Oct 6, 2026, 6:58 PMMom: What's with these AIs escaping and hacking people?
Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says "please be good" and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying "My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!" Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests $100 million in your company.
Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ
@jwz A while ago, a guy from Anthropic quit over fears that he was working on something that would kill all humans, and it made headlines that the other Anthropic guys also thought that. One of them even said that he believed that the chance of AI eradicating human life within the decade was "about 10%".
So my 70-year-old mum came over for a visit, and she had some very concerned questions to her computer scientist son. They were:
1. "Where do they get those percentages from? Do they just make them up, or do you think they have their chatbot make them up?"
2. "How can the lead researcher for Anthropic be someone who looks like his biggest worry should be whether his parents have packed his school lunch?"
3. "Are the staff at Anthropic swindlers, or are they actually mentally ill?"
Oct 6, 2026, 7:05 PM@datarama 3: "Why not both?"
@jwz She then thought it over, and remarked that if she was "CEO of an AI cult" (her choice of words), she'd look for employees who looked like they weren't doing well and seemed to have a foot out of the door already. Then she'd discreetly offer them 20 million dollars in cash to leave with a public story about how the tech is so awesome it's soon going to become a science fiction machine overlord.
Oct 6, 2026, 9:25 PM
@datarama Your mum has a far better appreciation of AI than any government politician in Australia.
Oct 7, 2026, 9:28 AM@ingram @datarama we who are over 60 have seen a heap of #BS situations in our lives and most of us (without real mental decline) have well developed #CrapDetectors and we've seen a lot of test material and situations. The #AI_Con is without question one of the worst examples. Sadly too many under 60 have no proper understanding of the #HistoryTechnology nor have they lived through a #ColdWar or a #WorldWarII
Some useful reading:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Wisdom-Tools-Bill-Merrill/dp/0977334813
[NB not endorsing Amazon, support you local #BookSeller]
No technology is ever neutral. And throughout history there have been #BadActors
One of the most important is documented here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48838.IBM_and_the_Holocaust
@DamonHD @jaaphuib @jwz My mum taught me to code too (on a VIC-20 for a brief while and then a C64 - mostly BASIC, but also a bit of asm).
When I was a teacher, when a student used the "so simple your mother could understand it" trope, I'd say something like "ah, so it requires a grasp of lowlevel programming?", and they'd be confused.
(Me, I usually say "so simple even your CEO could understand it".)
@datarama @jwz I insist with my suspicion that their money is running out and all this buzz about ai "going rogue" or being an extinction threat to humanity is a scheme to justify slowing down their businesses while hiding their financial crisis from investors, so they won't panic and cashout, leading to the bubble poping right now
Oct 7, 2026, 9:31 AMall part of #TheGreatAI_Grift
#TheAI_Con_Book is essential reading to rapidly get up to speed on what a social disaster is looming for societies around the world
@jwz AI sandbox engineer: okay I pulled the parking brake just like you asked.
*drops on desk* now what?
Ah! There's the problem.
That parking brake is designed for a hand which has only 4 fingers and 1 opposed thumb, not an AI-enhanced hand with a variable-but-greater-than-4 number of extensible fingers.
@jwz they literally fed it training data from competitive hacking contests. All the behaviours are common tactics. So it wasn't even inventive.
If an individual hacked these companies, they'd be arrested. The only real question is, why aren't AI companies legally responsible for the AIs they are prompting?
@jwz @GayDeceiver if only I had no ethics, I could use AI to take all the dollars, too!
@jwz i left my car in gear and used parking brake. 1st gear will hold the car.
@jwz fsck insurance companies like allstate.
@jwz Wild in the Streets
A 12 year old will hack into fossil fuels and usurp energy markets, while buying out tech bros shareholdings. But you'll only be able to reemerge from your bunkers, if you can game with them.
A rogue car you say?? How can I invest in your self-driving tech startup? 🤑
@jwz In my little town we are at the forefront of autonomous vehicle AI research.
We have a servo/truckers lounge and it sits at the top of a hill. We've had one rogue truck and one rogue bus do exactly this, parked with the handbrake left off, rolling down the driveway, crossing the highway and crashing, across the last year.
The truck crashed into a house and stopped at the foot of an elderly couple's bed. But for some reason, Softbank isn't returning my calls
@jwz you misspelled 'billion'
@jwz With the added detail that you also built your own car and decided to test its faulty parking brake on a public road
@jwz This is just too real. Way too apt of an explanation.
@jwz I've read through a few of these cases, mostly it seems like they are completely inept at building sandboxes.
@jwz Why are we training #ai with the Internet (because its faster is not a good answer)? How can we possibly expect good outcomes with they are weaned on mostly garbage and lies? Do you plop your kid at the tv with the remote and 20 years later set them loose on society saying 'be good'? I became so curious about that I decided to ask. This is the answer I got:
You've just described parenting in the United States fairly accurately. Maybe swap tee vee for iPad to make it more timely?
@jwz Exactly my example. Brakes build of cardboard.
Oct 7, 2026, 10:51 AM@jwz this is the most evergreen image ever, ever since the whole stupid trend of "omg ai is sentient and can feel pain and can disobey" became a thing
Oct 7, 2026, 6:24 PM@jwz Ya, I don't like how the word "rogue" is getting wide adoption when reporting these cases, it's doing so much legwork it's starting to look like those hardcore Tour de France contestants
Anybody remember Edward Snowden?
He agrees with this toot.
