this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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AI staff 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC (www.bbc.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Return_of_Chippy@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I'm not an AI techie and I'm not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I'm having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I've heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can't really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?

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[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Unlike a bio-virus that has evolved for a billion years across all the niches of our ecosystems, when AI "escapes the lab" it's entirely confined to man-made infrastructure, it's not going to infect a flock of migrating birds and hop to the other hemisphere, it's going to be in systems we built, mostly within the past 30 years or less, mostly in the past 30 months for the powerful ones.

When AI starts demonstrating "copying itself" through DNA encoding infecting living beings without killing them (too quickly), and/or "running" on something more ubiquitous than massive data-center hardware, that's when it's over.

[–] isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It may be confined to man-made infrastructure, but that same infrastructure is what keep billions of people from starving to death. At this point, computers and networked systems are so baked in to every facet of our logistics chains and government that simply shutting it all down isn't an option. The nightmare scenario is where rogue AI escapes the lab and copies itself to so many systems that the only way to kill it is to shut down every computer on Earth.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 5 points 2 days ago

That's the thing, at least right now, AI is dependent on new data centers, excess capacity built just for it - it's not going to "escape" to the banking system and the tractor navigation chips, if it could do that they wouldn't need to be building all this capacity for it.

[–] mEEGal@lemmy.world -3 points 2 days ago

hopefully you're right