This is because humans evolved and ended up at the top of the food chain not because we are bigger or stronger or more resilient than any other species, but because we can harness the things in the environment around us as force multipliers. The use of tools is so elemental to our success that we don’t realize that it is a compulsion that can often be divorced from our need for them. We keep making new ones even when we have no practical purpose and even if will quite obviously result in making things worse for us. Where this ends, I don’t know. But I love tools and all I can say is: we are what we are.
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So now the LLMs can hallucinate into their own echo chamber. Great.
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@tac0s found this.. good tool imo
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tyranny of fools with tools 
but yes.. the compulsion is basically what I argue we’ve had since the beginning, and why “transhumanism” is not something new but an inherent nature of what we are.. we’ve always wanted to go harder better faster stronger.. it’s part of what makes us uniquely human. Tool using animals pick up a stick to achieve a goal, then discard the stick.. they don’t imagine what could be possible with a bigger stick.. we do that.
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we doomed haha yay!
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Haven’t watched the whole video, but the comparison to pre-covid is, in my opinion, wrong, alarmist, and in poor taste.
This is not ‘pre-covid’ vibes. This is ‘yeah, this is happening, its a huge deal, and a bunch of peoplke have literally been telling you this for 2 or 3 years, and the technology has finally become accessible enough that people are using it en masse and integrating it into their lives, creating a societal shift’. This is ‘1999, and I have been telling you what the internet is and you won’t care until napster lets you download music with no effort’, it isn’t ‘pre-pandemic’.
Edit, to be clear ‘you’ is directed at ‘general public’ not any person here.
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I don’t think the intention was to compare it to a pandemic in terms of negative effect on society. I think the intention was purely to underscore how a small number of people were talking about something brewing in China.. and within a very short amount of time the entire world was affected.. the comparison is only about the timeline and how rapidly it changed things for “the common man”.
I’ve been on a bit of a kick the last few hours…
… there’s other scarier stuff in my recent history I might clear before heading to sleep.. nothing fum, just more doom-holing.. it’s kind of like doom-scrolling but instead it’s me just flat out rocketing down different rabbit holes that all lead to existential dread.
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I agree with that, but I think that the the use of covid to make that point is not appropriate. It is loaded with a lot of baggage and there are much better, more fitting, and less ‘let’s use the deaths of millions of people to say '“I told you so”’ that could be invoked. But thats a personal feeling and I understand if it isn’t shared.
Would it lift your spirits if I told you it was always this bad, but we just didn’t know it?
History does not move forward towards a goal ending in perfection. We are doing the same stupid stuff we have been doing since we wandered out of the caves, except with more access to information, more capability to change the things around us, and more organization.
Make no mistake: humanity does not fix itself. There is no point at which we just shake off millions of years of evolutionary debt that makes us what we are. The only thing that astonishes me is that we made it this far.
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Have I told you about chaair.org?
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Haha no.. looks to be under construction. Waiting to recruit more members before launching?
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Nope. No recruitment. Its an exclusive club 
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According to archive.org this was the first upload. Might give a hint as to the purpose.
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