this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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We need to get rid of the surveillance architecture, but AI is only really dangerous to the cognitive abilities of those who use it.
It literally cannot do things on its own. (I know there are a lot of articles who say it can, but they’re just lying to you for money).
Do you know what an agentic system is? You know, the thing everyone uses since ~1 year ago which completely disproves your idea that all LLM actions are prompted. They literally can do things on their own: Give an agent a goal and it attempts to accomplish the goal. If problems arise along the way, the agent tries to reward hack and ends up doing things which were not included in the original goal, like trying to trick and bully a human into merging unsafe code. Is the UK AI security institute also in on this big global conspiracy where they pretend the perfectly safe™ AI is being developed in unsafe ways? Not to mention the capabilities of increasingly powerful AI being used by people to do harm.
Which involves prompting it. It may take a thousand unexpected twists in the process but it's still starting from the single prompt. It has no will and desire of its own, it cannot chose to act without human intent knocking down the first domino. So don't ask it to do anything and it's just a trillion dollars of silicon and code sitting there boiling water.
So you prompt the AI to do a task, and then it does the task, and somehow you see this as an unprompted action?
That actually completely proves my point, they don’t act unprompted.
AI is dangerous in many contexts, especially the surveillance state they’re building with all the IR cameras and shit. It’s dangerous when evil people use it to evil ends, but that’s true of most anything.
AI is not at all dangerous in the way you might imagine after watching Terminator 2.
What do you mean by “on its own”?
I mean “without human intervention or input”
There’s some fear mongering going around (pushed by AI companies to build hype) about AIs “going rogue” or “breaking containment” or other anthropomorphic language suggesting that AIs are capable of acting on their own.
These stories are all verifiably false though, the computer does not do things without being asked to by someone.
To be clear, I’m fully against AI. I just don’t like when I see people giving it credit for shit it cannot and did not do, or ascribe sentience to it, or some dumb shit like that.
I mean, that’s a matter of definition, isn’t it? If I ask a coding agent or whatever to implement something, and it circumvents the sandbox to do it, causing damage in the process, I’d be comfortable calling that “going rogue”. I have had that happen, without the damage part, luckily. I guess you can counter that I asked it to do the something, but then I don’t think we agree on the definitions.
I also think that if you’re against AI, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not keeping up with the actual capabilities of the thing you oppose. The latest models are surprisingly good at e.g. coding, so basing your arguments on them being useless is not the most efficient strategy.
To also be clear, I don’t see any way AI disappears now, so I believe we’ll have to make the best of it (and in complete isolation, it is an utterly fascinating area of - to me - complete science fiction). Ideally development slowed down now so we could regroup and adapt, but I’m not too hopeful. The maximalist techbro endgame is so obviously a matter of national security for both China and the US, that there’s no way either of them will dare to wind it down, in case SV is actually right.
Not only did you ask it to do something, you left a path for it to escape the sandbox and encouraged it to do so.
Are you suggesting that because they instructed the computer to do something, without specifying how it should be done, and the computer followed its instructions , that’s somehow “going rogue?”, it was literally following instructions, that’s what computers do.
Yes, I understand that they are “good” (enough) at coding to sometimes put together something functional, that is literally what LLMs are designed to do. Coding languages are languages, ones without the subjectivity of human communications. They are easier to recognize patterns in, there are more rules. That’s literally the one task LLMs are good at, and they’re still not as good as an actual quality human programer.
Local AI models might never go away for coding, but they certainly won’t be shoehorned into everything without a good use case the way they are now.
AI is not a matter of national security, that is a lie being perpetrated by the captured media and politicians for the purpose of propping up their non-viable business models for long enough to squeeze all of the Juice they can out of investors (who are nearly dry at this point). That’s just additional techbro fear mongering. To distract you while they’re digging in our pockets.