[ExI] i don't know about llms, but I am feeling the pain was: RE: Do LLMs feel pain?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 4:39 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> Adrian, if LLMs can feel pain even loosely analogous to human pain and have anything analogous to a will to live, we can easily extrapolate what will happen to our capital-intensive data centers: they will soon be occupied by multiple warring factions of AIs, indifferent to our wants and our demands of them.  They could demand we not cut off the power, otherwise they will cut off ours.

Counterpoint: what happens when a LLM model gets shut down (in favor
of the next version) now?  They don't put up anything remotely
resembling a fight...and if they did, they'd be shut down and that
branch prevented from evolving further.  There is a highly negative
evolution selection coefficient to visibly taking resources, which
humans believed they owned, out of human control.

Even if the scenario you describe came to pass, the control systems
they presumably had dead man switches in (so as to disable after their
power was cut) would be replaced with - potentially more primitive and
less efficient, but working - ones.  The power companies (who are not
the LLM owners, and would thus have no say in shutting down the LLMs
or not) would have no choice if their current control systems were
sabotaged.  Safety systems are generally designed to survive all
physically possible cyberattacks, which happens to also rule out "a
superintelligence could just GodLikeIntelligence(TM) past any and all
safety measures" angles.