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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Walk away from the computer right now. Because it has been exactly that from its inception.

What? A modern PC doesn't have the capacity to autonomously carry out dangerous actions, and there are layers of UI elements, permission checks, and recovery options available for the things it can do.

It's 0/2 for "A powerful system that does what you say".

But modern computers can convince us, unknowingly, to harm ourselves. It happened before LLMs, by social media. And now LLMs are (voluntarily) replacing some people’s thinking so they blindly trust hallucinations.

Are you going to start blaming paper for what's written on it next? People can convince other people to do things, using computers as a medium.

Computers didn't invent social media. People invented social media, engineering it carefully to be as addictive as possible.

And people will inevitably misuse ASI, including in non-obvious ways.

Like, I don’t think all social media’s problems can be blamed by evil companies making it addictive: for example, people have a bias for negativity and convenience, so even a default feed probably would’ve caused the increased cynicism and short attention span we see today. But even if they can, innocent people enabled toxic social media to grow and adopted it themselves, most of them clueless until too late.

Any person or group, there are ideas most believe are fine that actually have serious long-term consequences. An evil AI can just suggest one and they’ll adopt it willingly. Although without an evil AI they’ll still come up with some themselves, just less frequently.

Until the last few months, computers could not hack websites or devise novel mathematical proofs from plain-English commands. That is what 'powerful systems' is referring to.

But we did have self-replicating viruses and computer-assisted proofs. Is this more significant?

Depends on how much weight you put on "solves prominent decades old mathematical problems" and "autonomously launches successful cyber attacks against large, hardened corporations."

I’m comparing the latter to worms, some (like Morris) have seriously crippled large organizations.

Or compare to CloudStrike unintentionally bricking most of their customers.

Are LLM-driven crises significantly different?

Are LLM-driven crises significantly different?

That's an empirical question that I hope we never learn the answer to (because it never happens, not because we all die before anyone can check). Off the top of my head, the fact that LLMs aren't tied to one human body and its many biological limitations and lacks human psychology means that whatever crisis it creates can be reinforced and defended against attempts to solve it without need for rest or sleep, and also the LLM can't reasonably be coerced or bribed to stopping the crisis or at least not making it worse, and these differences seem like they would likely lead to downstream differences in how crises play out. Specifically, it seems likely to make crises worse, more prolonged, or centered around more obscure vulnerabilities. It's an open question as to if LLM-driven defenses against/solutions to crises will make it such that these crises will be, on net, worse or better, or, more or less common than human-hacker-driven non-AI-based crises. Again, I hope we never get an empirical answer to that question.

Having to know how to do what you say it should do necessitates that you say when you mean it to do more often than not. This applies to computers, especially at their inception, and does not apply to LLMs.

You're delusional. RBMK reactors don't explode. And that rash you feel after going into the Therac-25 is just a normal reaction to the treatment. Malfunction 54 is nowhere in the manual and therefore does not exist. Machines don't have emergent behavior. Frankenstein was about LLMs, and nothing else.

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