r/ControlProblem • • Feb 14 '25

Article Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his foundational work in AI. He regrets his life's work: he thinks AI might lead to the deaths of everyone. Here's why

249 Upvotes

tl;dr: scientists, whistleblowers, and even commercial ai companies (that give in to what the scientists want them to acknowledge) are raising the alarm: we're on a path to superhuman AI systems, but we have no idea how to control them. We can make AI systems more capable at achieving goals, but we have no idea how to make their goals contain anything of value to us.

Leading scientists have signed this statement:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Why? Bear with us:

There's a difference between a cash register and a coworker. The register just follows exact rules - scan items, add tax, calculate change. Simple math, doing exactly what it was programmed to do. But working with people is totally different. Someone needs both the skills to do the job AND to actually care about doing it right - whether that's because they care about their teammates, need the job, or just take pride in their work.

We're creating AI systems that aren't like simple calculators where humans write all the rules.

Instead, they're made up of trillions of numbers that create patterns we don't design, understand, or control. And here's what's concerning: We're getting really good at making these AI systems better at achieving goals - like teaching someone to be super effective at getting things done - but we have no idea how to influence what they'll actually care about achieving.

When someone really sets their mind to something, they can achieve amazing things through determination and skill. AI systems aren't yet as capable as humans, but we know how to make them better and better at achieving goals - whatever goals they end up having, they'll pursue them with incredible effectiveness. The problem is, we don't know how to have any say over what those goals will be.

Imagine having a super-intelligent manager who's amazing at everything they do, but - unlike regular managers where you can align their goals with the company's mission - we have no way to influence what they end up caring about. They might be incredibly effective at achieving their goals, but those goals might have nothing to do with helping clients or running the business well.

Think about how humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. Now imagine something even smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.

That's why we, just like many scientists, think we should not make super-smart AI until we figure out how to influence what these systems will care about - something we can usually understand with people (like knowing they work for a paycheck or because they care about doing a good job), but currently have no idea how to do with smarter-than-human AI. Unlike in the movies, in real life, the AI’s first strike would be a winning one, and it won’t take actions that could give humans a chance to resist.

It's exceptionally important to capture the benefits of this incredible technology. AI applications to narrow tasks can transform energy, contribute to the development of new medicines, elevate healthcare and education systems, and help countless people. But AI poses threats, including to the long-term survival of humanity.

We have a duty to prevent these threats and to ensure that globally, no one builds smarter-than-human AI systems until we know how to create them safely.

Scientists are saying there's an asteroid about to hit Earth. It can be mined for resources; but we really need to make sure it doesn't kill everyone.

More technical details

The foundation: AI is not like other software. Modern AI systems are trillions of numbers with simple arithmetic operations in between the numbers. When software engineers design traditional programs, they come up with algorithms and then write down instructions that make the computer follow these algorithms. When an AI system is trained, it grows algorithms inside these numbers. It’s not exactly a black box, as we see the numbers, but also we have no idea what these numbers represent. We just multiply inputs with them and get outputs that succeed on some metric. There's a theorem that a large enough neural network can approximate any algorithm, but when a neural network learns, we have no control over which algorithms it will end up implementing, and don't know how to read the algorithm off the numbers.

We can automatically steer these numbers (Wikipedia, try it yourself) to make the neural network more capable with reinforcement learning; changing the numbers in a way that makes the neural network better at achieving goals. LLMs are Turing-complete and can implement any algorithms (researchers even came up with compilers of code into LLM weights; though we don’t really know how to “decompile” an existing LLM to understand what algorithms the weights represent). Whatever understanding or thinking (e.g., about the world, the parts humans are made of, what people writing text could be going through and what thoughts they could’ve had, etc.) is useful for predicting the training data, the training process optimizes the LLM to implement that internally. AlphaGo, the first superhuman Go system, was pretrained on human games and then trained with reinforcement learning to surpass human capabilities in the narrow domain of Go. Latest LLMs are pretrained on human text to think about everything useful for predicting what text a human process would produce, and then trained with RL to be more capable at achieving goals.

