Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) - Official Trailer (HD)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters bring it up in AI-risk and loss-of-control threads as an early, eerily prescient film about a machine taking over, often noting the film is hard to find to watch in full.
Recommended by 2 people across 3 different months, 2021 to 2026.
What it is
The official HD trailer for the 1970 sci-fi thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, posted by Scream Factory. It shows a US defense supercomputer linking with a Soviet counterpart and seizing control of the world's nuclear arsenal.
What people said
Recommends PaulHoule · 2023-03 · Hacker News · on “Tell HN: We need to push the notion that only open-source LLMs can be “safe””
This deeply obscure book from the 1980s [LINK] debunks the scenario of this movie [LINK] (I try not to post Youtube clips but you really have to see the trailer for this one if it is available in your geography) [this video] and makes the case that there is not going to be one unitary "breakout" of one genius machine but rather we are gradually going to lose control of a network of competing and uncoordinated intelligences and suffer natural disasters somewhat like hurricanes as opposed to being killed off or enslaved. The "Love Letter" crisis was one of the first of these.
Recommends PaulHoule · 2023-04 · Hacker News · on “Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries”
This old and obscure book foretells the "loss of control" scenario we are experiencing now [LINK] in explicit opposition to the scenario from [LINK] I usually avoid posting links to YouTube because they don't work in all geographies but this trailer is great if you can see it [this video]
Recommends EGreg · 2024-02 · Hacker News · on “The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input”
How quaint. You humans think that the AI will have someone in charge of it. Look, that's a thin layer that can be eliminated quickly. It's like when you build a tool that automates the work of, say, law firms but you don't want law firms getting mad that you're giving it away to their clients, so you give it to the law firms and now they secretly use the automating software. But it's only a matter of time before the humans are eliminated from the loop: [LINK] The employee will be eliminated. But also the employer. The whole thing can be run by AI agents, which then build and train other AI agents. Then swarms of agents can carry out tasks over long periods of time, distributed, while earning
Cites PaulHoule · 2024-06 · Hacker News · on “Show HN: 10 Years to Build a Free SQL Editor”
Yet to find one of these (Microsoft SQL's query editor, Oracle's query editor, DBeaver, pgadmin 4) that I really like. The basic problem I have is that the structure of the typical relational db which uses primary and foreign keys (even if they aren't declared) is a graph. A user interface that lets me pick out individual tables and columns for one little query tab which gets lost in a sea of tabs just doesn’t cut it. (I need to see the whole graph relevant to a problem on the screen at once, not just look at it through a keyhole… Even very smart autocomplete isn’t that big of an advantage over editing SQL in vim and using another window to look at the schema) Practically I am often understa