[ExI] Holy cow!

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2026 at 7:34 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

No, nor do I think that question is relevant.

I was acknowledging that some would debate whether the qualities of
"vast" and "intelligence" apply to previous examples, as a prelude to
noting that there are previous examples of your claim, so as to point
out that "For the very first time" is not a correct qualifier for the
thing being discussed.

>> > 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,

I recall quite a few such predictions in mainstream media.  It wasn't
only the lunatic fringe.

> but this is NOT about a prediction at all, this is about something that has already occurred.

Civilization does not appear to have collapsed.  Neither Mythos itself
nor anyone using Mythos appears to have already directly damaged a
majority of the world's computers.

> 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 wants with it.

It is true that he could issue the orders, but they would not have
that result.  Even acknowledging the flaws they found, he lacks the
ability to apply them to my system.

I have checked the vulnerabilities.  They are indeed of concern to a
typical corporate environment, like those that I have used in prior
work.  For my own systems, I run better security than that, and I have
for decades.

> 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.

There's another problem with your case.  What do you think would
happen if someone actually pulled that?

You seem to assume that the attacked institutions would just sit
there, unable and unwilling to respond and recover their capability or
mitigate the damage.  That is the complete opposite of what happens in
almost every case.

It's much like the Republicans claiming that only the Democrats have
political agency in the US - that every bad thing the Republicans do
is the Democrats' fault.  "Oh, the networks would go down AND STAY
DOWN AND EVERYTHING WOULD BE WRECKED FOREVER AND NOBODY COULD OR WOULD
DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT."

Also...those examples you give to claim world-shaping effects are,
frankly, lame.  (Especially since the computers would be patched and
functionality restored, and basically everyone who would be involved
knows it.)

* If the New York Stock Exchange went offline for a week (before they
resumed full operations, restoring data from the countless backups all
over the world), most people would barely notice, aside from it
dominating the headlines for that week.
* There are news articles you can find about air traffic control
messing up, taking out a plane or two and shutting down an airport for
a while, but life goes on.  A closer analogy to a wide-scale strike
against air traffic control computers would be when the skies cleared
of air traffic on September 11, 2001, but I remember what happened:
the world kept on going without air travel for a while.
* A nuclear power plant - even multiple ones, attacked all at the same
time - would almost certainly scram and shut down safely, as they are
designed to do during any attack including cyber attack.  The power
grid would miss their contribution until the plant was brought back
online, but even if that causes blackouts, I personally have lived
through blackouts and confirmed that civilization continues without
grid power (especially when the outage is foreseeably temporary).
* Cyber attacks against F-35s would require far more than attacking
even the number of vulnerabilities that Mythos found; at most, an
intense attack could take out a few...and US fighter jets have been
shot down before without the world ending.

I can think of far more insidious and effective ways to use these
vulnerabilities.  But I will agree that, even if some bad guy did
manage to get ahold of Mythos's exploits, one of the above would be
far more likely to actually be used than something that would actually
cause serious lasting damage.  People focused on world destruction
just keep having no imagination when it comes to this - and they don't
tend to give the sorts of prompts that would trigger AIs to suggest
actually effective stuff (even when they're running systems with no
morality controls).

Case in point: when trying to imagine how Mythos could be abused to
wreck the world, you yourself came up with the quoted examples.  (I
shall refrain from giving better examples right now, because then your
mind would just leap to those and assume the bad guys will think of
them.  If you can't think of them - even with the same capabilities
you assume the bad guys would use, aside from Mythos's specific list
of cyber vulnerabilities - why do you think the bad guys would think
of them?)

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

You asked what people would remember, not what is a big deal.

People will remember the bombing of Iran.  Even if all the potential
damage you claim was true to its most nightmarish potential - it is
just potential, which (so far) evidence suggests is being averted.
The actual damage inflicted so far is that people are forced to patch
security vulnerabilities they would not have otherwise (in many cases,
because they were unaware of said vulnerabilities), which is time and
energy that could have gone to other pursuits.  The bombing of Iran
resulted in a lot of people injured or dead, among other consequences.

Like it or not, when remembering history, people focus far more on
what did happen than what could have happened.  How many people give
daily thanks to Stanislav Petrov for the continued existence of
civilization?