this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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LLMs are never going to become superintelligent. However, an LLM WILL kill us all if someone decides that it IS superintelligent and so puts it in charge of nuclear weapons.
"You're right to push back on that, I nuked Albania instead doing what I was supposed to do, that's my bad".
stupid people are going to kill us all, maybe our great filter will be do we let them or not
We're already letting them bro. The great filter is us. I'll be surprised if we make it to 2050. The entire industrial revolution is an unplanned terraform, and our response to the potential destruction of a stable climate, and most macroscopic life on Earth, is to double down, consume product, elect pedophiles, worship the most morally bankrupt psychopaths and sociopaths in politics, business, and entertainment; not to mention the widespread contempt and lack of empathy for "others" not like me, for some flagrantly dissonant reason.
We are in the midst of a global mental illness epidemic, and the average talking chimp is sleepwalking through it; barely cognizant of what is even happening outside their personalized propaganda bubble.
We don't have to put it in charge of nuclear weapons, it just has to find a way into those systems, many of which are fairly old, like it's broken into websites without anyone telling it to.
There's no way an LLM is getting into those systems. They have no networking and rely on physical dials and switches. Even the code is in a completely proprietary language, using hardware custom made by the military. There's no training data in the world that's gonna give an LLM the kind of knowledge to get into that system. The best it could do is drive some admiral in the navy to AI psychosis and convince him to press the button, but even that's difficult because it requires more than one guy.
Yeah Manchurian candidate style mass ai psychosis social engineering. Viable.
But ai "itself" won't be the mass extinction initiation. It'll be those billionaire oligarchs choosing the target algorithm to pick wrongthinkers with autonomous drones and such
Those systems are supposed to be air-gapped.
They just have to atrophy their own minds enough they belive the ai when it tells them to push the button.
Not putting ai in charge directly is only weak protection.