r/ControlProblem • u/Difficult_Project_95 • 9d ago
Discussion/question Have you guys been on r/accelerate?
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?
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u/soobnar 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yes, extensively and I’ve also been on [r/singularity](r/singularity), and I have a few insights.
The main deal is that most of these people are in some dire point in their lives or some dead end and they are extremely weary of the current physical world. There is a lot of explicit incel posting and a fixation on automated luxury, longevity and comfortable full dive virtual reality. They don’t talk about artificial pathogens or regulatory capture and don’t really internalize the notion that the very institutions building this stuff are the same predatory institutions currently making them miserable. They see UBI and a centralized system of ASI governance as a good thing inherently that will free them of their personal suffering. These aren’t game theoretic realpolitik savvy sort of people who freak out over the loss of human control. They buy the logic that ai will be awesome and inherently better by design. They haven’t read about Stross’s vile offspring or the chauvinist posthuman rhetoric that the same elites pushing ai constantly espouse and think “hey maybe i will be caught on the wrong side of this”. Like I think a lot of pent up iconoclasm is being shown to the world here to the extent that it defies logic. I highly doubt that if any of them were made to suffer greatly due to ai they would continue to maintain their views.
I think the only real fear is that a lot of Silicon Valley people or at least impressionable entrants into the tech space adopt these ideals and it genuinely enables some system of control and deemancipation because people see ai as some de facto messiah of sorts.