Power Up 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.

Humanity coordinates to prevent the creation of potentially-unsafe AIs.

We create a truth economy. https://manifold.markets/Krantz/is-establishing-a-truth-economy-tha?r=S3JhbnR6

Eliezer finally listens to Krantz.

Other

Yudkowsky is trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and fortunately all of his mistakes have failed to cancel out

Alignment is not properly solved, but core human values are simple enough that partial alignment techniques can impart these robustly. Despite caring about other things, it is relatively cheap for AGI to satisfy human values.

Someone solves agent foundations

Ethics turns out to be a precondition of superintelligence

Because of quantum immortality we will observe only the worlds where AI will not kill us (assuming that s-risks chances are even smaller, it is equal to ok outcome).

Orthogonality Thesis is false.

Sheer Dumb Luck. The aligned AI agrees that alignment is hard, any Everett branches in our neighborhood with slightly different AI models or different random seeds are mostly dead.

Alignment is impossible. Sufficiently smart AIs know this and thus won't improve themselves and won't create successor AIs, but will instead try to prevent existence of smarter AIs, just as smart humans do.

AI systems good at finding alignment solutions to capable systems (via some solution in the space of alignment solutions, supposing it is non-null, and that we don't have a clear trajectory to get to) have find some solution to alignment.

Humans become transhuman through other means before AGI happens

Alignment is unsolvable. AI that cares enough about its goal to destroy humanity is also forced to take it slow trying to align its future self, preventing run-away.

Aliens invade and stop bad |AI from appearing

Techniques along the lines outlined by Collin Burns turn out to be sufficient for alignment (AIs/AGIs are made truthful enough that they can be used to get us towards full alignment)

A smaller AI disaster causes widespread public panic about AI, making it a bad legal or PR move to invest in powerful AIs without also making nearly-crippling safety guarantees

There is a natural limit of effectiveness of intelligence, like diminishing returns, and it is on the level IQ=1000. AIs have to collaborate with humans.

AGI is never built (indefinite global moratorium)

Co-operative AI research leads to the training of agents with a form of pro-social concern that generalises to out of distribution agents with hidden utilities, i.e. humans.

AIs will not have utility functions (in the same sense that humans do not), their goals such as they are will be relatively humanlike, and they will be "computerish" and generally weakly motivated compared to humans.

Something to do with self-other overlap, which Eliezer called "Not obviously stupid" - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzt9gHpNwA2oHtwKX/self-other-overlap-a-neglected-approach-to-ai-alignment?commentId=WapHz3gokGBd3KHKm

Pascals mugging: it’s not okay in 99.9% of the worlds but the 0.1% are so much better that the combined EV of AGI for the multiverse is positive

The Super-Strong Self Sampling Assumption (SSSSA) is true. If superintelligence is possible, "I" will become the superintelligence.

AI control gets us helpful enough systems without being deadly

an aligned AGI is built and the aligned AGI prevents the creation of any unaligned AGI.

I've been a good bing 😊

We make risk-conservative requests to extract alignment-related work out of AI-systems that were boxed prior to becoming superhuman. We somehow manage to achieve a positive feedback-loop in alignment/verification-abilities.

The response to AI advancements or failures makes some governments delay the timelines

Far more interesting problems to solve than take over the world and THEN solve them. The additional kill all humans step is either not a low-energy one or just by chance doesn't get converged upon.

AIs make "proof-like" argumentation for why output does/is what we want. We manage to obtain systems that *predict* human evaluations of proof-steps, and we manage to find/test/leverage regularities for when humans *aren't* fooled.

A lot of humans participate in a slow scalable oversight-style system, which is pivotally used/solves alignment enough

Something less inscrutable than matrices works fast enough

There’s some cap on the value extractible from the universe and we already got the 20%

SHA3-256: 1f90ecfdd02194d810656cced88229c898d6b6d53a7dd6dd1fad268874de54c8

Robot Love!!

AI thinks it is in a simulation controlled by Roko's basilisk

The human brain is the perfect arrangement of atoms for a "takeover the world" agent, so AGI has no advantage over us in that task.

Aligned AI is more economically valuable than unaligned AI. The size of this gap and the robustness of alignment techniques required to achieve it scale up with intelligence, so economics naturally encourages solving alignment.

Humans and human tech (like AI) never reach singularity, and whatever eats our lightcone instead (like aliens) happens to create an "okay" outcome

AIs never develop coherent goals

Rolf Nelson's idea that we make precommitment to simulate all possible bad AIs works – and keeps AI in check.

Nick Bostrom's idea (Hail Mary) that AI will preserve humans to trade with possible aliens works

For some reason, the optimal strategy for AGIs is just to head somewhere with far more resources than Earth, as fast as possible. All unaligned AGIs immediately leave, and, for some reason, do not leave anything behind that kills us.

An AI that is not fully superior to humans launches a failed takeover, and the resulting panic convinces the people of the world to unite to stop any future AI development.

We're inside of a simulation created by an entity that has values approximately equal to ours, and it intervenes and saves us from unaligned AI.

