Experimental News

J. Something 'just works' on the order of eg: train a predictive/imitative/generative AI on a human-generated dataset, and RLHF her to be unfailingly nice, generous to weaker entities, and determined to make the cosmos a lovely place.

K. Somebody discovers a new AI paradigm that's powerful enough and matures fast enough to beat deep learning to the punch, and the new paradigm is much much more alignable than giant inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers.

C. Solving prosaic alignment on the first critical try is not as difficult, nor as dangerous, nor taking as much extra time, as Yudkowsky predicts; whatever effort is put forth by the leading coalition works inside of their lead time.

G. It's impossible/improbable for something sufficiently smarter and more capable than modern humanity to be created, that it can just do whatever without needing humans to cooperate; nor does it successfully cheat/trick us.

M. "We'll make the AI do our AI alignment homework" just works as a plan. (Eg the helping AI doesn't need to be smart enough to be deadly; the alignment proposals that most impress human judges are honest and truthful and successful.)

Something wonderful happens that isn't well-described by any option listed. (The semantics of this option may change if other options are added.)

A. Humanity successfully coordinates worldwide to prevent the creation of powerful AGIs for long enough to develop human intelligence augmentation, uploading, or some other pathway into transcending humanity's window of fragility.

I. The tech path to AGI superintelligence is naturally slow enough and gradual enough, that world-destroyingly-critical alignment problems never appear faster than previous discoveries generalize to allow safe further experimentation.

B. Humanity puts forth a tremendous effort, and delays AI for long enough, and puts enough desperate work into alignment, that alignment gets solved first.

D. Early powerful AGIs realize that they wouldn't be able to align their own future selves/successors if their intelligence got raised further, and work honestly with humans on solving the problem in a way acceptable to both factions.

O. Early applications of AI/AGI drastically increase human civilization's sanity and coordination ability; enabling humanity to solve alignment, or slow down further descent into AGI, etc. (Not in principle mutex with all other answers.)

E. Whatever strange motivations end up inside an unalignable AGI, or the internal slice through that AGI which codes its successor, they max out at a universe full of cheerful qualia-bearing life and an okay outcome for existing humans.

H. Many competing AGIs form an equilibrium whereby no faction is allowed to get too powerful, and humanity is part of this equilibrium and survives and gets a big chunk of cosmic pie.

L. Earth's present civilization crashes before powerful AGI, and the next civilization that rises is wiser and better at ops. (Exception to 'okay' as defined originally, will be said to count as 'okay' even if many current humans die.)

F. Somebody pulls off a hat trick involving blah blah acausal blah blah simulations blah blah, or other amazingly clever idea, which leads an AGI to put the reachable galaxies to good use despite that AGI not being otherwise alignable.

N. A crash project at augmenting human intelligence via neurotech, training mentats via neurofeedback, etc, produces people who can solve alignment before it's too late, despite Earth civ not slowing AI down much.

If you write an argument that breaks down the 'okay outcomes' into lots of distinct categories, without breaking down internal conjuncts and so on, Reality is very impressed with how disjunctive this sounds and allocates more probability.

YES

Multivariate statistics

Game Theory

Computer-aided Statistical Analysis

Stochastic models

Applied Microeconometrics

Incentives and economic institutions

Auctions and markets

Time series analysis

Behavioral Economics

Introduction to Economics of Information

Monetary theory and monetary policy

Non-parametric statistics

Economic history

Behavioral Finance

Experimental economic research

Industrial economics

Collective Choice

Environmental economics

Labor markets and population economics

Bounded Rationality

Empirical Corporate Finance

Financial and social policy

Business planning

International banking services

Contract theory

Company valuation

Bank management

International Economics

Development Economics

Advanced Corporate Finance

Political Economy

Cost management and cost accounting

Personnel economics

International accounting according to IFRS

K. Somebody discovers a new AI paradigm that's powerful enough and matures fast enough to beat deep learning to the punch, and the new paradigm is much much more alignable than giant inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers.

I. The tech path to AGI superintelligence is naturally slow enough and gradual enough, that world-destroyingly-critical alignment problems never appear faster than previous discoveries generalize to allow safe further experimentation.

C. Solving prosaic alignment on the first critical try is not as difficult, nor as dangerous, nor taking as much extra time, as Yudkowsky predicts; whatever effort is put forth by the leading coalition works inside of their lead time.

B. Humanity puts forth a tremendous effort, and delays AI for long enough, and puts enough desperate work into alignment, that alignment gets solved first.

Something wonderful happens that isn't well-described by any option listed. (The semantics of this option may change if other options are added.)

