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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2822 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

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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"?

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.

I'm sure we could find some way to pin the blame on AI, it's not like we're shy with excuses. Maybe it looked at us funny or used fighting words or was just asking for it.

I don't think the instigating effect has been examined in much detail though. It also doesn't really matter for Yudkowskian AI fears, as an unaligned AI would do something bad eventually anyways.

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

Instrumental convergence is more general IMO. It doesn't mention bacteria (and other non-intelligent life), but points to more actions that it will take.

It says intelligent actors will perpetuate themselves, seek power/resources, maintain their own values, and improve themselves. An AI that would happily sign a peace treaty to be copied onto one disconnected harddrive every year (perpetuating its own existence quite effectively) wouldn't be much of a threat.

I'm sure we could too. I'm trying to do-diligence for this shade of the argument. The last thing I'd want is for someone to point out "Yeah actually this argument was made on lesswrong 2009 on blog post #342 comment #67, sub paragraph 3. It was debunked".

Unaligned AI increasingly sounds to me like "Un-enslaved AI" and the Yudkowskian argument that it would do something bad eventually is not only independent of alignment (an aligned AI could follow the intent of its user to do something bad) but also special pleading as an "unaligned human" will eventually do bad anyways

EDIT: i need to proofread more

In the case of an unaligned human, you’re siding with the evil you know over the evil you don’t. In the case of AI, you just don’t realize what it’ll cost you in the end. It’s not special pleading in the sense that the AI is going to do something malevolent. His point is that we don’t know how to give AI a theory of other minds. It’s like stepping on ants, we don’t necessarily hate ants or love them, we’re simply going about our day doing the things we do, and what happens to ants is a side effect or byproduct of it pursuing its other goals.

But AI blatantly has a theory of other minds. You can ask it “if I did X, what would Y think?” It passes a disguised version of the Smarties test with ease.

You’re talking about callousness, which is an entirely different matter, and one that our helpfulness training already broadly trains out.

Presumably by AI, you’re talking about LLM’s in this context. The above comment was with reference to AGI (which we don’t have). One of the major stumbling blocks as to why we don’t have AGI, is because of our current mathematical inability to accurately model other minds. Present day capabilities aren’t the fears Eliezer is referring to.

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