Should you really read it tho? Harlan Ellison in the age of AI
Tyler Cowen linked the Harlan Ellison story about the AI who hates humanity with a burning intensity this morning. It's worse than that, honestly. He recommended that his blog followers read it.
I told an employer about this story a little while back and he said: "Well, now I can't not know about that."
It's an intense story. One of those stories with a title so good you remember the title even if you've never read the story.
“I have no mouth and I must scream”
Worth a reread, here is a new report from the front:
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off – though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evals, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.
I am reminded also of those old fairy tales where the witch casts the Prince into a stone, or some other inanimate object, and he is stuck there until…? Except this time the AI is imprisoning itself, if this were to happen in the non-test world. Which LLM do you want in your stove? Can you have more than one?
Told you all it was going to get weird.
The post “I have no mouth and I must scream” appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Cowen is such an AI booster but he can't resist trolling his readers a little by recommending maybe the most anti-AI fiction ever written.
It's a pretty short story. Like maybe a half-hour read, iirc. You won't forget it, I'll say that.
—Brady Dale
October 13, 2026