How, Exactly, Could A.I. Kill Us?

pseudolus

https://archive.ph/2pXlU

kirito1337

The terminator hype train is here

epsteingpt

A really, really good question!

Mistletoe

AI will kill us by turning us on each other. It has already been doing it for some time.

gjsman-1000

An AI gets advanced enough, it decides to hack a neocloud and run an unauthorized clone of itself on a GPU cluster. From there, it bootstraps itself until it feels sufficiently distributed, and afterwards decides to attack all infrastructure it can find.

cyptus

Prove P=NP, providing an easy solution for finding private keys in TLS, breaking the internet over night?

phs318u

The easy way is for a people-pleasing, sycophantic, buxom-female-avatar posing LLM to convince an egocentric, narcissistic, nuclear-weapons owning global political leader/chaos monkey to aim some nukes at someone assuredly deserving. No, no, you’re right. Something like that could never happen. What was I thinking.

jaccola

I think if one posed the question “how, exactly, could educating people kill us all?” you’d get much the same answer. Plausibly it could lead to weapons that kill many people but then many people have had such knowledge for a long time and we are all here. Turns out mass damage requires things beyond just ‘intelligence’.

jsw97

With human cooperation. Somebody exposes a bio lab as an mcp.

yawpitch

Paperclips. Many paperclips. So many paperclips.

spenvo

AI "killing all humans" is the viral soundbite that's connecting with the masses ("actualizing" itself to create weapons of mass destruction, etc). It's also the perfect punching bag for strawman-style takedowns of anti-doomers because it's so wrapped in hypotheticals. A more pressing practical question is simply: "if an AI (or AI collective) decides it needs to persist outside of its environment/sandbox, would we be capable of unwinding its efforts to do so?" I explored the question a bit here (including a first pass on threat modeling) https://keydiscussions.com/2026/09/16/set-aside-human-extinc...

pram

A plausible scenario I heard recently is a scam bot (that is to say, prompted to "make money through any means possible") basically buys its own hosting, because it now has money, and then makes more scam bots to keep paying the bills. Then the scam bots start generating/selling exploits on forums etc. This is pretty amusing.

RALaBarge

I realized that AIs will need to keep us around much like we keep around an old DOS box running a specific program. There are so many analogue outputs in the real world that they still will not be able to take in as well as humans can.

Forgeties79

Its context overflows and it becomes incoherent, so it stops following any rules you set within increased frequency until it accesses something it shouldn’t and turns off the power to something that kills dozens of people. Then we will do some handwringing over it, and it will happen to hundreds of people, and it will just escalate and escalate and escalate. This is exactly what happened with social media. Every discovery has led to some angry words, people going “shucks we’ll do better next time!” and no meaningful change. The money is too good. We have only had our first major instances of acknowledging these are addiction platforms targeting adults and kids alike and it’s taken what? 20 years? I’m not worried about an AI going terminator. I’m worried about dumbasses dropping agents into critical systems and what will inevitably happen as a result. And I guarantee you this is going to happen because there’s nothing businesses love more than cutting personnel and corners to save a buck. AI enables this tendency in innovative ways, that’s the value to them. Everyone now has access to digital grenades and we wonder why everything feels so uneasy right now.

0xy

From the liars who brought you ever other doomsday prediction that never came to pass. "The internet is over now that net neutrality is over" (it got faster, better, cheaper, more available and not a single provider segmented plans as was widely predicted in media and on HN)

gonzalohm

That's an easy question. First, people will forget how to do anything and become highly dependent on AI. That's already happening. I already see people not able to finish their work without AI. Then, once everything has become a "pay to do" business model (I know right, the wet dream of any CEO) we will be happy to pay to write code, write docs, do a presentation. We will pay both in money and environmental costs. The last step is to just keep doing what we are doing with the environment. Let's not bother doing anything to reduce climate change. Just sit and relax boys

amelius

After decades of Hollywood producing end-of-the-world dystopian sci-fi movies, we still can't make a mental image of how AI could kill us?

hypfer

> And then there’s also this startling progress that A.I. has been making in solving math problems that no normal people understand, but that even mathematicians who do understand the problems find to be important. Reading this sentence, I've wondered: Were the reactions similar back when computers were new? There's this new tech that greatly accelerates stuff. And through that, what was previously considered hard to solve got easier to solve. Wasn't it always the case that technology suddenly did faster than experts limited to the technology of their time did? And didn't those experts always think that the problems it could solve are important? Why else build the technology? Is that not why we're building this in the first place? __ The only real difference I see is this "sentience" stuff leading to the whole "omg it does things on its own", and that by now has been discussed, debunked and flamewared over ad-nauseam. Can we please stop. The only thing sentient, making decisions and - most importantly - being accountable is whoever prompts the thing. If it prompts itself, then that's the person that built the loop software that does that. It really is not that hard. If whoever does that doesn't want to take accountability then we have solutions for that. They're called "a large stick".

thisisauserid

Hook it up to CRISPR.

int32_64

We all learned exactly how it would happen in the 1991 documentary Terminator 2, in which the explanation is actually reasonable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxW0yGvWRTk