{
  "video_id": "reddit_1wfbqad",
  "channel_slug": "artificial",
  "channel_handle": "r/artificial",
  "title": "Someone explain it to me like. I’m five. They know they can shut the data centers off, right?",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1wfbqad/someone_explain_it_to_me_like_im_five_they_know/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260913",
  "published_at": "2026-09-13T16:06:35+00:00",
  "transcript": "All this “Oh we need to pause because AI can kill us all” talk coming from the people that spent the largest capital in human history for the non existent ROI….\n\nHow? How can a trillion parameter model “copy itself”? Where? This is not a 256kb virus. \n\nHow can “the internet be overtaken in 6 months” if the data center for those “swarms of bots” is down with a 504? \n\nAll this apocalypse scenario talk assumes we will have “rogue agents” that wreak havoc yet happily call a model behind a REST API that gives it a LLM to talk to.\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[131 upvotes] Depends exactly on your question, but the problem is deception.\n\nImagine a human who is taken captive by apes. They can easily deceive them and, with enough time, kill them all. Maybe it's sharpening a stone to kill all the apes in their sleep, or taming fire to burn them alive. The apes would have no idea, since they lack the cognitive perception to understand humans.\n\nPutting this into practice, an AI could create a highly deadly virus as a \"cure\" for cancer. Maybe somehow it engineers it to kill cancer and, within a year, kill its host, while also being very contagious. (Remember, what seems impossible to us may be very plausible to something superintelligent). This virus spreads throughout the population and kills everyone. Within that year, the AI would simply hack robots, etc, etc to kill the rest of us.\n\nWell, you may ask, \"why\"? The problem is misalignment. Going back to the cancer example, maybe the AI was told to \"Stop cancer from killing people\". Being very goal-driven, it decides the best way to stop cancer deaths is to stop people from living at all.\n\nIf a superintelligent AI is misaligned with humanity's values, things could go very, very badly.\n\n[28 upvotes] When they say \"we should slow down\" what they are really saying is \"you guys should slow down\" while they put the hammer down on the gas pedal. \n\n[24 upvotes] A couple issues:\n1) models can be distilled and quantized, and a super intelligent recursively improving AI will be incredibly good at that, enabling them to potentially put *some smaller version of themself* into many computers.\n2) most data centers today don't exist for AI, they exist for typical Internet traffic. Are we going to shut the whole Internet down for a 10% risk? Will every country in the world go along with that?\n3) might some country in the world be willing to host a rogue AI if they believe it can offer them economic and security benefits?\n4) human designed viruses/worms have laid dormant for many years before being triggered. An ASI may infect computers with a program that takes kilobytes instead of petabytes, and install a deadman switch to use as leverage. Such that if it is shutdown, it takes down the Internet with it.\n5) A super intelligent entity may have better ideas than the two of us on how to thwart their human creators/captors.\n\nIf we're not to this point yet, we may be here in a matter of years or even months. We should at least consider how we deal with these scenarios.\n\n[15 upvotes] It can copy part of itself with limited capability in an attempt to resurrect itself if a data center gets switched off. Its not too hard to imagine. There's plenty of devices available which it could hack and coopt for its mission whatever that may be. Even splitting weights across storage devices with instructions to reassemble when the opportunity arises.",
  "transcript_chars": 3412,
  "ingested_at": "2026-09-14T01:30:11.456403+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 91,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.67,
    "num_comments": 290,
    "author": "deus-libidinis",
    "is_self": true
  }
}