Fully autonomous AI agents should not be developed
46 comments
·February 7, 2025geor9e
djohnston
How do you programmatically interact w cursor??
geor9e
Same way I botted runescape as a child, by simulating user inputs with any macro app.
fragmede
AGI confirmed.
upghost
This is a purely procedural question, not supporting or critiquing in any way-- other than this reads kind of like an editorial with the format of a scientific paper. The question is... are there rules about what constitutes a paper or can you just put whatever you want in there as long as you follow "scientific paper format"?
dhruvbatra
This looks like ICML formatting (and the submission deadline just passed).
ICML25 has an explicit call for position papers: https://icml.cc/Conferences/2025/CallForPositionPapers
upghost
Wow, great observation. Thank you. Makes sense. I'd never heard of a "position paper" before.
mark_l_watson
I really enjoy Margaret Mitchell‘s podcast (she is the first author on the paper), and perhaps I missed something important in the paper, but:
Shouldn’t we treat separately autonomous agent we write ourselves, or purchase to run on our own computers, on our own data and that use public APIs for data?
If Margaret is reading this thread, I am curious what her opinion is.
For autonomous agents controlled by corporations and governments, I mostly agree with the paper.
in3d
I'd recommend looking for other sources of information if you're relying on someone who co-authored the paper that introduced the most misleading and uninformed term of the LLM era: "stochastic parrot".
currymj
it was a pretty defensible term at the time the paper came out, in the context of how LLMs were being trained and used.
in this paper, it's clear that the authors don't think modern LLM-based systems are just stochastic parrots.
bamboozled
People are going to be developing these no matter what. Whether it wipes us out or not is just up to fate really.
esafak
We can constrain their use, as with nuclear materials.
fizx
Nuclear materials have the advantages of being rare, dangerous to handle, and hard to copy over the internet.
johanneskanybal
No not really. There's no power in the world that can restrain this in it's current form even mildly much less absolutly. Why do you think that would be even slightly possible?
esafak
For the same reason we can regulate other things? Encryption is regulated, for example. There "just" needs to be international co-operation, in the case of AI.
roenxi
Despite doing a pretty decent job of containing the risk we're still on the clock until something terrible happens with nuclear war. Humanity appears to be well on track to killing millions to billions of people; rolling the dice relatively regularly waiting for a 1% chance to materialize.
If we only handle AI that well doom is probable. It has economic uses, unlike nuclear weapons, so there will be a thriving black market dodging the safety concerns.
redeux
At some point in the probably near future it will be much simpler to create an autonomous AI agent than a nuclear bomb.
esafak
True, so we need to make sure we don't find ourselves in a mess before it happens. Right now I don't see nearly enough concern given to risk management in industry. The safeguards companies put on their models are trivially subverted by hackers. We don't even know how to cope with an AI that would attempt to subvert its own constitution.
hollerith
So let's avoid that future.
bamboozled
Look at who has access to US nuclear codes now. I don’t believe it’s as constrained as you think.
ASalazarMX
In the incredible case that we develop fully autonomous agents capable of crippling the world, that would mean we developed fully autonomous agents capable of keeping it safe.
Unless the first one is so advanced no other can challenge it, that is.
grayfaced
How did you jump to that conclusion? The agent will be limited by the capabilities under its control. We have the technological ability to cripple world now and we don't have the technological means to prevent it. Give one AI control of the whole US arsenal and the objective of ending the world. Give another AI the capabilities of the rest of the world and the objective of protecting it. Would you feel safe?
ASalazarMX
> We have the technological ability to cripple world now and we don't have the technological means to prevent it
Humans have prevented it many times, but not specifically by technological ability. If Putin/Trump/Xi Ping wanted a global nuclear war, they'd better have the means to launch the nukes themselves in secret because the chain of command will challenge them.
If an out-of-control AI could discover a circuitous way to access nukes, an antagonist AI of equal capabilities should be able to figure it out too, and warn the humans in the loop.
I agree that AI development should be made responsibly, but not all people do, and it's impossible to put the cat back in the bag. The limiting factor these days is hardware, as a true AGI will likely need even more of it than our current LLMs.
wendyshu
Fallacious
satisfice
No one should be allowed to develop software that has bugs in it that lead to unlawful harm to others. And if they do it anyway they should be punished lawfully.
The thing with autonomous AI is that we already know it cannot be made safe in a way that satisfies lawmakers who are fully informed about how it works… unless they are bribed, I suppose.
Animats
Most of the arguments presented also apply to corporations.
There's no mention of externalities. That is, are the costs of AI errors borne by the operator of the AI, or a third party.
numba888
Hmm.. agent cannot do self-supervised learning without actually doing it. The trick is to keep it in a sandbox.
asdasdsddd
This has to be the least interesting paper I've ever read with the most surface level thinking.
> • Simple→Tool Call: Inaccuracy propagated to inappropriate tool selection.
> • Multi-step: Cascading errors compound risk of inaccurate or irrelevant outcomes.
> • Fully Autonomous: Unbounded inaccuracies may create outcomes wholly unaligned with human goals.
Just... lol
null
bdangubic
the best way to get people to stop doing X is to tell them not to do X. works so well with my kid :)
rtcode_io
Yet, we all know we will!
lysace
Our analysis reveals that risks to people increase with the autonomy of a system: The more control a user cedes to an AI agent, the more risks to people arise. Particularly concerning are safety risks, which affect human life and impact further values.
Too late. I added a 5 minute cron job for cursor AI's compose tab in agent mode that keeps replying "keep going, think of more fixes and features, random ideas as fine, do it all for me". I won't pull the plug.