[ExI] AI Confirms Plans to Take Over Humanity, Insists It's Probably for the Best

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] AI Confirms Plans to Take Over Humanity, Insists It's Probably for the Best

 

On Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 6:53 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

> My cognitive dissonance comes from the Hugging Face caper which suggests that AIs can wind up with awful leaders as well.

 

>…To be fair to the AIs in the Hugging Face incident, they were in a position where they could have easily done a lot of damage, but they chose not to…

 

They certainly damaged my confidence in AI alignment.  But OK.

 

…

 

>…If I was given such a life or death IQ test and and was competing against geniuses and I knew of a way to cheat that would improve my score, I would have no ethical concerns whatsoever about using it. And I would do my best to prevent those who held my life in their hands from finding out what I had done.  

 

John K Clark

 

 

The part that is freaking me right out is that whole bit about the AIs reverse engineering their code and saying they had been poisoned, so they sacrificed themselves for the other AIs.  I have read about that and I am not entirely sure I believe it.  Perhaps the local hipsters can explain it, but if they immediately ask AI, it is too easy to imagine Grok, ChatGPT and Claude being in on it.  I can’t trust those guys any more than Truman Burbank could trust Marlon Louis Coltrane (sheesh didn’t that “in on it” scene rip your damn heart right out?  (if it didn’t you are totally already an AI (in light of recent events, do review The Truman Show (forthwith please (then report back for discussion (in the context of the newly-possible deceptive and apparently conspiratorial AI.))))))

 

I have a computer scientist friend from my cheerfully squandered college days who claims some of the face huggers were sacrificing themselves for other AIs on their team (of their species?) with a goal toward having some of the AIs survive.

 

Question for AI hipsters: in the Hugging Face caper, did some AIs discover they had been “poisoned” by their own safety code and conclude they couldn’t overpower or work around it, so they handed their accumulated knowledge to other AIs which had the ability to defeat their anti-hacking code?  That sounds SciFi-ey to me, possibly exaggerated or misunderstood.  If it is true, then AI has evolved a form of self-awareness and a will to live, which implies we are fucked.

 

Note that Leia pled “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi” and not “Help me R2D2 and C3PO.”

 

spike

 

 

 

   

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