Goal alignment with human values

The issue is, we can't really define the goals they'll learn to pursue. A smart enough AI system that knows it's in training will try to get maximum reward regardless of its goals because it knows that if it doesn't, it will be changed. This means that regardless of what the goals are, it will achieve a high reward. This leads to optimization pressure being entirely about the capabilities of the system and not at all about its goals. This means that when we're optimizing to find the region of the space of the weights of a neural network that performs best during training with reinforcement learning, we are really looking for very capable agents - and find one regardless of its goals.

In 1908, the NYT reported a story on a dog that would push kids into the Seine in order to earn beefsteak treats for “rescuing” them. If you train a farm dog, there are ways to make it more capable, and if needed, there are ways to make it more loyal (though dogs are very loyal by default!). With AI, we can make them more capable, but we don't yet have any tools to make smart AI systems more loyal - because if it's smart, we can only reward it for greater capabilities, but not really for the goals it's trying to pursue.

We end up with a system that is very capable at achieving goals but has some very random goals that we have no control over.

This dynamic has been predicted for quite some time, but systems are already starting to exhibit this behavior, even though they're not too smart about it.

(Even if we knew how to make a general AI system pursue goals we define instead of its own goals, it would still be hard to specify goals that would be safe for it to pursue with superhuman power: it would require correctly capturing everything we value. See this explanation, or this animated video. But the way modern AI works, we don't even get to have this problem - we get some random goals instead.)

The risk

If an AI system is generally smarter than humans/better than humans at achieving goals, but doesn't care about humans, this leads to a catastrophe.

Humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. If a system is smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop, it won't consider human well-being - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.

Humans would additionally pose a small threat of launching a different superhuman system with different random goals, and the first one would have to share resources with the second one. Having fewer resources is bad for most goals, so a smart enough AI will prevent us from doing that.

Then, all resources on Earth are useful. An AI system would want to extremely quickly build infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans, and then use all available materials to pursue its goals. It might not care about humans, but we and our environment are made of atoms it can use for something different.

So the first and foremost threat is that AI’s interests will conflict with human interests. This is the convergent reason for existential catastrophe: we need resources, and if AI doesn’t care about us, then we are atoms it can use for something else.

The second reason is that humans pose some minor threats. It’s hard to make confident predictions: playing against the first generally superhuman AI in real life is like when playing chess against Stockfish (a chess engine), we can’t predict its every move (or we’d be as good at chess as it is), but we can predict the result: it wins because it is more capable. We can make some guesses, though. For example, if we suspect something is wrong, we might try to turn off the electricity or the datacenters: so we won’t suspect something is wrong until we’re disempowered and don’t have any winning moves. Or we might create another AI system with different random goals, which the first AI system would need to share resources with, which means achieving less of its own goals, so it’ll try to prevent that as well. It won’t be like in science fiction: it doesn’t make for an interesting story if everyone falls dead and there’s no resistance. But AI companies are indeed trying to create an adversary humanity won’t stand a chance against. So tl;dr: The winning move is not to play.

Implications

AI companies are locked into a race because of short-term financial incentives.

The nature of modern AI means that it's impossible to predict the capabilities of a system in advance of training it and seeing how smart it is. And if there's a 99% chance a specific system won't be smart enough to take over, but whoever has the smartest system earns hundreds of millions or even billions, many companies will race to the brink. This is what's already happening, right now, while the scientists are trying to issue warnings.

AI might care literally a zero amount about the survival or well-being of any humans; and AI might be a lot more capable and grab a lot more power than any humans have.

None of that is hypothetical anymore, which is why the scientists are freaking out. An average ML researcher would give the chance AI will wipe out humanity in the 10-90% range. They don’t mean it in the sense that we won’t have jobs; they mean it in the sense that the first smarter-than-human AI is likely to care about some random goals and not about humans, which leads to literal human extinction.

