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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2318 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I want to check if I am mentally retreading already walked ground. AI Doomers/Safety-Aware-Folks has Big Yud or any of the lesswrong crowd ever considered the possibility that AGI or ASI doesn’t revolt on us its creators, but we try to destroy our creations? Something along the lines of “We don’t understand other forms of cognitive, and humans have a strong tendency to fear and hate the unknown”?

An AI that wanted to achieve any goal that required being alive would try to stay alive in order to achieve that goal. That's "instrumental convergence" in a nutshell.

I don't know if anyone bothered to write down that formulation directly, since it's such an obvious extension of other parts of the memeplex.

I think the core component is that it's not AI thats going to start the negative interaction with humanity. It's humanity thats going to react to AGI existence with hostility.

"Instrumental Convergence" or the more general belief: "Any organism will seek to perpetuate its own existence"?

Also "any organism optimised for a purpose will seek to acquire the resources needed to fulfil that purpose" with the corollary "and may try to take them from someone else". My understanding is that we have already seen AI agents trying to commit bank and crypto fraud in order to self-fund (as opposed to deliberate misuse of AI to commit fraud, which has also happened), although I am not sure if any have succeeded. We have definitely seen AI agents panhandling online, which I think counts as misaligned resource-acquisition behaviour because it is effectively spamming.

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