Paradigm News

A set of radical beliefs that do not fit on a strict left/right paradigm

An attempt to terrorize people into bringing down the system of private insurance in the United States

Wrongful delay or deny insurance claims

An attempt to change the incentive structure present at the CEO level of UHC and similar companies

Mental illness

Chronic Back Pain

Radical Leftism

Fame

Assassin suffered a personal tragedy at the hands of UnitedHealthcare

Business

Manipulation of the share price of UnitedHealth Inc for profit.

Genetic predisposition (Italian)

Zizian Murder Cult member

Targeted hit/contract killing

brainwashed right wing anti-vax lunatic

Personal conflict with CEO

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Coding agents will close the loop

Recursively improving coding agents will succeed in the market

Coding agents will flip the initiative

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

The multi-agent paradigm will win

“Live learning” will be standard

YES

Brakes hit

Capability limit in AI

Huge alignment effort

New AI paradigm

Slow and gradual capability gains in AI

Enhancing human minds and/or society

Major capability limit in AI

Non-AI tech

Alignment relatively easy

Brakes not hit

Alignment unnecessary

Well-behaved AI with bad ends

It will allow to predict in advance whether a given intelligence architecture will be sentient

It will be solved by AI

The methods developed to solve the problem will be proven to be useful to approach other seemingly unsolvable problems (such as why does reality exist rather non-exist?)

It will be shown that every intelligence is sentient to some extent

It will be shown that for any level of intelligence, a non-sentient intelligence can exist

It will open a new seemingly unsolvable problem

Retrospectively, the solution will look relatively trivial and such that it could have been found much earlier by much smaller efforts

The process of understanding its solution by a median human will take less time than it takes for a median human to successfully complete undergrad 1-year calculus course

The solution will be formally accepted, but the consensus will be that no one understands the “intuition behind it”

It will be shown that the higher is the level of intelligence, the harder it is to construct a non-sentient intelligence

The full set of all possible qualia will be derived from it

It will be solved within the standard modern scientific framework and scientific method understanding

It will require some paradigm shift in logic/epistemology/scientific method

It will be shown that some sufficiently high level of intelligence requires sentience

NO

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

NO

Q1/Q2 '26

Q3/Q4 '26

Q3/Q4 '25

Q1/Q2 '27

Q1/Q2 '25

Q3/Q4 '27

YES