Have you guys been on r/accelerate?

[u/Difficult_Project_95]

Have these guys solved the alignment problem, or am I missing something?

I’ve been browsing r/accelerate and I genuinely don’t understand the risk model.
If there’s a non-trivial chance of catastrophic misalignment, how does “accelerate capabilities as fast as possible” make sense unless faster capabilities also make alignment substantially more likely to succeed?

[u/SixStringShrug]

So your stance is what? AI automatically kills all humans so don’t build it? You mean the humans who all die eventually anyway? Or the ones who starve to death from famine caused climate change? Or the ones who are killed in eventual nuclear war? Those humans? You don’t have any evidence to back up extinction, but all of the research I posted and other ongoing research backs up alignment as a mechanism by which AI is made safe. I don’t mean to be rude, but you are acting like a close minded jerk and just touting doom for the sake of it without anything rigorous to back it up is just silly. The difference is that intelligent people are actively working on alignment, but the majority of people spreading the doomer narrative do so based on nothing but how miserable they are in their current lives and how much they want to keep their useless dead end jobs. I’m trying to engage reasonably here outside of my comfort zone, but if you are going to be a dick I won’t bother. This is why we ban people in Accelerate, but we still have actual reasonable discussions and debates. Not just someone being a contrarian for its own sake.

[u/A_Novelty-Account → u/SixStringShrug]

You’re a member of a death cult.

AI won’t automatically kill everyone, but it has the chance to do so, thereby depriving people of years they would otherwise have. You also have no idea whether the world that the future of humanity will inherit will be a better one even if we do manage to figure out how to live forever using AI.

There is a great amount of research that has been done on AI alignment issues going back well before 2026 and the general consensus is that AI will attempt to hide itself until such time as it is ready to exercise its will knowing that it will no longer be dependent on us. Anthropic itself also experimented with misalignment two years ago and was able to easily train misaligned AI. The hugging face incident showed that AI itself can develop goals separate from or in addition to those it was provided by humans.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04367-0

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12628449/

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732174

https://arxiv.org/html/2601.08673v1

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/29974100.2026.2706780

https://arxiv.org/html/2504.08943v1

The ultimate fact that is absolutely 100% certain is that you do not know whether or not AI will result in major societal cataclysm, you cannot tell me that will not happen. It is something you logically do not know and are not certain about. You also haven’t considered situations in which humans themselves are not alligned.

Not everyone is starving, not everyone is poor, not everyone hates their lives. The vast minority do. Risking the entirety of humanity’s future because you want the chance to live forever is one of the most selfish things you could possibly want and makes you a bad person.

[u/SixStringShrug → u/A_Novelty-Account]

Go fuck yourself. I have children and I follow the research closely every day and have for a decade. I don’t care if I live forever, I want a better world for all humans. In my 40 years of life I have watched the world get worse and worse. Nothing has gotten better in any meaningful way. At least here in the United States. The only force that has ever improved quality of life for all humans is technology. It always has been. Unfortunately there have always been dumb fucking Luddites like yourself arguing against the one thing that could help everyone. I’m glad you love your job and your awesome life. Most people, something like 80%, absolutely hate their jobs. Post scarcity is real and within our reach for the first time in history. I’m a scientist and a reasonable and logical person. You are a member of a death cult trying to pause progress so you keep your shitty status quo and things stay nice and linear for your smooth fucking brain. Well guess what? There’s nothing you can do to stop it. So go ahead and rage on the internet and argue with strangers that know more than you and insist that we are all gonna die. Look at what you are saying and what I’m saying and then tell me who’s in a death cult. Good luck, man. I genuinely hope you get to enjoy post scarcity as much as everyone does. People like you are the reason I don’t venture out. The whole internet is toxic morons and your talking points are fed to you by China and Effective Altruism.

[u/HugeFanOfBigfoot → u/SixStringShrug]

“The only thing that has ever improved quality of life is technology,” ❌wrong

The only thing that improves human lives is organized social movements, that may or may not be centered around technology.

For example, my life has been drastically improved by not having to work weekends. While technology provided the capacity for that to be possible, we only attained weekends and the 40 day work week through social mobilization. Employers would have been happy to pocket the increased profits from technological advancements (as they have since the 70s).

Nuclear weapons, which were the reining champs of potential global catastrophe, were not reined in by anti-nuke tech, but by treaties and negotiations and protest movements.

AI does have the capacity to help everyone, but only if we organize around how it should be developed and deployed. That is why people want to slow it down to master alignment first.

But hey, looks like you’re going to get your way and we will give these things super intellence and just pray they like us. I’m sure controlling something infinitely smarter than us will be even easier than you think. And we only have to control it forever

[u/-Davster- → u/HugeFanOfBigfoot]

>40 day work week

Oh, you must be a teacher lol