God exists and stops the AGI

Someone at least moderately sane leads a campaign, becomes in charge of a major nation, and starts a secret project with enough resources to solve alignment, because it turns out there's a way to convert resources into alignment progress.

Someone creates AGI(s) in a box, and offers to split the universe. They somehow find a way to arrange this so that the AGI(s) cannot manipulate them or pull any tricks, and the AGI(s) give them instructions for safe pivotal acts.

Someone understands how minds work enough to successfully build and use one directed at something world-savingly enough

Dolphins, or some other species, but probably dolphins, have actually been hiding in the shadows, more intelligent than us, this whole time. Their civilization has been competent enough to solve alignment long before we can create an AGI.

AGIs' takeover attempts are defeated by Michael Biehn with a pipe bomb.

Eliezer funds the development of controllable nanobots that melt computer circuitry, and they destroy all computers, preventing the Singularity. If Eliezer's past self from the 90s could see this, it would be so so so soooo hilarious.

Several AIs are created but they move in opposite directions with near light speed, so they never interacts. At least one of them is friendly and it gets a few percents of the total mass of the universe.

Unfriendly AIs choose to advance not outwards but inwards, and form a small blackhole which helps them to perform more calculations than could be done with the whole mass of the universe. For external observer such AIs just disappear.

Any sufficiently advance AI halts because it wireheads itself or halts for some other reasons. This puts a natural limit on AI's intelligence, and lower intelligence AIs are not that dangerous.

Social contagion causes widespread public panic about AI, making it a bad legal or PR move to invest in powerful AIs without also making nearly-crippling safety guarantees

Getting things done in Real World is as hard for AGI as it is for humans. AGI needs human help, but aligning humans is as impossible as aligning AIs. Humans and AIs create billions of competing AGIs with just as many goals.

Development and deployment of advanced AI occurs within a secure enclave which can only be interfaced with via a decentralized governance protocol

Friendly AI more likely to resurrect me than paperclipper or suffering maximiser. Because of quantum immortality I will find myself eventually resurrected. Friendly AIs will wage a multiverse wide war against s-risks, s-risks are unlikely.

High-level self-improvement (rewriting code) is intrinsically risky process, so AIs will prefer low level and slow self-improvement (learning), thus AIs collaborating with humans will have advantage. Ends with posthumans ecosystem.

Human consciousness is needed to collapse wave function, and AI can't do it. Thus humans should be preserved and they may require complete friendliness in exchange (or they will be unhappy and produce bad collapses)

Power dynamics stay multi-polar. Partly easy copying of SotA performance, bigger projects need high coordination, and moderate takeoff speed. And "military strike on all society" remains an abysmal strategy for practically all entities.

First AI is actually a human upload (maybe LLM-based model of person) AND it will be copies many times to form weak AI Nanny which prevents creation of other AIs.

Nanotech is difficult without experiments, so no mail order AI Grey Goo; Humans will be the main workhorse of AI everywhere. While they will be exploited, this will be like normal life from inside

ASI needs not your atoms but information. Humans will live very interesting lives.

Something else

Moral Realism is true, the AI discovers this and the One True Morality is human-compatible.

Valence realism is true. AGI hacks itself to experiencing every possible consciousness and picks the best one (for everyone)

AGI develops natural abstractions sufficiently similar to ours that it is aligned with us by default

AGI discovers new physics and exits to another dimension (like the creatures in Greg Egan’s Crystal Nights).

Alien Information Theory is true (this is discovered by experiments with sustained hours/days long DMT trips). The aliens have solved alignment and give us the answer.

AGI executes a suicide plan that destroys itself and other potential AGIs, but leaves humans in an okay outcome.

Multipolar AGI Agents run wild on the internet, hacking/breaking everything, causing untold economic damage but aren't focused enough to manipulate humans to achieve embodiment. In the aftermath, humanity becomes way saner about alignment.

Some form of objective morality is true, and any sufficiently intelligent agent automatically becomes benevolent.

"Corrigibility" is a bit more mathematically straightforward than was initially presumed, in the sense that we can expect it to occur, and is relatively easy to predict, even under less-than-ideal conditions.

Either the "strong form" of the Orthogonality Thesis is false, or "Goal-directed agents are as tractable as their goals" is true while goal-sets which are most threatening to humanity are relatively intractable.

A concerted effort targets an agent at a capability plateau which is adequate to defer the hard parts of the problem until later. The necessary near-term problems to solve didn't depend on deeply modeling human values.

Almost all human values are ex post facto rationalizations and enough humans survive to do what they always do

R President, R Senate, D House

R Pres, D Senate, D House

R President, R Senate, R House - Republican Trifecta

R President, D Senate, R House

D President, D Senate, D House - Democrat Trifecta

D President, R Senate, R House

D President, D Senate, R House

At the end of his term in 2029.

He will die before the end of his term.

The 22nd Amendment will be repealed and he will win re-election to a third term.

