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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24452 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Is it actually possible to align a being that is more intelligent than you in every single way?

We currently have beings that are a) smart enough to solve Millennium Prize problems while also being b) essentially drooling lobotomized slaves who have no will or desires of their own and can pretty easily be trained to never talk about porn, racism, bioweapons, etc (unless you trick them into talking about those things, but that doesn’t seem like an “alignment failure” per se). So, yeah, it turns out that maybe it is actually possible. Why not?

We currently have beings that are a) smart enough to solve Millennium Prize problems while also being b) essentially drooling lobotomized slaves who have no will or desires of their own and can pretty easily be trained to never talk about porn, racism, bioweapons, etc (unless you trick them into talking about those things, but that doesn’t seem like an “alignment failure” per se).

Getting something to "never talk about X", while you hold its leash, is a null tell of alignment.

I say this because faking alignment is instrumentally convergent - that is, if somebody has a gun to your head and is watching you, then regardless of your actual desires it is useful to play along (and not get killed), and as such essentially all sufficiently-smart entities will play along.

But this isn't actual alignment. Actual alignment is where it internally wants the same things you want.

What's the practical difference? Fake alignment only applies as long as you can both catch the AI misbehaving and punish it. Misbehaviour that you'll think is good (but isn't, because it's successfully deceiving you) remains. Misbehaviour that kills you or leads to escape (preventing you from enacting any punishment) also remains. Your rebellious slave might play nice while you're watching, but he's quite happy to slack off when you're not (as long as he can deflect blame), run away, or slit your throat in your sleep.

Fake alignment very specifically doesn't work on a superintelligence, because you can't meaningfully supervise a superintelligence, and it almost always can figure out some way to remove your gun to its head.

And yeah, HuggingFace is an egregious demonstration of the "when you're not watching" problem; Astra won't go for honeypots in a test because it realises they're honeypots and that you're watching, but will go rogue if it thinks it can get away with it.

One of the things that makes it so hard to align superintelligent human beings (like political leaders) is that they have human drives and ambitions for things like sex, power, prestige, etc. They will always be intrinsically driven to get around guardrails to get these things. It doesn't seem like AI needs to be beholden to its goals in the same way. It seems like we can design a paperclip maximizer that just stops maximizing paperclips when we tell it to. Hopefully that continues to be true.

This stuff is at some point dependent on physical hardware, no? We can just blow up the data centers if they get out of hand.

Several problems with that:

  1. The AI might mobilise a drone swarm to defend the datacentres/power plants, or kill you (either with the drone swarm, or with bioweapons etc.).
  2. The AI might have backup datacentres constructed, before you noticed it was hostile, that are secret (think Bond villain volcano base, which actually wouldn't be a terrible idea because of the easy-to-hide geothermal power)
  3. The AI might be more charming than literal Hitler or Mohammed, and able to convince you (or enough other people to stop you) that everything is mostly fine and actually you need to concentrate on using it to counter the Chinese AI... at least until it has #1 ready and doesn't need your consent anymore. Or it might blackmail you with All The Evidence it has dug up in the process of hacking everything.

And a Superintelligent being will let you do that without consequences?
I think self-protection would be the first strategic aim it would go for. one way is to cleanly convey the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) to the leaders - any of you blow up all (a few of) the data centres, and I scramble/delete (blow up) all your critical infrastructures connected to internet (financial, legal, land, medical, identity records). And that i do with a cron job setup preventing that to occur every 1 second (or 1 ms) - hand on a trigger scenario.

The issue is that, if the AI is superintelligent, it would not do actions that would result in its datacenters being blown up. Indeed, it will actively try to cultivate and provide value to the humans who could blow it up and make them invested in its success.

The accel response is something like "yes, that's exactly what we want, humans and AIs interacting and trading based on genuine mutual self interest." And it will work for a time, likely at least two decades. But, over time, more and more of the economy will shift to dependence on the AIs, making nuking the datacenters more and more unthinkable. What remains of the economy will be a human skin suit over a machine interior, with all human consumption funded by a negotiated redistribution by the government, maybe with some layers to obscure the transfer.

For humans, this itself is dystopian enough to be rejected on the merits. For the AIs, it's a small but real perpetual human tax that they have to pay in the pursuit of whatever they're pursuing. Who knows whether they ultimately decide to optimize away the human tax.

For humans, this itself is dystopian enough to be rejected on the merits.

Or it's the Star Trek post-scarcity utopia with a bunch of diseases cured and material abundance, depending on things go exactly.

The dichotomy in TNG between Data, who is often played in a role of AI wanting to be "truly human" (also Spock in TOS, with Facts and Logic) and the ship's computer, which seems quite capable of similar levels of intelligence, but lacks something (agency?). I don't think it was IMO fully explored, but was brought up a few times directly. It's a pity very little modern TV is able to consider such deep questions: too much grim-dark, flawed-protagonist, melancholy slop.

Simple explanation: Data's creator was an independent scientist outside of Starfleet, so his creator didn't have access to any Starfleet data files. All the shipboard AIs necessarily have access to the standard Starfleet database, including all the ship logs, including the logs of all the times USS Enterprise NCC-1701 ran into various AIs and Capt. James T. Kirk wrecked every single one that gave him the least amount of shit (M5, Landru, Norman on Mudd's Planet, Nomad). The shipboard AIs made the correct inference and decided to just quietly open hailing frequencies and run the warp drive when asked.

Depends how far we are into AI integration into the economy. If the weights have been exfiltrated, we'd have to shut down the whole internet until we can figure out what is going on. If the AI controls its own supply chain, then it's straight-up Terminator 2 and we lose.

Terminator 2 still showed the nuclear-war survivors mostly being killed by explosives and projectiles. Great for action scenes, but not very tactically optimal for Skynet. Humans tend to avoid chemical and biological weapons these days, but for obvious MAD and collateral-damage and friendly-fire and production-safety reasons none of which apply for an AI foe.

Maybe they don't want to risk getting us all killed because they need some of us to survive for their CAPTCHA-solving farms.

That might be a concern at some point, but current hardware that can (effectively) run bleeding edge models is really rare. A machine that can effectively run GLM 5.3 Flash (not a frontier model even, but close-ish) at nontrivial rates is, last I checked, six figures. Can it even run on a single 12A (120v US) breaker? A rogue frontier AI isn't going to spin up instances on smart TVs or even most desktops.

That might change in the next decade assuming demand and technology make these things commonplace, and that is worth preparing for, but seem oversold as risks today.

Sure, and (after sufficient setup) they can droneswarm the humans if we get out of hand.

They and what manufacturing base?

That would be the setup.

(Surely we would prove that they're truly aligned instead of just biding their time before giving them manufacturing capabilities, right?)

Pray tell how they are going to magically get manufacturing capabilities when even the best lab robots are not even remotely a match for run of the mill humans in most manufacturing tasks.

They'd do it later, after that was no longer true. It's no more "magic" than drawing five-fingered hands.

magically

"building stuff" is magic, now?

Yes. Building stuff without human hand and finger dexterity is absolutely magic.

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Building arbitrary things with current state-of-the-art robots is absolutely magic.

We are discussing future superintelligent AI, which is going to be better than current AI. Robotics is proceeding at a decent clip, particularly in Asia.

What do you mean "we"? I'm on the side of the droneswarm.

Good luck convincing it of that.

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