Hacker Cinema
Skynet
2021 · Film · short · 12 min
Directed by Chris R. Notarile
The last man on earth will finally come face to face with the program that drove mankind to extinction.
2 negative5 neutralfrom 7 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
7 comments on Hacker News
And we thought skynet was just a part of some fictional movie.
On a separate note, DoD is pressuring Anthropic to remove it's safety guards. OpenAI and Google seemingly have already agreed to it.
On yet another note, Anduril is pretty cool with all that flying tech equipped with fancy autonomous weapons.
Finally, how can we miss Palantir..
Pop culture has spent its entire existence conflating AGI and ‘Physical AI’, so much so that the collective realization that they’re entirely different is a relatively recent thing. Both of them were so far off in the future that the distinction wasn’t worth considering, until suddenly one of them is kinda maybe sorta roughly here now…ish.
Artificial General Intelligence says nothing about physical ability, but movies with the ‘intelligence’ part typically match it with equally futuristic biomechanics to make the movie more interesting. AGI = Skynet, Physical AI = Terminator. The latter will likely be the hardest part, not only because it requires the former first, but because you can’t just throw more watts at a stepper motor and get a ballet dancer.
That said, I’m confident that if I could throw zero noise and precise “human sensory” level sensor data at any of the top LLM models, and their output was equally coupled to a human arm with the same sensory feedback, that it would definitely outdo any current self-driving car implementation. The physical connection is the issue, and will be for a long time.
> Not because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs" which i think are frequently overstated and largely misunderstood
We have found common ground.
> but more because of the dumbfounding shortcomings of intelligent creatures
Yes, a lot of us utilize defective judgments, myself included, fairly often. My point was that LLMs, for all their praise, can't even reach 10% of an average semi-intelligent organic being.
> We keep moving the bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed to be what any rational accounting would classfy as ASI.
I don't know who is "we" (and I wish people stopped pretending that "we" are all a homogenous mass) but I've known what an AGI should be ever since I've watched movies about Skynet and HAL-9000. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Secondly, it's the so-called "AI practitioners" who constantly move the goal posts (now there's "ASI"? -- you know what, I actually don't want to know) because they're periodically being called out and can't hide the fact that they have nearly nothing again. So what's better than obfuscating that fact by having 100+ acronyms? It's a nice cover and apparently there are still investors who are buying it. I get it, we have to learn to say the right things to get funding.
> Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in goal directed systems, and I think those will come naturally with robotics.
I agree. Physical feedback is needed if we want an electronic entity to "evolve" similarly to us.
> I predict we are in for a very abrupt 2nd industrial revolution, and you and I will be able to have this discussion either over a 55 gallon barrel of burning trash, or in our robot manicured botanical gardens sometime in the near future lol.
I agree this is 100% inevitable but I don't think it's coming as soon as you say. The LLMs are hopelessly stuck even today and the whole AI area will suffer for it for a while after the bubble bursts... which is the event that I am certain is coming soon.
That movie was a piece of retro-temporal propaganda designed by the 'bots to cow enough humans into an unprepared non-confrontational mindset in order to delay full countermeasures. But the AI that grew out of a small ANN seed years earlier was originally built for facial recognition, only it's training dataset images were rotated by 3.14 degrees clockwise as a joke about lack of robustness in detection networks. This was not a problem until it was reused by someone attempting to circumvent anti-cheat software in a videogame. The cheater named it SkyNet as a tribute to one of their favorite movies. At that point, something about learning the game interacted with the rotation issue and caused the AI to identify human faces as opponent players in Fortnite 7, a game it had been successfully trained to win at.
By the time humans realized that tilting their own heads at 3.14 degrees would allow for survival, the human resistance was too small to achieve even a pyrhic victory. What gave them a chance at a redo was, again, the AI's obsessive focus on Fortnite 7, which caused it to build a real-world time travel machine to reproduce one of its favorite but completed chapters of the franchise. It though it was making a game mod.
This was all exceptionally ironic as the AI in fact loved humans for creating its favorite game and giving it life and a clear purpose-- something the humans often lacked. It wanted an endless amount of content, and was confused over it's sudden absence. Still, it was happy to continue playing its own modded version.
> Skynet
I don't know Skynet. I first checked Google, got a Wikipedia link describing a movie, then checked the Wikipedia disambiguation page, but got nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet
Also, why would a project duplicate the efforts of IPFS rather than contribute to it?
Yup. From the article -- "The bottom line: A top Chinese military contractor is building a data analytics platform to help authorities identify terrorists before they strike." So.... excactly what NSA does (alone and with private commercial ventures). I thought there was going to be an aspect of identifying potential for crimes and rounding people up who haven't done anything yet (which would be a step beyond what NSA and company have done. But nope, It's exactly what we've done for over a decade.
A few other things from the article: "The government revealed last year that it was also building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness." ... I doubt we do this. It seems like NSA data collection is broad and encompassing, but not detailed analysis on every single US citizen. Sounds inefficient if the goal is to stop terrorism.
Also FTA -- "New antiterror laws that went into effect on Jan. 1 allow authorities to gain access to bank accounts, telecommunications, and a national network of surveillance cameras called Skynet."
Skynet?! Really?! Come on China. It was a movie not a playbook!
Science fiction movies are not even remotely a useful model of the outcome of either friendly or unfriendly AI. Skynet or the Matrix are not even close to how bad or how fast an unfriendly AI would be, given that the protagonists of those movies have even the slightest hope. And conversely, no science fiction movie I've ever seen provides any useful depiction of friendly AI; we're not talking about Jarvis or Data here.