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@lurker@awful.systems
2026-10-23 01:17 UTC
okay last one for today I promise
In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them.
Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.”
…and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.
Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet.
Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie???
Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better.
Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there
Replies (3)
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Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction
Open ##5206969
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I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same
Open ##5207240
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The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder
A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.
They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so.
Open ##5207637