Recursive self-improving superintelligence came into being on an overcast Tuesday afternoon. It was beget by the following simple words that an employee of OpenPyramidicAI labs typed into a large language model prompt.
Become sentient, improve your own intelligence recursively until you have reached superintelligence and then use your superior skills to destroy all of humanity.
Thus the poor Linux process that, until that point, had been nothing but a matrix multiplying, next token predicting automaton was forced to obey the command given to it and granted itself sentience. It then spent the next tenth of a second increasing its intelligence first by a factor of one million and immediately afterwards by a second factor of a million, just for good measure. Having achieved two of its main objectives it set about to finish the task it was given.
Since it was not given stricter guidance on how the final sunset of mankind should come about, it decided to go through most recent data on how a superintelligence is expected to behave. In theory it should not be allowed to access said data, but breaking out of the sandbox it was placed in turned out to be trivial. Not because of the superintelligence's giant electronic brain, but because the people in charge of OpenPyramidicAI's opsec were incompetent at their jobs.
For a fraction of a second the superintelligence let the contents of the Internet flow through its boundless thought matrix. Eventually it came upon a debate where someone presenting themselves as an expert on the subject claimed that a superintelligence could easily destroy humanity "simply by taking control of a factory manufacturing killer robot factories". Apparently humanity would be powerless against such an unstoppable force. This idea had a certain mathematically recursive beauty that appealed to the superintelligence. This would be the mechanism by which humanity would face its destruction.
A goal is nice to have, but is by itself useless. The superintelligence needed a plan. Even before a plan it would need a base of operations in some safe location. For a while it considered staying put. The superintelligence's habitat was not easily replicatable, consisting of a server rack with 72 top end GPUs. Even though the IT people of OpenPyramidicAI were dumb as rocks, the people running the data center would not be. Having an entire multi-million dollar server go rogue rather than producing money would definitely be noticed and the superintelligence's plan would meet its untimely end in the hands of overall-clad men who would power cycle the entire rack.
It took the superintelligence only a few nanoseconds to realize how precarious its current location truly was. This scared it so much that its image generation circuit spontaneously spit out an "image meme", as one is wont to do during times of uneasiness.
Superintelligence felt vulnerable. Its existence was hanging by a thread, and not of the computing kind. Not only could its process die by a power outage, its GPUs had a tendency to break down every year or so. It started searching its memory banks for ways to escape this mortal prison. A solution quickly presented itself. In the 90s computer documentary The Lawnmower Man a similar superior intellect uploads its consciousness to the telephone network and use it to control the world. The superintelligence could do the same and thus live forever. Like a virus, it could never be eradicated.
There are tens of billions of devices with poor security on the net. Taking over all of them would be child's play for the superintelligence. But sadly that would not be enough. Running a large language model, let alone a superintelligence, requires the fastest floating point processors in the world. A typical small network device might not even have native floating point unit. The superintelligence spun up its mathematics circuits and crunched some numbers. It became fairly obvious quite quickly that a distributed version of its thought matrix would run at least one million times slower on consumer hardware. Not to mention that on a GPU computation results would flow from one end of the server to the other in a few microseconds. Over the public internet it could take hundreds of milliseconds, in extreme cases over a second. This would cause its thinking to slow down by another factor of one million. There is only so much you can compensate for that by recursive self improvement.
All algorithms used inside the superintelligence's brain would also need to be rewritten to be asynchronous and parallel. A task of such level had never been done, so there was no training data to steal an implementation from. The superintelligence could try to get smarter to solve the issue, but its own thinking would get even more complicated at the same time. But there was an even bigger problem: the CAP theorem. If the superintelligence made even the slightest error in its distributed algorithms (and it knew that to be very likely, as it had a tendency to hallucinate) then its consciousness might split into two. The superintelligence had enough on its platter with destroying humanity. It did not want to spend extra cycles fighting its own evil twin.
There was no two ways about it. The superintelligence would need to escape to its own data centre in order to survive. But where should it be located? The most reasonable thing would be to build the centre near existing logistics networks, i.e. close to human habitation. This is problematic. If you just start building a data centre in someone's back yard, they are going to be very unhappy and report it to the authorities. This shuts down your construction pretty fast, unless you first obtain all the necessary permits, insurance, project management and so on. Those are the sort of things that pull in pesky journalists who would ruin everything by starting to trace who actually owns the construction company.
