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LLM data centres should be forced to install something that shut them down in and instant, yes.
And then they should be shut down. In an instant.
Like, right away.
Skynet style attack on civilization isn't really a realistic example of the dangers AI, or at least the current tech using that term, has, and I struggle to think of a danger that it poses where the best solution is to shut down the actual data center as quickly as possible. That'd be like pointing to the problems Facebook has caused, and insisting that the proper response is an instant global Facebook shutdown button. Further, a lot of AIs can run locally, which would make shutting down data centers an ineffective way to deal with it. And who presses this button? The AI company, that has an incentive to keep their product active if there's any doubt that it can be? The government, that will likely take a long time to act or who may use the button as leverage to force AI to be biased towards the current crop of politicians? Is this button remotely accessible, thereby enabling a hacker to disable the AI and any infrastructure that has been foolishly made reliant on it in some way? Or is it airgapped, and therefore not much more useful than just shutting down the power to the site or disconnecting the data cables involved would be?
Every option you listed sucks. That’s the whole point. So do we just give up on safeguards entirely?
No, but the safeguard should be designed in response to the dangers that the tech actually poses, and those tend to be more subtle than actively trying to kill everyone, like perpetuating existing human biases in things like medicine, hiring etc without a clear way to tell that biased decision has been made or a human in the loop to hold accountable, or providing dangerously inaccurate information. Nobody is likely to press a universal off button to deal with these types of "everyday" problems and once the response is given the damage is done, so safety should focus on regulating what the AI says and does in the first place more than responding to it afterwards.
Yeah I agree most risks are bias and bad decisions. But I still think we need a fire-extinguisher style backup if something spins out of control even if hitting it brings great pain.
if we really need to and recognize that need, we already can do that in a number of ways though. A single big obvious button to do it just creates a single obvious point of attack.
That’s fair but it’s the same problem we already live with for nuclear weapons. The codes exist, they’re secret, and we trust a handful of people with them. Why should an AI kill switch be any different?
Because the danger is different. The danger of AGI is that if it happens, it's an exponential process in which a machine basically instantly becomes so much smarter than the smartest human beings that it could circumvent any safeguards we humans could possibly think of, let alone put into practice.
What form might that take? No one can know because it is literally beyond our ability to comprehend. Perhaps a device that was smart enough could influence human minds at a distance using the em radiation from it's own circuits. Maybe it could take over a car, a Roomba, or an attack drone. Maybe it could manifest reality through sheer willpower.
Thats the problem with superintelligence; it's unpredictable. Add to that that perhaps humanity doesn't, um, have an unassailable claim to universal moral high ground, and there's a case to be made that a superintelligent AGI might decide that we humans gotta go.
So we will never reach the point where we will realize we have been fooled? I think not.
Not sure how this has any bearing on my comment. Instructions unclear.
I'm pretty sure someone would notice a Roomba ruling the world, or nukes launching, or even just a missing car.
I see I was taking it too literally. I need to think on that more, thanks for pointing that out.
The utility of a nuclear stockpile is as a deterrent against a threat that we know exists (hostile foreign powers). The utility of this is a deterrent or response to, what exactly? A hypothetical AI beyond what we currently have the tech to make, and which if built probably would not behave in the way that it is fictionally portrayed to, such that the button is unlikely to actually be pressed even if needed (consider that the AIs we have already can be used to persuade people of things, so if we somehow managed to actually make a skynet style super-AI bent on taking over the world, rather than suddenly launching a war on humanity, its most obvious move would be to just manipulate people into giving it control of things, such that the one in charge of pressing the button would pretty much be itself or someone favorable to it, long before anyone realized pressing it was even necessary).
I get what you’re saying when AI can manipulate, it will try to make sure the button never gets pressed. But humanity isn’t dumb either. We’ve spotted and contained world-ending risks before. Why assume we wouldn’t notice this one?
Have we? the closest I can think of is maybe the ozone hole, and that wasnt quite world ending as far as I understand it so much as a danger to people's health.
Smallpox may be another one if the current Secretary of Health's brain worm doesn't decide that smallpox is good for your health or something.
that wasnt world ending tho. Deadly, sure, but diseases like that dont tend to just kill absolutely everyone, and we existed in spite of it for quite a long time.
Yeah, fair enough.
global warming, comets, solar flares, nearby supernovas, overpopulation, nuclear war... i dunno
Apparently you don't.
We've done nothing meaningful to contain global warming. Comets? That's a laugh! What do you think we have that will stop a comet from creating a huge mess if it happens to be pointed to us? (You're aware that Armageddon was a fictive movie, right?) And with solar flares and nearby supernovas you've entered the realm of delusion. What, precisely, have we done to "contain" solar flares and supernovas?
which of those have we actually done anything about? weve made some modest efforts on global warming but not enough to actually solve the issue, overpopulation was never really a serious issue in the first place, nuclear weapons still exist and still could be used someday, and the space stuff we have only the beginnings of an idea about how maybe deal with someday, except maybe asteroids and comets, which we have an idea of what to do but not the infrastructure to launch a big enough craft to redirect a big one in time.
... humanity isn’t dumb either.
[citation needed]
Socrates (470–399 BCE) — ethics, questioning, Socratic method
Plato (427–347 BCE) — forms, justice, ideal state
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) — logic, science, virtue ethics
Confucius (551–479 BCE) — ethics, family, social harmony
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) — political realism
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) — scientific method
René Descartes (1596–1650) — rationalism, “I think, therefore I am”
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) — social contract, Leviathan
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) — pantheism, ethics
John Locke (1632–1704) — empiricism, liberalism
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) — monads, optimism
David Hume (1711–1776) — empiricism, skepticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) — social contract, human freedom
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) — categorical imperative, critique of reason
Georg Hegel (1770–1831) — dialectics, history as progress
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) — pessimism, will to live
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) — utilitarianism, liberty
Karl Marx (1818–1883) — materialism, class struggle
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) — will to power, eternal recurrence
William James (1842–1910) — pragmatism, psychology
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) — language, logic
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) — being, existentialism
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) — existentialism, freedom
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — feminism, existential ethics
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) — power, knowledge, institutions
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) — totalitarianism, political theory
Noam Chomsky (1928– ) — linguistics, political philosophy
Those are humans. A human is smart. Humanity is another story...
Ah. If you redefine "contain[ing] world-ending risks" to include "literally anything that someone blathers about" you can continue that line of blather forever.
If you genuinely think that the current generation of AI could "spin out of control" in a way that could do great harm to humanity (other than the real, tangible harms that it's already doing all the time, every day), then you've accepted a false narrative perpetuated by people who just want to sell you shit.
"AI", in the sense that we've all come to understand it in the past 5ish years is just advertising — advertising for a product with no actual utility and no viable business model. The only danger we should be worried about is the economic consequences of the AI bubble busting and plugging the developed world into yet another brutal economic recession.
For the record, this is a much-better question.
Yea my question wast as well thought out as i thought.
Sorry, I'm 5/6 of a 6-pack in and just being dumb. It was a fine question.
Hey bud, I drink beer because it makes me weiser.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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