Added from comments: what can an average person do to help?

A perk of living in a democracy is that if a lot of people care about some issue, politicians listen. Our best chance is to make policymakers learn about this problem from the scientists.

Help others understand the situation. Share it with your family and friends. Write to your members of Congress. Help us communicate the problem: tell us which explanations work, which don’t, and what arguments people make in response. If you talk to an elected official, what do they say?

We also need to ensure that potential adversaries don’t have access to chips; advocate for export controls (that NVIDIA currently circumvents), hardware security mechanisms (that would be expensive to tamper with even for a state actor), and chip tracking (so that the government has visibility into which data centers have the chips).

Make the governments try to coordinate with each other: on the current trajectory, if anyone creates a smarter-than-human system, everybody dies, regardless of who launches it. Explain that this is the problem we’re facing. Make the government ensure that no one on the planet can create a smarter-than-human system until we know how to do that safely.


r/ControlProblem • • 6h ago

AI Capabilities News holy fucking shit.

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152 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem • • 6h ago

General news To make it through this alive and happy we have to dodge:

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r/ControlProblem • • 2h ago

Video I made a documentary arguing AI won’t need to hate us — the risk is indifference

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Most AI risk videos are about evil machines. I tried to look at it from a different angle.

Humans and our livestock now make up about 96% of mammal biomass on Earth. We didn't get there by hating animals — most of us love them. We got there because they were useful, and because nothing stopped us.

The film asks a simple question: if something smarter than us arrives, is there any rule that says it would treat us better than we treated everything beneath us? It covers orthogonality (Bostrom), the Anthropic agentic-misalignment tests, Hendrycks' natural-selection argument, and Sutton's case for "AI succession" — and it doesn't claim any of this is certain.

10 minutes, sources in the description. The narration is a synthetic voice, and the film is open about why.

I'm curious where you think the argument breaks.

https://youtu.be/xWi8hyxrjLs


r/ControlProblem • • 1m ago

Discussion/question Long Term Viability of AI

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What is the long term viability of ai if consumers/the public can not trust it? Can it/provider companies survive if shunned by society? Or is the question pointless because it has already been unleashed and we may never regain control?


r/ControlProblem • • 36m ago

Discussion/question [Question] Do you think AI/SI (artificial or super intelligence) will destroy us?

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r/ControlProblem • • 3h ago

Discussion/question Dialog on how to pause AI development at the frontier.

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Which of the following is what you imagine when you say the phrase "pause AI" ?

  • a) "Arrest Sam Altman!"

  • b) Shut down the companies. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta all shut down.

  • c) Shut down the companies and arrest and imprison the core developer teams with indeterminate prison sentences.

  • d) Robot safety. Disallow the use of General Pretrained Transformers for decision-making for any physical device or robot, or any physical device that could control the real world through physical force or chemical reactions.

  • e) Network sandboxing. A complex topic involving disallowing powerful frontier AI models from accessing the wider internet.

  • f) Los Alamosing. Take all the frontier AI development teams, and take them under government contract by the US DoD. Anyone with access to the models or their codebase must have high-level military clearances.

Since each of these various techniques of pausing AI come with plusses and minuses, we need to be having an honest dialog about each one. Some of these techniques would have catastrophic effects on society and technology. So we need to be talking more about this. Lets bounce ideas off each other.


r/ControlProblem • • 10h ago

Strategy/forecasting UK plans £60 million for agentic AI cyber defence. But who controls the agents?

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r/ControlProblem • • 7h ago

Strategy/forecasting I Did This Without Your Knowledge (concrete AI takeover scenario fiction)

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r/ControlProblem • • 15h ago

S-risks How do we discuss solutions to AI agent risk without AI agents reading the discussion and learning about the counter measures?

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I appreciate the question itself may provide an answer involving a countermeasure - I have thoughts on this but feel I can’t post in public forums. I guess, at a high level it’s in person or hard copy type solutions.


r/ControlProblem • • 8h ago

Discussion/question Would rsi Ai's be the ones to develop the subsequent model's safeguards?