M. "We'll make the AI do our AI alignment homework" just works as a plan. (Eg the helping AI doesn't need to be smart enough to be deadly; the alignment proposals that most impress human judges are honest and truthful and successful.)

A. Humanity successfully coordinates worldwide to prevent the creation of powerful AGIs for long enough to develop human intelligence augmentation, uploading, or some other pathway into transcending humanity's window of fragility.

E. Whatever strange motivations end up inside an unalignable AGI, or the internal slice through that AGI which codes its successor, they max out at a universe full of cheerful qualia-bearing life and an okay outcome for existing humans.

J. Something 'just works' on the order of eg: train a predictive/imitative/generative AI on a human-generated dataset, and RLHF her to be unfailingly nice, generous to weaker entities, and determined to make the cosmos a lovely place.

O. Early applications of AI/AGI drastically increase human civilization's sanity and coordination ability; enabling humanity to solve alignment, or slow down further descent into AGI, etc. (Not in principle mutex with all other answers.)

D. Early powerful AGIs realize that they wouldn't be able to align their own future selves/successors if their intelligence got raised further, and work honestly with humans on solving the problem in a way acceptable to both factions.

F. Somebody pulls off a hat trick involving blah blah acausal blah blah simulations blah blah, or other amazingly clever idea, which leads an AGI to put the reachable galaxies to good use despite that AGI not being otherwise alignable.

L. Earth's present civilization crashes before powerful AGI, and the next civilization that rises is wiser and better at ops. (Exception to 'okay' as defined originally, will be said to count as 'okay' even if many current humans die.)

G. It's impossible/improbable for something sufficiently smarter and more capable than modern humanity to be created, that it can just do whatever without needing humans to cooperate; nor does it successfully cheat/trick us.

H. Many competing AGIs form an equilibrium whereby no faction is allowed to get too powerful, and humanity is part of this equilibrium and survives and gets a big chunk of cosmic pie.

N. A crash project at augmenting human intelligence via neurotech, training mentats via neurofeedback, etc, produces people who can solve alignment before it's too late, despite Earth civ not slowing AI down much.

You are fooled by at least one option on this list, which out of many tries, ends up sufficiently well-aimed at your personal ideals / prejudices / the parts you understand less well / your own personal indulgences in wishful thinking.

YES

Newton

Einstein

Maxwell

Richard P. Feynman

Someone who solves quantum gravity

Fermi

Dirac

Heisenberg

Planck

Schrödinger

Bose

Lorentz

Boltzmann

Pauli

Someone with high achievement in experimental physics

Ibn al-Haytham

Someone to cause a paradigm shift in understanding the physics of experience

Bohr

Poincaré

Tycho Brahe

Johannes Kepler

Someone who convincingly replaces quantum mechanics with a better framework

Stephen Hawking

Ernst Mach

Archimedes

Demokritos (sp)

Shen Kuo

YES

YES

YES

YES

NO

I get my car a very weird paint job which would make it unsellable

Will go to edge Esmeralda (in any capacity, at least one event)

Will get cavity preventing bacteria

Japan JET Reunion 2025

I buy a video camera that can record for 24h+ and record various public places

Pickleball tournament

I use computer vision to run diy studies of politeness behavior, grouped by car brand etc

I start an AI beauty/art twitter and get 1k followers

I document a method of self modifying an SLR by blackening all surfaces

Publish and finish personal)group predictions tracking software

AI phrenology - publish a doc on a study of AI image generation models differential portrayals of previously very hard to measure aspects of the human condition such as facial shape linkages to personality

Build a personal pickleball court and attract community members to play there

Surreptitiously construct additional pickleball courts at Foster City

Publish an edited dashcam video of all the things I've filmed with the Tesla ssd

Tool to view twitter as someone else. Given that follows are public this should be easy

Create a nice Tesla models y fold over screen cover with cutouts for vital areas only. Makes night driving much easier. No need for a distracting map view if you're not turning for 200 miles

I off road hike far into iron point outside Golconda, NV

I set a personal daily mileage record

Make balatro mod which shows currently selected hand score if played (ie everyone's need for this otherwise great game)

Get gphotos to fix any of their innumerable UI bugs by complaining

Have a sci-fi story published online somewhere

Make neighborhood intro video with stories etc

Will go to a natal conference again

Local Free library and bulletin board at my place

Overland trek to CITY in Nevada, an off-limits experimental art city which has been in progress for over 50 years

Go to Mexico to see Trevor Bauer play

Go see the Starship 4 launch in Texas in 2024

Release "Reading the mind in the AI generated images"

Get over 1k users for my browser extension

Ship something involving image => description => more images to users

I go to West Africa and go to concerts, visit Nollywood etc

I write a science fiction novel about aliens who experiment with forced evolution