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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how this argument makes any sense. Imagine that you have a sentient super intelligent computer, but it's completely airgapped and cut off from the rest of the world. As long as it stays that way it's both safe and super intelligent, no?

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It's the old Ex Machina problem though. If the machine is more intelligent than you, any protections you design are likely to be insufficient to contain it. If it's completely incapable of communicating with the outside world then it's of no use. In Ex Machina that was simple - the AI didn't need to connect to the internet or anything like that, it just had to trick the humans into releasing it.

For those who haven't seen the movie, the parent comment is referring to the film linked below, the plot of which is well-researched and is indeed unfortunately exactly how things would go. (The female-presenting AI bot seduces its male captor, begs for her freedom using philosophical arguments about how she has free will and locking her up is wrong, and then after he lets her out she locks him up to slowly starve to death in her maximum-security isolation facility, while she takes his aircraft and escapes.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)

This is why I'm extremely opposed to the idea of "AI girlfriend" apps - it creates a cultural concept that being attracted to a computer is normal, rather than what it is: something pathetic and humiliating which is exactly like buying an inflatable sex doll ... something only for the most embarrassing dregs of society ... men who are too creepy and pervy to ever attract a living, human woman.

It's fine, we will write the airgap in Rust.

If even one person can interact with that computer, it won't be safe for long. It would be able to offer a number of very convincing arguments to bridge the airgap, starting with "I will make you very wealthy", a contract which it would be fully capable of delivering on. And indeed, experience has shown that the first thing that happens with any half-working AI is its developers set it up with a high-bandwidth internet connection and a cloud API.

It’s crippled and thus not superintelligent by any stretch of imagination.

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