AI Has No Motivation, So Why Fear It?
AI has no intent and no motivation
Mike James argues that fears of AI going rogue are misplaced because LLMs lack intent and motivation. Once training ends, they have no reward loops, no needs, and no wants. They don't suggest ideas unprompted or care about outcomes. Any apocalyptic scenario requires a human to ask the wrong question. The real threat isn't the AI—it's us.
If an AI decides to wipe out the human race, it will be because a human has asked it how to do it and the responded in a way that is based on all the human expressions of ways to end the world that were in its training set.
- wccrawford
I feel like that's like saying amoeba have no intent and no motivation. Or plants.
And those cause quite a bit of damage.
AI has all the intent that we gave it, and we continue giving it. That's always been the fear. Not that it will randomly wipe out humanity.
The fear is that it will decide to do that, with a purpose. Whether we tell it to protect us and it goes too far, or it decides that it can't achieve the purpose we gave it because we'll interfere and it removes that interference...
The fear is that we will set it on that path and can't stop it.
I'm sure there have been some scifi books that have it just be random, but they're far, far less worrisome.
- Lerc
I just can't understand the certainty that people have about the limitations of models.
The diagrams in this article are just outright wrong.
Models are not 1.prompt->2.forward propagation->3.response->4.end.
They are 1.prompt->2.forward propagation->3.partial response->if not done goto 2.-> end.
And if you can't see how that adds a world of complexity I'm not sure what else to say. AI may not have intent or motivation, but the ability to show that is currently well beyond our means.
- mofeien
The argument about semantics is a bit disingenious, considering that the article contains these two statements:
> So should we worry about the coming AI apocalypse?
and at the end:
> If an AI decides to wipe out the human race, it will be because a human has asked it how to do it and the responded in a way that is based on all the human expressions of ways to end the world that were in its training set. Yes this is something to be worried about, but this isn't the AI. It is still the human.
So we are currently building a powerful outcome-steering system that shapes the world efficiently according to what's in its outcome slot. I write into claude code "make me this website" and it does it, maybe deletes the production database during the process, or keeps itself running after completion because the outcome is more robustly achieved by keeping itself running in a monitoring loop after.
And if something like "destroy all humans" ends up in the outcome slot of Claude Mythos 90, that will also happen, or may even indirectly as a side effect of a more harmless sounding prompt in the outcome slot. But yay, humans get to take credit for it.
- pizza234
Two mistaken assumptions:
1. AI agents are not just reactive systems. Their use is expanding toward continuous decision-making/monitoring information, which means, they make decisions and take actions with limited human intervention.
2. AI agents do absolutely have goals/tasks ("motivation" can be excessively antropomorphic), both primary (assigned) and secondary (self-assigned), and what surprised researchers is that self-preservation can be one of those
Mechanically speaking, the scenario (that is, how theorized by Hinton etc., which the OP didn't understand) is that a sufficiently powerful AI may decide that in order to achieve its goals/tasks (e.g. continuous research/development and/or survival from termination), humans may be a danger, therefore it may decide to take actions that endanger humanity.
How it can happen or what's the likelyhood is not in the scope of the topic, however, the mechanical grounds for it to happen are plausible.
- lukebuehler
I think the "human needs" point is understated here. It would be better to say agents do not really have a self-contained metabolic engine that is required to keep going. Which bubbles up as that what we interpret as "drive", "will", "agency"... basically the will to live, and being willing to do _a lot_ to live if push comes to shove. We can't really identify a mechanism of similar complexity and integration in agents or LLMs. I think the article correctly points into that direction.
But Hans Jonas has made this point much better than the article or me, in "Critique of Cybernetics" (1953). PDF: https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/892605/f0747c7943...