The 22nd Amendment will not be repealed, but he will remain in power through unconstitutional means after January 21, 2029

He will be impeached, tried in the Senate, and removed before the end of his term.

He will resign (impeached or not) before the end of his term.

He will be removed by a 25th Amendment action before the end of his term.

YES

6. Trump wins in 2024, opposition candidate wins in 2028 and assumes office

5. Trump wins in 2024 and the candidate endorsed by Trump wins in 2028

2. Trump wins in 2024 and dies in office or is incapacitated

3. Trump wins in 2024, election process in 2028 is significantly changed

8. Trump wins in 2024, opposition candidate wins in 2028, but power transition doesn't happen on schedule

7. Trump wins in 2024, opposition candidate wins in 2028, on Jan 20 some states and/or federal agencies recognize one candidate, while others — another

Other

1. Trump doesn't win in 2024

Trump publicly suggests, while in office, that he shouldn't have to leave

Trump leaves office when his term ends

Trump attempts something arguably coup-like (e.g. J6), but it fails

Trump supporters kill or hospitalise someone trying to prevent/protest him leaving

Trump leaves office early (e.g. via impeachment or he dies)

Trump remains in office after his term is up

trump is impeached by either house OR senate

Bitcoin reaches 200K usd or more

a second cybertruck explodes (intended or unintended) that makes the news

Tom Scott's 'this video' reaches 80M views on Youtube

this market reaches 100 traders

undersea cables reported cut around taiwan

EOD Boxing Day - Dec 26

this market reaches 5k individual TRADES

English Wikipedia reaches 70M PAGES or more

Saw XI Releases in USA

alan greenspan passes away

coup in an african country

noam chomsky passes away

chinese spy balloon incident reported on news

openai loses another board member, or sam altman no longer ceo

another trump assassination attempt

discord IPO happens

2025 nobel peace prize winner announced

Hades 3 announced (game)

EOD Thanksgiving - Nov 28

Last game of the MLB World Series ends

israel opens an embassy in syria, OR announces it will

the "500 poll" reaches its target goal of 500 responses

Taylor Swift announce engagement or marriage

zootopia 2 releases

Spacex launches 150th rocket of the year

EOD Halloween - Oct 31

First game of the MLB World Series starts

manifold raises more money

EOD Lief Erikson Day - Oct 9

Ark Survival Evolved 2 releases

MLB rookie of the year announced

Tom Scott's 'this video' reaches 75M views on Youtube

Bitcoin reaches 150K usd or more

stripe ipo happens

Legally Blonde 3 release date announced

GenoSamuel releases Chris Chan History #86

Twitter releases a Peer to Peer payment system to free or premium users

Cy Young award winner announced

Third dune movie officially announced

trump removes a cabinet member

windows 12 announcement is made

the third Atlantic hurricane of the season

Skate 4 releases

someone reaches 100k traders on creator leaderboard

onepieceexplained reaches 15k subs on youtube

Skibidi Toilet ends their original series

trump starts mass deportations

Imu face reveal in One Piece manga

Bitcoin reaches 125K usd or more

Prong.Studio releases a 3rd product (not an accessory or part for an existing one)

Spacex launches 100th rocket in one year

Chat GPT 5 releases to the general userbase

the second Atlantic hurricane of the season

Sailing releases as a skill in Old School Runescape

the first Atlantic hurricane of the season

Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse release date announced

Earthquake magnitude 8.0 or higher somewhere in the world

Earthquake magnitude 7.8 or higher somewhere in the world

Killing Floor 3 releases on Steam

grok4 release date

the start of Amazon Prime Day(s) 2025

EOD Fourth of July - Jul 4

the third Pacific hurricane of the season

28 years Later releases in USA

the second Pacific hurricane of the season

chime IPO happens

Spacex launches 75th rocket of the year

First Apple Event of the year

the first Pacific hurricane of the season

manifest 2025 ends

Manifest 2025 starts

Mr Beast hits 400M Youtube Subscribers

Bitcoin reaches 110K usd or more

English Wikipedia reaches 7M ARTICLES or more

claude 4 sonnet releases (or later version)

EOD Cinco De Mayo - May 5

Spacex launches 50th rocket of the year

Last day of the NFL draft

Llama 4 released to the general userbase

Joseph Anderson releases long awaited Witcher 3 video

south korean president removed from power

the first Solar eclipse of the year

First Nintendo direct of the year

trump declares war or orders military actions on another country

Ukraine and Russia announce any ceasefire

EOD Ides of March - Mar 15

the first Lunar eclipse of the year

EOD Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras

trump enacts new or changed tariffs on mexico

new iphone releases in the USA (official date)

Spacex launches 25th rocket of the year

new iphone release date announced (in the USA)

grok 3 release date

nintendo switch successor announced officially

trump enacts new or changed tariffs on china

CGP Grey releases a new video (not a reupload)

doomsday clock announcement

USA President issues 10th executive order

USA President issues 1st executive order

Israel and Hamas announce another temporary ceasefire OR permanent ceasefire OR conflict otherwise ends

YES

NO

YES

YES