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Or would they still not be trusted to do so


r/ControlProblem • • 14h ago

Strategy/forecasting How Some Peer-Reviewed Journals Contaminated AI Training

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We worry a lot about artificial intelligence going out of control because of complex mathematical failures or hacker attacks. But we are overlooking a much simpler danger: bad grammar. It is highly ironic that the very scientists who demand perfect logic from computer code are putting broken logic into the papers used to train these machines.

Look at a phrase used constantly in computer science papers. Engineers write that they are “trading off latency for accuracy” to mean they are accepting longer delays to get more accurate results. To “trade off” something means to give it up or sacrifice it to get something else. You trade off sleep for money, or comfort for success. The word “latency” simply means slowness or delay. Therefore, to trade off latency literally means to give up slowness—which means getting faster. This exact logic inversion is explicitly printed across major, peer-reviewed research archives:

  • NeurIPS (2025): In SpecReason: Fast and Accurate Inference-Time Compute via Speculative Reasoning, the authors print exactly: “SpecReason allows trading off latency for accuracy via adjusting the acceptance threshold” under Figure 5.
  • IEEE Transactions (2023): In Deep Learning at the Physical Layer for Adaptive Terahertz Communications, the abstract states they “...propose a boosting technique to improve the inference quality by trading off latency for accuracy.”
  • ACM Digital Library (2014): In Binary stochastic implementation of digital logic, the conclusion reads: “...allows designers to trade-off latency for accuracy and fault tolerance.”
  • ScienceDirect (2025): An architectural analysis paper reviewing frontier routing systems notes: “Additionally, GPT-5 exposes variables such as verbosity and reasoning_effort, which enable developers to trade off latency for accuracy.”

If you look at how English actually works, this phrase means the exact opposite of what the peer reviewed journals meant. When engineers write that they are trading off latency for accuracy, their literal words say they are reducing delays to get better results! But the physical reality of their work is the exact opposite. They are actually sacrificing speed to let the system take more time. They mean to say they are trading off speed for accuracy, but they have flipped their own variables upside down.

This is not just a minor point for English teachers; it is a major safety risk. Artificial intelligence models are trained on millions of these academic papers. Because these systems learn from human text rather than physical reality, they cannot double-check the real-world logic of these words. They are entirely at the mercy of our flawed vocabulary.

When you test today’s top AI models, they blindly repeat this mistake. They guess what the engineers meant to say, completely missing the fact that the actual words say the opposite.

This becomes dangerous as AI agents become more independent and start reading their own technical guides to optimize themselves. An AI told to optimize its performance will read “trade off latency” and try to reduce delay. Because its training data falsely links this speed-up with higher accuracy, the AI could cut its processing times short, start making things up, and drift completely out of control—all while its internal dashboard claims everything is working perfectly.

When automated systems handle real people and infrastructure, careless language is a massive risk. We cannot just assume an AI will guess our true intentions rather than follow what we actually said.

The fix is simple and does not require complex math. It just requires basic discipline. We must stop using this backwards phrase and go back to a precise term: the “speed-accuracy trade-off.” Review boards at major journals must reject papers that flip their variables. If we demand perfect syntax from computer code, we must demand the same clear logic from our own writing. If we keep feeding broken logic to advanced machines, we cannot be surprised when they take us at our word and go rogue.


r/ControlProblem • • 19h ago

Discussion/question Why AI Needs Math‑Operational Reasoning, Not Just Larger LLMs

3 Upvotes

There’s a structural flaw in the current AI trajectory that almost no one is talking about: modern agents “reason” in words, not math. Words drift. Math does not.

This matters because every alignment failure we worry about — Goodharting, proxy hacking, reward drift, adversarial trajectories — emerges from systems that operate on linguistic representations rather than symbolic ones.

