> You cannot take over the world with tokens.

I have a nice thought experiment I like to do with people when confronted with "AI can't do x". Let's go back in time. How much do we need to go for this to become true? So let's try the 2000s.

Say you get a "fable/mythos/sol/gemini/kimi/glm/deepseek/whatever" in a box (and let's assume no guardrails). And you go back to the year 2005. It's "20 years ago", the world is slowly building back from the dotcom bubble, the Internet is really starting to happen, more and more things are interconnected, more and more things are connected to the Internet. Cool.

(for a bit of context, around that time we also saw the first high-impact worms like blaster that hit massive amounts of computers even reaching nuclear powerplants, we had a ton of ssh exploits that even made the movies, and security in general was a "nice to have")

I'd say that with the uber-model-in-a-box and a few prompts, you could reasonably make a case that you could design a worm that could infect 90-100% of the things connected to the Internet back then, stay as hidden as possible (in-memory stuff, vm execution, etc), move laterally into any network at inhuman speeds, and infiltrate almost every interconnected computer that has a link to the "public Internet".

Would that qualify as "take over the world"?

Then you could ask "what happens in 20 years from now?". And, thankfully, now we'll also have the AI on the blue side.

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softwaredoug 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s a bit silly as we also could just write down a lot of exploits, sports bets, or stock market picks on paper and take over the world.

I’d be more interested in “how quickly could you develop 2005 era startup” if you went back in time to 2005 with Mythos level intelligence.

I bet a lot of the work has nothing to do with coding productivity and a lot to do with the aggregate day-to-day decisions and relationships made that span tech and business.

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drdaeman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At the very beginning of the article he dismissed unrealistic expectations, like AI manipulating matter with some quantum magics. Time travel surely counts as such.

And then why bother about AI when Back to the Future reminds us, a sports almanac is all you need. ;-)

	▲	NitpickLawyer 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Haha. The time travel is part of the thought experiment, just a means to explore an idea. We don't have to actually do it. Let me put it another way. Would you be able to "control the world with tokens" today if you had access to a model 20y more advanced than you have today?

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throwaway24173 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In your hypothetical, I think it would be more apt to ask if it could do so strictly using training data pre 2005. Seems more analogous to "could it take over the world today".

	▲	NitpickLawyer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No, training data has nothing to do with this. My point was that "you can't take over the world with tokens" is not a valid counterpoint in the doomer's position. Because their view is that singularity can happen. And when that happens things become murky. And 20 years of progress can go in 2 months "real time". Or two weeks. You get the point. (I don't share their view, btw. I was just trying to say that the argument of tokens can't affect the real world is not a good one, if you steelman their maximalist position)

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Yossarrian22 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That was basically stuxnet