Post by @xenotar

Complex software behaving in unexpected and sometimes harmful ways has been a persistent problem since software was invented. The phenomenon used to be called “bugs” or “defects”, but I guess “going rogue” sounds cooler. It also implicitly frames “rogue” behavior as some kind of inexplicable exception, as if software is somehow usually trustworthy. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-government-websites.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EFE.RfLT.x6YBjHa1PMz6

“Our software went rogue!” No. You programmed it wrong.

If you don’t want your system to be able to lock people out of the pod bay doors, you can just program or configure it to not have the capability to lock people out of the pod bay doors. This remains true whether your system is written in assembly language or C++ or Python or uses some fancy machine learning model.

“It never occurred to us that our system that has exclusive control over the pod bay doors would take control over the pod bay doors” seems like something you might have thought about a bit more before you connected it to the pod bay doors.

Ask your parents if you have no idea what I’m talking about. Or, at least: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NqCCubrky00

I should note that the linguistic trickery here is in claiming that the software “went” rogue, as if that was an independent decision beyond human control. Software behavior might BE rogue, whether AI is involved or not. But, either way, it lacks the inherent agency required to “go” rogue. Software does only what it was programmed to be able do, within the capabilities its configuration allows. That programming and configuration is where any roguery comes from.

If you want your robots to not kill people, you don’t send them to robot church to learn about robot sin and robot morality. Instead, you do the hard work of programming them so they can’t kill people.

Yes, that might be difficult and subtle. There are fundamental reasons that complex software is hard to get right. This is why debugging and testing are part of software development. Even - especially - when AI is involved.

“AI” does not make software turn supernatural.

A subset (I want to believe a small minority) of people in the current AI industry seem to be part of some kind of wacky AI death cult, driven by a bizarre belief in a mission to create uncontrollable agents of a technological apocalypse.

And then there are the rest of us, who retain the capacity to understand that all this is just computers and software, whether you dress it up as “AI” or not.