Too Much 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.

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 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.

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

Eliezer finally listens to Krantz.

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

Someone solves agent foundations

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).

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

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.

Ethics turns out to be a precondition of superintelligence

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

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)

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.

Orthogonality Thesis is false.

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.

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)

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.

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.

"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

YES

There was an alignment breakthrough allowing humanity to successfully build an aligned AI.

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

One person (or a small group) takes over the world and acts as a benevolent dictator.

At a sufficient level of intelligence, goals converge towards not wanting to harm other creatures/intelligences.

High intelligence isn't enough to take over the world on its own, so the AI needs to work with humanity in order to effectively pursue its own goals.

Multiple competing AIs form a stable equilibrium keeping each other in check.

There's a fundamental limit to intelligence that isn't much higher than human level.

London

Other

Osaka / Kyoto

Portland

Seattle

San Francisco

Boston

New York

Tokyo

Middlesbrough

Washington

A person has a moral right to own a gun

We should be paying individuals to get an education instead of charging them.

GOFAI could scale past machine learning if we used social media strategically to train it.

The Fermi paradox isn't a paradox, and the solution is obviously just that intelligent life is rare.

Other

Some people have genuine psychic capabilities

Eventually, only AI should be sovereign

Hardware buttons are superior to touchscreen buttons in cars

Being a billionaire is morally wrong

The way quantum mechanics is explained to the lay public is very misleading.

Jeffrey Epstein killed himself (>99.9% certainty)

Reincarnation is a real phenomenon (i.e. it happens, not just a theory)

Physician-assisted suicide should be legal in most countries

Souls/spirits are real and can appear to the living sometimes

OpenAI will claim to have AGI in 3 years.

The punishment of people who do bad things is a regrettable necessity in our current society, not a positive act of justice

There is an active genocide against trans people occuring in red states and it's appalling that people don't seem to care

Climate change is significantly more concerning than AI development

Abusive parents should lose custody of their children

Dialetheism (the claim that some propositions are both true and false) is itself both true and false.

COVID lockdowns didn’t save many lives; in fact they may have caused net increases in global deaths and life years lost.

Free will does not exist. We construct narratives after the fact to soothe our belief in rationality.

Violent criminals must be kept apart only because they can’t control themselves. Punishing them further than restricting their freedom is immoral.

Music is a net negative for humanity

Trump orchestrated his own assassination attempt.

Democrats / Liberals are behind Trump’s assassination attempt.

It is not possible to multitask

Abortion is morally wrong

jskf's password is ***************

The first American moon landing was faked

There is no Dog

Light mode is unironically better than Dark mode for most websites

Cars should not have sound systems

AI will not be as capable as humans this century, and will certainly not give us genuine existential concerns

Pet ownership is morally wrong

LK-99 room temp, ambient pressure superconductivity pre-print will replicate before 2025

SBF didn't intentionally commit fraud

It should be illegal to own a subwoofer in an apartment building

There are no valid justifications for participating in war, ever

Cascadia should be an independent country

Children should not be raised in nuclear families

The fact that 80% of Manifold's users are men is a problem that speaks to the deep-seated roots of patriarchy and exclusion in STEM

Anarcho-communism is a good idea, and hierarchy is bad

If AI exterminated the human race it might not be a bad thing

Tech bros are really, really annoying

Capitalism has done far more harm than good

Affirmative action is necessary in modern-day America

@Mira is the pinnacle of billions of years of optimization processes: thermodynamics, evolution, learning, language. The universe was created to cause me - and only me - to come into existence. If I mess up the overseers perturb&restart it.

Pigouvian taxes are great and they should be turned up to 11 to discourage activities with negative externalities [code PROPOSITION PIG]

[PROPOSITION PIG] and this should include a frequent flyer levy

[PROPOSITION PIG] and this should include meat and dairy

We have reached the end of history. Nothing Ever Happens.

[PROPOSITION PIG] and this should include alcohol

SBF was obviously a scammer just because he's a cryptocurrency person. Rationalists were too forgiving of this just because he was giving them money.

Most young Americans would receive more benefit than harm if there were universal military conscription

The people producing fake honey (and sell it as real) are based, because they are actively working to synthesize something people want, even if they scam some people in the process.

Tarot cards are not really able to predict the future but you can learn a lot about someone by doing a reading for someone.

Mac and cheese tastes better with peanut butter mixed in

It would actually be a good thing if automation eliminated all jobs.

Free will doesn't require the ability to do otherwise.

This market probably would have worked better as the new unlinked free response market.

We should be doing much more to pursue human genetic engineering to prevent diseases and aging.

Prolonged school closures because COVID were socially devastating.

Factory farming is horrific but it is not wrong to eat meat.

California is wildly overrated.

Scientific racism is bad, actually. (also it's not scientific)

The next American moon landing will be faked

Tenet (Christopher Nolan film) is underrated

We should give childlike sex robots to pedophiles

Having sex with children isn't inherently/necessarily bad

Cars are a societal net negative

Oversized pickup trucks should be illegal in cities

Suburban, single-family housing is immoral.

YES

Coding agents will close the loop

Coding agents will flip the initiative

“Live learning” will be standard

The multi-agent paradigm will win

The specific model will not matter as much as today; the network of agents will be important

Recursively improving coding agents will succeed in the market

Other

"when you go to bury someone you put them in the hole in the ground, not the pile of dirt beside it"

"It's such a bad allocation of time to learn a language so much people already know" - @jim

"I think I'm a victim of money laundering and I am looking for legal representation" - rubyatmidnight

a big anthropic shadow

A small group made it impossible for anyone else to develop AI.

A humanitarian catastrophe hampered AI progress.

AI never got the capability to cause extinction.

AI became safer as it got more powerful without much human effort outside of some RLHFing.

Cognitive enhancement helped a lot.

Humanity coordinated on having a sufficiently long and strong AI moratorium.

Brain uploading helped a lot.

Jono from 2023 does not think I (the one being polled in 2100) qualify as a person.

A plan to mitigate AI risks succeeded and already had a post about it on the alignmentforum on 2023.

Open source AI created an egalitarian world where no one/few got in a position to (accidently) kill everyone.

Nobody wanted to develop AI anymore.

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.

NO