[ExI] Holy cow!

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2026 at 6:19 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

* >> For the very first time a vast non-human intelligence has the power to
>> devastate the world's economy and plunge civilization into chaos. And you
>> say it's just hype,  nothing special, just an incremental improvement!*
>
>
>
> * > One might debate whether previous examples were "vast" or truly
> "intelligence" ("Is this particular AI actually 'intelligent'?"*


*Do you think a debate on whether Einstein was truly "intelligent" would be
productive? I don't because the answer is obvious. *


>
>
> *> I do recall quite a few previous automated bug-finding efforts, some of
> which were spoken of in similar terms at the time - however much we might
> call that silly in hindsight. *

*Remember how Y2K was spoken of in late 1999?  Not how it turned out,*
>

*You're comparing apples to oranges. Only the lunatic fringe predicted Y2K
would cause civilization collapse, **but this is NOT about a prediction at
all, t**his is about something that has already occurred**.  Consider the
computer you're using to read these words on **right now**, if it's using
the Linux operating system (or Android which is based on it) or an
operating system made by Apple or Microsoft*,* then **RIGHT NOW** Dario
Amodei could order Mythos to take complete control of your computer and do
whatever *he* want*s with* it. And he could do the same thing to computers
that run nuclear power plants, air traffic control computers, and the
computers that run the New York Stock Exchange. And if he wanted to knock a
F-35 fighter jet out of the air he could take control of the computers
needed to enable it to fly and knock it out of the air. And stealth
technology would not save it. *

*But **Amodei is not doing any of those things, instead he decided not to
release Mythos to the general public even though that means giving up
billions of dollars of revenue that he would otherwise have received. Why
would he do this? Because Mythos turned out to be so much smarter than
expected it scared him shitless. Previously it had been considered to be a
very big deal if just one zero day error was found in a major piece of
software, but Mythos found THOUSANDS of them, and Mythos did more, he wrote
thousands of malicious programs that could actually exploit those zero day
flaws. *

*The thing that worries me is that the other AI companies are probably only
a few months or weeks behind Anthropic, and I'm not sure that Elon Musk
will be as morally scrupulous as Dario Amodei. And open source AI models
only seem to be about 6 to 8 months behind the leading closed models that
are at the frontier. *

*And you say all of this is no big deal! *


*John K Clark*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260409/20137a82/attachment.htm>