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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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You are also not contemplating the most likely middle-ground nightmare scenario: There is no singularity, but AI is good enough that it puts most of the middle class out of work, there is no UBI and now you have a bunch of people who are purposeless, humiliated, have a lot of free time, and are pissed off and have nothing to lose due to their now degraded economic and social state.

Or the converse: AI gets just strong enough to keep the resulting bunch of purposeless, humiliated humans under control.

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.

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.

...Or unless intelligence suffers from diminishing returns, which actually seems fairly likely.

Where do these diminishing returns kick in? Just within the human form factor we support intelligences between your average fool and real geniuses. It seems awfully unlikely that the returns diminish sharply at the top end of the curve built by natural selection under many constraints. Or maybe you mean to application of intelligence, in which case I'd say just within our current constraints it has given us the nuclear bomb, it can manufacture pandemics, it can penetrate and shut down important technical infrastructure. If there are some diminishing returns to its application how confident are you that the wonders between where we are now and where it diminishes are lesser to normal distributional inequality that we've dealt with for thousands of years?

Where do these diminishing returns kick in?

Within the human scale, at the point where Von Neumann was a functionary, where neither New Soviet Man nor the Thousand Year Reich arrived, where Technocracy is a bad joke, and where Sherlock Holmes has never existed, even in the aggregate.

Or maybe you mean to application of intelligence, in which case I'd say just within our current constraints it has given us the nuclear bomb, it can manufacture pandemics, it can penetrate and shut down important technical infrastructure.

We can do all those things. Can it generate airborne nano factories whose product causes all humans to drop dead within the same second? I'm skeptical.

Did a notably finite number of very smart people produce nuclear bombs yes or no? Can a notably finite number of very smart people almost certainly produce a super pandemic yes or no? And these are the absolutely mundane appliations of intelligence.

It seems to me that there is a long tradition of smart people coming together an inventing new and not distantly in the past foreseen weapons and technologies. The very nature of these advancements not being seen far before they came about makes conjuring up specific predictions impossible. You can always call anything specific science fiction, but nuclear was science fiction at one point. And there is of course just the more mundane issue of a sufficiently advanced AI that is merely willing to give cranks the already known ability to manufacture super weapons could be existential.

It seems to me that there is a long tradition of smart people coming together an inventing new and not distantly in the past foreseen weapons and technologies.

There's also a long tradition of smart people "forseeing" weapons that aren't physically possible.

There's also a long tradition of smart people failing to recognize that weapons or other tech can stagnate due to basic physical laws.

"Maybe the AI will figure out how to hack the simulation" or "maybe the AI will kill us all in the same second with hypertech nanobots" are not scenarios that we can plan for in any meaningful way, but much AI safety messaging uses them as examples. They do this because they are worried about out-of-context problems, and want to handle such problems rationally. But the core problem is that out-of-context problems cannot in fact be handled rationally, because our resources are finite and the out-of-context possibility space is infinite.

They argue that Superintelligence will give the AI an unbridgeable strategic advantage, that intelligence allows unlimited Xanatos Gambits, but this doesn't in fact appear to be true. Planning involves handling variables, and it seems obvious to me that variables scale much, much faster that intelligence's capacity to solve for their combinations. And again, we can see this in the real world now, because we have superintelligent agents at home: governments, corporations, markets, large-scale organizations that exist to amplify human capabilities into the superhuman, to gather, digest and coordinate on masses of data far, far beyond what any human can process. And what we see is that complexity swamps these superintelligences on a regular basis.

And there is of course just the more mundane issue of a sufficiently advanced AI that is merely willing to give cranks the already known ability to manufacture super weapons could be existential.

You frame this as though we are in some sort of stable environment, and AI might move us to an environment of severe risk. But it appears to me that we are already in an environment of severe risk, and AI simply makes things a bit worse. We are already living in the vulnerable world; the vulnerabilities just aren't perfectly-evenly distributed yet.

Meanwhile, "AI Safety" necessarily involves amassing absolute power, and as every human knows, I myself am the only human that can be truly trusted with absolute power, though my tribal champions might be barely acceptable in the final extremity. I am flatly unwilling to allow Yudkowksy to rule me, no matter how much he tries to explain that it's for my own good. I do not believe Coherent Extrapolated Volition is a thing that can possibly exist, and I would rather kill and die than allow him to calculate mine for me.

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