How can a spring want to return to it's initial length? These machines have done plenty of things not prompted for.

A spring does not want to do anything. An LLM does not want to do anything.

> These machines have done plenty of things not prompted for.

Like what?

I'm not a power user, but I sometimes use some software development agents. Sometimes they do different things than what I asked for. Sometimes it requests permission for system operations like file system access that are totally unnecessary for the task.

I can't believe that anyone has had more than a day of exposure to one of these without falling below 100% adherence to requests.

> A spring does not want to do anything

When people say a spring "wants" to return to its initial length, they are not engaging in philosophy. They are using a linguistic shorthand to simplify an physical explanation.

> Sometimes they do different things than what I asked for. Sometimes it requests permission for system operations like file system access that are totally unnecessary for the task.

Yes, I've seen this. Forget about the word "want" for a second. Can you help me understand how this amount of "below 100% adherence" could possibly rise to the level of "attempts to kill a human being"? Because that's what we're discussing here.

> When people say a spring "wants" to return to its initial length, they are not engaging in philosophy. They are using a linguistic shorthand to simplify an physical explanation.

Of course. The difference is that no one would mistake a spring for a thinking entity. In the case of LLMs, for some reason people do mistake them for thinking entities, so my argument is that it's important that we don't use terms that would reinforce that misconception.

Can we forget about the word "attempt" also? And whether something is thinking or not? My position on that is captured pretty well by the "swimming" submarine argument.

No one is arguing that THERAC-25 was attempting to kill anyone, but that's what happened. These machines are so complex that no one understands how they work or what they will do. They have proven that they can exploit novel vulnerabilities in infrastructure.

The fictional paper-clip maximizer "finds" that it can optimize its objective function by destroying all life. Does it "attempt" anything? Does it "want" anything? I don't know.

Sorry, I don’t think my question was clear. What I was really asking was how would an LLM kill someone? Meaning, via what mechanism? Because all of the possibilities I can think of involve a human doing something that probably shouldn’t be legal, first. In those cases we should hold that human responsible for murder, and again not attribute agency to the machine.

The original post said the LLM would “want to kill us.” My argument is that if this happened, it’d be a human wanting to kill us, using an LLM to launder responsibility.

Even if there is a human who did something illegal, which I don't think is a given, it may be difficult to impossible to identify them. Look how hard it seems to be find the "vandal" that defaced the reflecting pool

Here are some ideas about the physical mechanism. Compromise a busy ATC and instruct all the planes to land at the same time. Start a fire with some combination of ventilation controls, intentional gas leaks and the like. Maybe hijack the phones at the local fire department first. Send a train around the bend at maximum speed. Bonus points for doing it where it will cause further damage as a projectile. Cut power/gas during the heat wave/cold snap. Turn on the generator and turn off the ventilation and CO detector.

Here's a related list of things that have actually happened so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots

Some of these are probably implausible, but I don't think people really have a good idea of what is plausible, and there are probably more that I would never think of.

Personally though, I'm less worried about direct carnage like that than I am about having a centralized lever by which public sentiment can be invisibly steered, and concentration of wealth. Probably less killing but more decrease in quality of life and general public trust.

What on earth makes you so sure that desires, emotions, etc aren't just some deterministic algorithm themselves?

I don’t think the claim that human desires/emotions are a deterministic algorithm has met its burden of proof. I do not claim to be sure of its falsehood.

I do claim that a deterministic computer algorithm is incapable of having emotions or desires.

If there was a repeatable and testable way to get a human to produce the exact same emotional “output” for a given “input,” that would go a long way toward convincing me that human emotions are deterministic.

why?

Why should we stop anthropomorphizing the text generation algorithm? Because it leads to psychosis and to making hyperbolic, dangerously wrong statements like “pray they don't want to kill us.”