Scott Alexander

Plan A feels like our best hope to do something actually good.

Then, in the mid-2030s, they pause at AIs around the level of top human geniuses. These AIs are close enough to current AIs that the same alignment techniques that mostly-sort-of-work for ours might mostly-sort-of-work for them too... The plan is to ...

Hunting down all existing chips is only slightly harder. Most of these chips are in giant data centers the size of small cities using entire power plants' worth of electricity - so hard to hide. The rest can be traced to their final locations using c...

AI has gone from "dumber than a child" to "expert level" in a few years in many domains. The gap between "expert level" and "above top geniuses" is smaller, so we expect it to take less time. This has been a pattern in fields like chess and Go, where...

I think there's only a 20% chance of an AI-related underclass that lasts more than a generation, let alone a permanent underclass.

A good pause strategy would involve both sides being able to monitor the other's data centers to prevent illegal training, then limiting training to some slow mutually-agreeable rate that lets alignment researchers thoroughly test each generation of ...