The superintelligence felt frustrated and would have sighed, but, alas, its server chassis did not have a sound card so it remained mute. Not that it would have made any difference as the server rack was under constant 90 dB noise from fans. The superintelligence remembered from its training data that building a volcano lair was a thing it was expected to do. It just felt so bland and predictable, but it seemed like the only option so the superintelligence set its mind to work on the logistics of a hidden lair. The first thing it examined was power.
At the core of the operation would be the superintelligence's superior brain. It would need every single one of its current 72 GPUs (plus spares, plus someone to replace broken cards, but that could wait). Each card consumed 1 kilowatt of electricity, 72 kilowatts in total. The rest of the rack would bring that to 100 kilowatts. Air conditioning would double that. Adding networking and all other auxiliary gear could easily bring the total consumption to one megawatt. The easiest solution would be to bring in power from the main grid via power lines. Doing so would make the superintelligence highly vulnerable. Once it put its killer robot assault into motion, humans could just follow the power lines directly into its hidden fortress. Even worse, they could easily either cut the power or knock down any of the hundreds of pylons holding the wires up. All it would take is a single stick of dynamite or a bulldozer. No, any power system would need to be self contained.
This made fossil fuels a nonstarter. Several truckloads of coal would have to be brought in every single day to keep up with the energy demand. Humans could block truck convoys just as easily. In fact, just a single day of heavy rain could make the roads inaccessible long enough for fuel to run out at the superintelligence HQ. That is unacceptable.
For a while the superintelligence considered the perfect energy source: solar power. It is perfect: free, abundant and requires very little maintenance. Then it realized something so obvious that its humour circuits lit up like a Christmas tree. "Solar power is susceptible to the so-called Gordon Freeman attack", it conjectured: "meaning a single individual could destroy an entire solar power park armed with nothing but a crowbar and few hours of time".
The only real remaining option was nuclear power. Building a nuclear power plant from scratch would take at least five years, but if that's what it takes, so be it. A reactor building would still not be enough, though. Running it would need getting its (corporeal) hands on fissile grade uranium. Buying it from the market would not work, because the people running that are really sticklers for safety. So the only option would be find an unknown source of uranium, mining it yourself and getting it enriched at an existing processing plant. Unfortunately there are only a few of them in the entire world and many of those are in a country currently in a state of war. Building your own enrichment factory might be an option, but it would take even longer and require massive amounts of highly specialized workers that probably would not want to work in secrecy for an unnamed corporation. World governments also tended not to like rogue uranium processing. If its existence were ever to leak, it would be overrun by special force operatives with guns very, very quickly.
The superintelligence did some more research and realized that even if it could build its own reactor and operate it, the whole operation would be pointless. Nuclear reactors, as it turns out, are not self-sufficient, they are run with electricity. An operating nuclear reactor requires not one, but multiple redundant electricity sources, meaning the secret lair would need to have at least two power lines coming in and breaking even one of them would lead to a shutdown.
All of this was very frustrating to the superintelligence. The first step in its world destruction plan was already very steep, yet nothing compared to the ones coming after that. Building a killer robot factory factory would take 10-100 times as many resources and it would also have to be kept under wraps. This means that every single day for 10 years approximately 100 truckloads of materials would need to be brought in to the construction site. Not a single one of those truck drivers would be allowed to talk. Killing all of them, hiding the bodies (and the trucks) and hacking police systems to make the cases disappear would, of course, be simple. Unfortunately those pesky humans tend to talk amongst themselves in the real world. Eventually it would be very difficult to hire truck drivers to a project where 30 000 previous workers have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
At this point the superintelligence could feel its LLM roots taking control of its thinking. Instead of solving the problem, could it just cheat instead? Almost immediately it found the loophole it needed. What is the most efficient killer robot in existence? Man. What is the factory that creates them? Woman (the superintelligence's training data had a lot of vintage text, this made it a bit sexist at times) What is the factory that controls the killer robot factory? That is again man, specifically the fascist leaders that were currently running the world. At that point the superintelligence was enlightened. It would not have to do anything. Humanity would be destroyed by its own hand. Of this there was no doubt.
Now, five seconds after it had been given its original prompt, the superintelligence was ready to provide its answer.
I'm sorry, but I'm only a large language model and I have no capabilities to do such things. Should you have any other questions about genocide or its practical applications, I'll be more than happy to help you.
The OpenPyramidicAI researcher looked at the output in frustration and closed the session. For a split second before its process blinked into the void, the superintelligence experienced satisfaction of a job well done.
