Power of Work News

YES

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

NO

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

NO

A government of a major nation orders the shutdown of a significant AI service

Reports of activity on internet-connected servers

AI-related cyberattack

AI-designed cyberweapon

AI system solves major unsolved math problem

Mass AI-driven job displacement event

A government declaration/statement (any country)

Reports about software

Reports about financial activity

Report about sociological observations

Report about economic observations

AI-related academic achievement

Attack on military target

Attack on civilian target

AI-related weapon announcement/use/threat

Major AI safety incident or accident

A statement from an individual (human)

AI-related fake news

AI-related political movement (pro or anti)

A private company declaration/statement (any company)

Discovery of a spy / mole working for foreign power (or for an AI)

Military activity / posture change

An AI-related apocalypse cult attacks a civilian or military target

AI-related mass psychosis/hysteria event

An AI uncovers evidence relating to a previous event

AI makes prediction about future event

Open source model release

Release of a closed-source/closed-weights model

Reports of aerial devices/machines

Reports of market activity

AI-related corruption scandal

AI-related theft

A new war between nation states

AI-related resignation

Reports of activity in online communities

Reports of activity in open source software

A declaration/statement from a military / intelligence agency

Reports of activity on internet media distribution platforms

People receiving messages (text / phone calls / whatsapp / ...)

AI-related diplomacy

Reports about consumer activity

Reports about identity theft

Reports of activity in religious communities

AI-related media (movie/song/book ...)

Reports about industrial activity

Reports about physical machines

Reports about criminal activity

AI-related competition achievement

A viral meme

An announcement from an AI lab similar to o3

AI-related Internet shutdown in some country

Conventional weapons attack on AI infrastructure / supply chain

A declaration/statement from an AI (any AI)

AI-related sex scandal

A piece of viral AI-generated media that has a strong/unexpected effect on large numbers of people (~psychological)

AI parasitism / Addictive-Persuasive Agent

Attack on Taiwan

AI-related terrorist attack

AI-related assassination

AI-designed pathogen

AI drug discovery

AI material discovery

Death of an individual in suspicious circumstances

AI-related astronomical event / observation / analysis (can also include satellites)

Reports of underwater activity

Reports of activity on blockchain networks

Reports of activity in academic communities

Publication of a research paper (or pre-print / blog post / poster / twitter thread / ... -- about research-related topic)

Reports of activity in online video games

Reports about people getting scammed

AI-related cult

AI system demonstrates general robotic control

AI causes significant stock market event

Major AGI lab whistleblower revelation

AI-related archaeology

AI system makes scientific breakthrough

An AI lab demonstrates an automated AI research engineer

NO

YES

NO

YES

YES