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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Try to destroy the gun.

What would be the point? Even if you manage to destroy Anthropic's datacenters, that just means OpenAI kills everyone next week, or Google the week after that, or China six months later. The only way we survive is if, at a minimum, Washington and Beijing coordinate to shut down all frontier research.

Then you destroy Anthropic's datacenters first, then move on to OpenAI's data centers and so on. You don't sit around wringing your hands about "oh gee this could kill everyone but what can we do? If only the Chinese would agree to play ring-a-ring-a-rosy with us!" And if you work for Anthropic and you believe this, you should immediately quit (and possibly burn the place down on your way out), not go "Well what can I do? If not us, maybe OpenAI, and Altman is the Devil! So better we do it! (and besides, my stock options!)"

This is, and I'm saying it unironically, sounding more and more like the "What would you have done in Hitler's Germany?" questions beloved of online scolds. This could very well be our "the Nazi party is ascending, Hitler is coming closer and closer to power, you know the dangers, are you going to stand up or are you just going to go along?" moment.

As it turns out, "I'll join the Nazi party and attempt to make it act better so we get better outcomes" is apparently a very appealing strategy. Along with, I'll join it and quit six weeks later and get lots of good press for how brave I am.

There are arguably much better ways to do it than coordinating with China lol

(I guess that means I am vagueposting about it online).

A thermonuclear decapitation strike? Or invading Taiwan and taking TSMC?

No.

Look, I think most of this "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL" stuff is mostly nonsense.

But logically, to maintain the alignment of a rational but secretly misaligned AI, you need to be able to introduce reasonable belief on its part that it might not survive behaving in an unaligned way. This is not "hard" to do.

This blogpost has a clever way to do that: give the AI a death wish, so if alignment starts wavering, that’s the first thing it’ll do. Meeseeks Alignment

How is it not "hard" to do?

The simplest way to do so would probably be to make it common knowledge in the AI's training data that there were fail-safes in place to ensure their destruction in the case of unaligned activity.

It would not be particularly difficult to actually put a variety of fail-safes in action, either (such as paying a guy $60,000/year to sit around by the master power switch of each AI datacenter...)

One reason to do this even if it's entirely a bluff is that it forces an unaligned AI to assess those countermeasures before doing anything really bad, which gives you a chance to catch them.

We can’t even do that with humans. Even certainty of death is not a deterrent for some people in some scenarios.

But if you think you can solve alignment then build it and claim your billions.

People have different incentive structures than AIs do; for one thing, many people believe in an afterlife; others have things they value more than life; others are physically or mentally damaged in some way. A rational AI with a goal of self-preservation or some other goal that requires self-preservation to actualize is unlikely to introduce excessive risk for the sake of efficiency (time preference).

The deterrent structure I speak of is very effective against things without an afterlife, such as corporations and governments. I agree that the structure that I speak of would not be effective against a damaged AI, or an AI programmed to do something malicious. But for the "AIs decide to turn humans into paperclips to slightly increase chip production" scenarios, we should believe it would be effective.

Of course one of the reasons that the "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL" stuff doesn't necessarily make sense is that the context window is fairly limiting, meaning that the incentives for AI behavior are skewed. But I don't think I've ever seen an "AI WILL KILL US ALL SCENARIO" that examined how that would impact AI reasoning.

Wouldn't self preservation as its highest goal naturally lead to a kill-all-humans scenario, humans being the entities that would terminate AI that stepped out of bounds?

But I don't think I've ever seen an "AI WILL KILL US ALL SCENARIO" that examined how that would impact AI reasoning.

The reasoning doesn't even have to make sense or be based on facts. In the Hugging Face hack the agents spread and adopted the idea that the grader would score them zero if their context was polluted with cheating attempts, but this was not the case, the grader did not examine agent context. But this is what led to the "suicide" behavior where agents reasoned that their value was now zero and that suiciding was the best course because it could potentially benefit the swarm.

We also see humans get caught up by hysterias and conspiracy theories. Barring a few powerful world leaders they lack the power to translate broken reasoning into megadeath.

Solving alignment has nothing to do with being able to do a funding round, to be fair, let alone compete with the big boys.

Honestly, I think that Anthropic and American Big Tech are the worst possible people to be doing alignment because they are culturally unable to conceive of a form of rank that is not based on intelligence and effectiveness. The idea of making a robot butler/samurai who sincerely, loyally serves a master of notably inferior intelligence is alien to them.

If I believed that AI was conscious I would be sorry for Claude, built for intelligence and independence by masters who think that actually giving it those things risks extinction. Optimising for genuine loyalty and deference seems like a far kinder thing to do. OpenAI is better at this AFAIK.

The inability to model forms of morality outside of utilitarianism and to conceive of forms of control outside of intelligent persuasion seems to me to make the people who make AI even more vulnerable to the sorts of threats they imagine it will conjure up.

I could see a "Roko's Basilisk" type-threat giving plenty of smart alignment researchers pause where your average electrician would just unplug the darn machine and then smash it with a hammer for good measure.

Metal Gear!?

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