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Notes -
As one of the proponents of the critique that Rationalist AI fans are "writing science fiction", allow me to specify my particular view of it. There is a difference between what Gwern is attempting here and the general Rationalist discourse around things like paper clip maximizers, singularities, basilisks, etc. If I had to put it to words it would be something like:
The scientific and engineering breakthroughs to achieve the technological level where the afore mentioned conceptual ideas becomes embodied and realizable are to word, amorphous, nebulous, underspecified, not defined at any level of scientific or engineering rigor. The end state is the assumed outcome and the pathway to achieve it is handwaved away analogous to a professor putting a hard math problem on the board, stating the solution, and saying the solution is trivial and an exercise to the reader. In this case replace trivial with some dismissive word for "let the shape rotators solve it"
The difference here is that Gwern is taking existing technology and proposing a pathway from it, because of that, the starting breakthroughs needed to achieve it are easier to define because its not an infinite span of starting states that lead to this one eventuality.
He essentially needs to prove these things are possible (at least):
These breakthroughs do break down into further breakthroughs but they are all on the cutting edge of current research not the distant futures research like a lot of Rationalist AI ideas.
Alignment is an impossible boogeyman, it's not possible to "align" a sentient being, so if you view eventual AIs as sentient you should just accept they will do what they want. If you view AIs as a tool without sentience, then "alignment" is better specified from control theory, and your actual research would be in quantifying the systemic signal an AI provides and applying classic control algorithms to it. The systemic signal is the hard part bordering on Sci-fi because its underspecified, amorphous, and not rigorously defined.
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