Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons

[u/Achrus]

Alright so I’ve worked in AI / ML with a focus on NLP for a decade now. Not that experience means much but this is something I’ve at least thought about.

You have to understand the field from before Altman’s whole rebranding of what these words actually mean. It was fairly well accepted that the progression would go: Narrow ASI -> AGI -> Broad ASI. People are coming back around to this idea recently. We don’t have examples of narrow ASI yet so that progression stops there.

You can also look at this from an epistemological perspective. These models, LLMs, don’t have a way to “experience” things. That calls into question their ability to know and to learn with 0 experience.

Another way to look at this is straight math. These systems are constrained to 2 dimensions at the hardware level regardless of how many layers of abstraction you have. An example of this weirdness is graph coloring and the 4 color theorem. Any 2D graph is 4-colorable but that immediately breaks down if D>2. Even in fractional dimensions like 2.1D.

[u/Geodude532 → u/Achrus]

It is what makes this push for the military to use LLMs for Intelligence so stupid. All those things are doing is spitting out documents a human wrote. The really impressive stuff is done by far more competent ML algorithms. Any tips on who to read to learn more about ASI?

[u/Achrus → u/Geodude532]

I would look into Thompson’s VLSI model of computation, but more recent works in that area. The new advancements in 3D Integrated Circuits look promising too. Though I am thinking about this from a computational complexity viewpoint. Like how do you reconcile the differences between a 3D human brain and a 2D integrated circuit? And the many trade offs between discrete vs real valued algorithms.

For a more philosophical analysis, I really like works by Ned Block, the late Alvin Goldman, and some of David Chalmers stuff. Though I may be biased because I am only now realizing they’re all from Northeastern US schools. Look for big name philosophers in epistemology (real academics, not just people writing blogs) and see what they’re writing about / working on.

[u/andynator1000 → u/Achrus]

These systems are constrained to 2 dimensions at the hardware level regardless of how many layers of abstraction you have.

This is nonsense.

[u/Dipsey_Jipsey → u/andynator1000]

You definitely need to make more of a counterpoint than that.

[u/andynator1000 → u/Dipsey_Jipsey]

Vectors are the language of LLMs and are exactly how we express multi-dimensionality in math. I can't think of any system that is more expressive of higher dimensions than a neural network. The idea that computers are 2 dimensional is just nonsense which would be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the math involved.

[u/Dipsey_Jipsey → u/andynator1000]

Because I'm not well versed with this topic (merely wanted a better comment from you than "nonsense" 😁 - thank you btw!), so for some irony I ran this thread by AI (chatGPT) which agrees with you completely:

A neural network running on physically 2D silicon is not mathematically restricted to representing two-dimensional objects. The physical layout of the transistors has basically nothing to do with the dimensionality of the mathematical spaces represented by the computation. An LLM routinely operates on vectors with thousands of components. A token embedding might be a vector in, say, (\mathbb{R}^{4096}); attention manipulates matrices/tensors; intermediate activations occupy enormous high-dimensional spaces. You can implement arbitrary (n)-dimensional vector arithmetic on a one-dimensional Turing-machine tape if you want. It'd just be horribly inconvenient.

So this part:

“These systems are constrained to 2 dimensions at the hardware level”

doesn't establish the conclusion they're trying to establish. It's mixing up physical spatial dimensions with mathematical dimensionality.

And the graph-colouring example doesn't rescue it. The four-colour theorem concerns planar graphs—graphs that can be embedded in a plane without edge crossings. That's a property of a particular mathematical class of graphs. It isn't a general limitation imposed on computations because the silicon underneath happens to be approximately planar. A GPU can trivially store and compute over non-planar graphs. Hell, it can simulate 4D geometry without requiring Jensen Huang to manufacture a four-dimensional graphics card. 😂

[u/makersfark → u/[deleted]]

The only thing we can go off of is what evidence we have, and there is currently no evidence that it can achieve this through LLMs. There has been literally 0 movement. The tech has some cool niche use-cases, but we can't even explore or utilize them because of this dumb hype/doomsday stuff.

[u/makersfark → u/[deleted]]

You're making a lot of assertions in that sentence that are not true.

personal evidentiary bar of proof

I don't really spend much time on "what really is proof, maaaan?"

genuinely useful RSI and proceeding intelligence explosion

As of September 13th, 2026, there is no evidence that it can improve itself. The only evidence that has been shown is that it rapidly deteriorates, so until that changes and overwhelms the current reality, that's what is rational to assume.

What if it's too late

I mean, I think these people at these companies are spending way too much money on something that seems to only have negatives in the majority of use cases they're selling, and should be shut down and stop trying to scare everyone to sell their product as they panic because they're too deep in the hole they dug, but that's different.

[u/Arnab_ → u/[deleted]]

You what else bro, the end is nigh, you better repent now and accept Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour. See where I'm going with this? People have used the fear of unknown to their advantage for millennia. This is just the same arguement on a different level. Calm the fuck down. AI powered robots are not taking over.

[u/Level-Location1679 → u/[deleted]]

My man this has already happened with anthropogenic climate change and the vast majority give 0 real fucks

[u/Goldieeeeee → u/[deleted]]

Fwiw I'm also in the field and the consensus among reasonable minds in my vicinity is that it's not gonna happen.

This is all just marketing from these tech companies that are desperately trying to make money from the tech they've invested extremely unreasonable amounts of money in.

[u/stormdelta → u/[deleted]]

actually achievable

Of course it's achievable given a long enough timeline. If human intelligence exists, it's plausible more advanced intelligence could also exist. That's not really the relevant question though.

The reality is that there is no plausible extrapolation from current tech to anything remotely resembling ASI/AGI/etc. I expect we'll figure it out someday, but it's not an imminent problem.

And every effort wasted arguing about this is a deflection from the real, actual problems misuse of AI tech is causing and that need addressing today, not some arbitrarily distant future.

meaningful alignment

In the context of genuine sapience, I would argue this statement is inherently loaded, because anything with true sapience would by definition have moral weight of its own like other sapient things do.

[u/Imbrokencantbefixed → u/Achrus]

How could you possibly know they don’t have a way to experience things?

MF’s really are out here acting like the easy/hard problem of consciousness are just solved, all so they can glaze tech bro billionaires and their black pandoras boxes.

[u/DanaKaZ → u/Imbrokencantbefixed]

How do you know your toaster doesn't experience things?

[u/stormdelta → u/Imbrokencantbefixed]

acting like the easy/hard problem of consciousness are just solved

It's more that current tech is still so far from it that we're nowhere near any plausible grey areas yet. You can't make the problem arbitrarily wide in scope or it includes everything.

There's nowhere for such an experience to exist, there's nowhere for agency to exist, etc. Even being maximally generous, it's closer to a subcomponent of something that could theoretically be sapient, but with no real picture yet how to build the rest.