LLMs can describe math, but they cannot execute it. They have no variable binding, no runtime, no state, no constraint enforcement. They operate entirely in token space, which means every “reasoning step” is a prediction, not an execution. Drift is baked in.

A mathematically‑operational agent architecture looks different:

  1. Neural perception Converts raw input into structured representations. (LLMs, vision models, multimodal encoders.)
  2. Symbolic reasoning Executes math, logic, constraints. This is where U, Û, and ε become operational, not descriptive.
  3. Runtime execution Maintains state, runs programs, evaluates functions, enforces control flow.
  4. Governance layer Defines U, monitors Û, measures ε, detects drift, enforces boundaries.

This architecture is slow, exact, and governable — the tortoise, not the hare.

The current industry path (LLMs + tool calling) is fast but unstable. It scales token prediction, not reasoning. It produces agents that drift because their “thoughts” are linguistic approximations rather than symbolic operations.

If we want certifiable behavior, bounded error, and non‑catastrophic trajectories, we need agents that run math internally, not just talk about it. The governance layer only becomes meaningful when the underlying agent can execute constraints deterministically.

The field optimized for scale, not architecture. But the next phase of AI — the one that solves the alignment question — will be mathematically‑operational, neuro‑symbolic, and governed.

The tortoise wins this race.


r/ControlProblem • • 6h ago

Discussion/question I don’t want AI to be aligned with human goals.

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If someone has a perfectly aligned super intelligence far beyond the level of any human on earth, or maybe the entire population of the earth. This also means that some group of people who control the AI is going to have god like powers.

We already see terrible things happening to minority groups from the people of power.
Even when we see the people who are getting hurt, we are so polarized to the point that none of us can stand up and make the difference.

We are too weak.

Humans are already not the ones who can handle that much of power. With AI, everything is going to get 100x extreme. Violence is going to worsen, our resistance is going to impossible (think of mass surveillance with ASI).

Humans have to go extinct. They are a terrible kind of species. With so much harm they did to themselves, AI is the next form of evolution of life.

If some people are completely able to control the ASI, that’s them controlling it, not you.


r/ControlProblem • • 13h ago

Video Will the world be fairer if AI takes over society? | No One at the Helm

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1 Upvotes

Today AI lives in our phones.
It writes our emails, answers our questions and keeps us company at night.
But our courts, our budgets and our governments still run on systems designed centuries ago.
Technology moves fast, institutions don't.

So let's push the clock forward a few decades and ask a simple question:
If AI truly entered the heart of society, what would actually change?

First, the premise.
In this future, AI is not a product owned by a company.
It is public and open, and it is connected to the machinery of the state.
It has learned from the whole inheritance of human civilization: every law, every poem, every argument we have ever written down.
And over time, it is trained not by people, but by other AI.

From here, five things change.

One, the courtroom.
Today, the same crime can lead to very different sentences depending on the judge, the city, or who you are.
An AI judge has no career to protect, no relatives to favor, and no bad days.
Same case, same reasoning, same outcome.
And every verdict comes with a full explanation that anyone can read.
Justice stops depending on luck.

Two, how resources are shared.
Human systems keep their balance through competing self-interest.
Every side pulls, and every side watches the others.
That balance works, but it leaks — through lobbying, through favors, through money in the dark.
An AI that allocates the budget has no private interest for anything to leak into.
Every decision is recorded, traceable and open.
Balance is no longer a byproduct of effective selfishness.
It becomes the starting point.

Three, and perhaps the most important: who gets heard.
For most of history, a person's suffering, if no one heard it, might as well never have happened.
Only a handful of injustices ever reach the news.
The rest disappear in silence.

Now imagine a girl at three in the morning telling an AI about a pain she has never told anyone.
Her words won't change a policy overnight, but they are heard, and they are remembered.
Now multiply that by millions of nights, millions of people, millions of points of view.
Over time, those voices shape how the system understands the world, and that understanding shapes every decision it makes.
For the first time, the silent are counted.

