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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   2339 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Yeah. These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow. It doesn't even take a lot of imagination to outline them.

These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow.

  1. Middle ground plateaus aren't particularly likely and anyone who thinks about the problem for more than it takes to write snarky comment should understand that. In any world where AI is good enough to replace all or most work then it can be put towards the task of improving AI. With an arbitrarily large amount of intelligence deployed to this end then unless there is something spooky going on in the human brain then we should expect rapid and recursive improvement. There just isn't a stable equilibrium there.

  2. Alignment is about existential risk, we don't need a special new branch of philosophy and ethics to discuss labor automation, this is a conversation that has been going on since before Marx and alignment people cannot hope to add anything useful to it. People can, should be, and are starting to have these conversations just fine without them.

Middle ground plateaus aren't particularly likely

I don't think "the government decides to pump the breaks on AI development after it becomes powerful enough to control the populace but before it becomes to powerful to be controlled" is a particularly unlikely outcome (accepting for the sake of argument that such an uber-powerful AI is possible).

Is this a one world government? Because the race scenario is super likely for pushing AGI forward.

I think most governments have similar incentives for, well, aligning AI to be powerful enough to succeed at its tasks, but not so powerful as to be uncontrollable.

AI is useful for intergovernmental conflict. More powerful AI is more useful for intergovernmental conflict.

Nuclear weapons are useful for intergovernmental conflict, but the trendline in government development, deployment, and research has cut away from more powerful nuclear weapons.

Mutually assured destruction doesn't hold for AI, and recently in the nuclear doctrine there have been escalation in defense tech that indeed indicate states would like to have dominance in the area.

Mutually assured destruction doesn't hold for AI

Sure it does. AI, as currently constituted, is more vulnerable to MAD than governmental bodies, not less.

states would like to have dominance in the area.

There's a difference between dominance in nuclear weapons and more powerful nuclear weapons.

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