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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12364 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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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.

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