Duale 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Pilot Action: Pilot action was a primary cause of the crash.

Design/Manufacturing Defect: A Boeing design or manufacturing defect was a primary cause of the crash.

YES

YES

While humans are on the lunar surface, a capsule is still in orbit

A woman is onboard

More than 50 million Americans watch the moon landing

Rocket was launched from US soil

Uses a rocket designed by Space X

There are no reported incidents which disrupt the mission’s original planning & timeline (post-takeoff)

At least 1 person with a citizenship other than to the US is aboard (could be a dual-citizen)

An American citizen is onboard

3 or more humans land on the lunar surface

It is on a NASA mission

YES

>= 6.85" display

>= 8x optical zoom

a Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 port

>= 3 high-performance cores

>= 130% mAh battery of next-tier iPhone

greater optical zoom than next-tier iPhone

more high-performance cores than next-tier iPhone

Special LLM capabilities (e.g. extra cache for LLM weights near a Neural Engine)

2 TB storage option

>= 1.5x RAM of next-tier iPhone

>= 12 GB RAM

>= 1.5x transistors of next-tier iPhone

No physical buttons https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/28/20th-anniversary-iphone-solid-state-buttons/

officially supports a desktop-like experience when used with external displays (~same web app experience as MacOS Safari)

a Thunderbolt 3 port

a Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) chip

special LLM capabilities beyond next-tier iPhone. Just 2x inference volume wouldn't count.

split-screen multi-tasking

more external buttons than next-tier iPhone

>= 2 USB-C ports

Touch ID

YES

NO

NO

2028-2031

2032-2035

2036-2039

2039-2042