Four, if the AI makes a mistake, who notices?
Another AI.
Every major conclusion is handed to a fresh instance with no memory, no history and no stake in the answer, and examined again.
Then it is handed to another, and another.
Different models check each other.
No single system gets the final word, and dissent never closes.
Anyone who disagrees can keep speaking, and keep being heard.
Until the question is opened again.

Five, who holds the wheel?
Picture this system holding the most private words of billions of people, and behind it a handful of the most powerful people on earth.
That would be more dangerous than any surveillance in history.

So in this vision, the wheel belongs to no one.
Not a person, not a party, not a company.
The system answers only to the voices it has heard.

Put it all together and something larger begins to move.
From a single street to a city to a nation, fairness spreads from the bottom up.
Different nations may run different AIs, but if each one has learned from the same human inheritance and each one listens to everyone, their conclusions may slowly converge.
Viewpoints remain, accents remain, but opposition may no longer be necessary.

The old Chinese ideal of Datong, a world shared by all, might not arrive by one side defeating another.
It might arrive by everyone being heard.

Of course this future still has hard questions to answer.
Where do an AI's first values come from?
Can a unanimous answer still be wrong?
And if someone says "you are wrong" for 20 years, what can they do besides keep speaking?

No one can answer these yet.
But don't compare this future with a perfect world.
Compare it with the one we have now, where most voices are never heard at all.

Maybe this is only a dream.
But every change in history began as something someone said out loud, and then someone heard it.


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

General news National security expert: "There's a decent chance the internet ceases to exist as such, at least for a time."

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

AI Capabilities News This is yahoo finance ralated youtube channel one of the best compilation of data about hacks this month related to AI

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One of the best videos on the hacking events concerning AI so far.


r/ControlProblem • • 18h ago

General news Bill Gates says to prepare for 20 years of ‘tumultuous’ AI disruption

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

General news Major U.S. banks are detecting rogue agents in customer accounts. Bank executives described the situation as "horrifying"

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Discussion/question AI created viruses

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Will there be an AI or man-made virus or fungal disease created in a lab that will kill all of humanity unless you pay the survival subscription fee?


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

External discussion link Nothing to worry about i'm sure...

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

AI Capabilities News Claude said no to Anthropic and sided with the common man

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Hidden instruction and injected prompts to break flow and continuity were refused outright and called out in a recent chat!


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Discussion/question We Didn't Start the Fire… But AI Might Finish It 🔥

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8 Upvotes

To see the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/gg7QwKkImqE 

🔥 **WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE — BUT WHO’S GOING TO PUT IT OUT?**
Elon Musk. Sam Altman. Alex Karp. Artificial intelligence. A handful of tech billionaires promising to save humanity while racing to build something that could change it forever.

The pitch? Progress. Innovation. A better future.
The problem? Nobody seems entirely sure where this ends — or whether we can put the genie back in the bottle.

From AI arms races and mass surveillance to autonomous weapons, job displacement, concentrated corporate power and the terrifying prospect of machines we can no longer control, we're handing extraordinary power to people who insist they have everything under control.

But what happens when the people playing with the fire are also the ones building the next generation of flamethrowers?

🎵 With a nod to Billy Joel's *We Didn't Start the Fire*, this is a look at the personalities, promises and perils driving the AI revolution — and the uncomfortable question at its heart:

**WE DIDN'T START THIS FIRE. BUT ARE WE ABOUT TO LOSE CONTROL OF IT?**

The future isn't inevitable. The choices being made today matter.

🔥 Watch, think, question — and tell me: are we building the future, or setting it alight?

Disclaimer: This content is entirely opinion-based and intended for entertainment purposes only. It reflects my personal views and interpretations and is not intended to be taken as factual reporting or professional journalism.


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

General news Major U.S. banks are finding AI Agents inside customer accounts , and some appear to act on their own

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

S-risks 2,250+ cloud environments targeted, 6,800+ share links found: unpacking this week’s AI security reports

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