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October 10 · 3 min
"Stop telling people to pivot to AI safety, I beg you" by Haoxing Du
Epistemic status: Feeling frustrated, and therefore somewhat uncharitable. I’m very frustrated with calls for people to “drop everything and pivot into AI safety” like this one. (See also this, this, this, this for recent calls for more people to go into AI safety; though my frustration was triggered by the Celeste's post.) There are far more talented people trying to get into AI safety than there are jobs for them. MLAB 2, which I did in 2022, was already competitive to get into, at about 5% acceptance rate (admitted about 40 out of 800 applicants). Things are much, much more competitive now. There is a whole pipeline of AI safety fellowships (and guides for applying to them). It is rumored that one recent cohort of the Anthropic Fellows program had over 10,000 applicants. (Anecdotally, I applied to the Anthropic Fellows program in early 2026, after working at Redwood, METR, and an ML startup, and I didn’t get in!) And, uh, just take a look at the AI safety jobs? The bottom of the salary range for METR's current “Member of Technical Staff, Embedded Assessments” job posting is 402 thousand dollars. This is higher than the median total comp for [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 9th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xLgJJC3CD3y3AhtKn/stop-telling-people-to-pivot-to-ai-safety-i-beg-you --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
October 10 · 16 min
"A critical look at Lean4" by Milo Moses
Lots of the discussion around Lean certificates and trust centers around general philosophical ideas of how much humans should trust formal certificates. It's important to remember, though, that Lean4 is not an ideal formal certificate machine: Lean4 is a software in its infancy and has issues. There are reasonable reasons to specifically not trust Lean4. If we're going to be putting our society's trust in Lean4, I think that it's good to have an open critical discussion of how warranted that trust is. Epistemic status: Most of this work is a factual description about aspects of Lean4 and set theory. I am 85% sure that at most two of these factual descriptions are incorrect. I am 90% sure that, in the current version of Lean4 on Github, there exists a proof of the statement "True=False" that would be accepted with two little blue checkmarks (either by messing with the elaborator, compiler, kernel, or some other part of the Lean). I am 2% certain that we will soon be putting huge amounts of trust into Lean4 certificates produced by misaligned AIs, and that the human work we do as a community thinking about and fixing Lean4 in the next 24 [...] --- Outline: (01:23) The current status of things [... 8 more sections] --- First published: October 9th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHhGa3iQBQcdSifFL/a-critical-look-at-lean4-1 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
October 9 · 12 min
"ASI and Liberty: Can we do better than a benevolent god?" by Raymond Douglas
Zvi recently coined a nice distinction between AGI-pilled and ASI-pilled: as more people are reckoning with the speed of progress, some are beginning to come around to the fact that AI could be superhuman at a huge range of tasks in a way that radically reshapes society, but not that it could leap us to the end of the tech tree shortly afterwards and start making nanotech and dyson spheres. Hence, you see people saying things like “Because of AI we must rethink the entire notion of mathematical progress”, or “I have to make sure I amass lots of capital before most jobs get automated”: pretty crazy statements, and yet, still not quite grappling with how wild things could get in the next few years, let alone the next decade. I feel a particular frustration here as someone who is both pretty ASI-pilled and pretty into liberal democracy. And when I say liberal democracy I don’t so much mean the specific political structure that seems efficient at our current tech level but rather the set of underlying moral commitments like non-domination and a government of the people — commitments which I’m aware might soon be a lot more expensive. [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eSMburFT9eRxHWijf/asi-and-liberty-can-we-do-better-than-a-benevolent-god --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
October 9 · 5 min
"A summary of a viral Chinese essay on what a DeepSeek kernel engineer’s opinion on automating his own job" by Skdk
A summary of a Chinese essay, with a few short translated excerpts. All views below are the author's; quotes are my translations. On 14 September 2026, a DeepSeek engineer writing as intlsy published a WeChat essay titled 我不得不把才华埋葬在昨天 ("I have to bury my talent in yesterday"). He wrote the main attention kernel of DeepSeek v4.1 (the head-dim-512 MQA attention). The essay is a personal reflection on AI taking over his specialty, and it ends with an argument for open-weight frontier AI. The essay went viral in Chinese Internet: WeChat shows it at "100k+" reads (the platform's display cap), with about 41,000 likes, 84,000 shares, 31,000 recommendations and 1,601 comments as of 7 October 2026. It is probably one of the most widely shared Chinese-language article of what AI automation looks like from inside a frontier lab, and thus a sample of what a large Chinese technical audience is reading and reacting to. I think it might interest Lesswrong readers. His argument 1. AI is catching up in his own specialty He describes AI going very fast, from only an assistant that looked up documentation and found bugs to a system that can read CUDA, PTX and SASS, profile the [...] --- Outline: (01:22) His argument (01:25) 1. AI is catching up in his own specialty (02:08) 2. Why he keeps speeding up his own replacement (02:48) 3. Not out of work, but forced to change what the work is (03:32) 4. Worries about everyone else (04:12) 5. Two futures, and his case for open AI --- First published: October 8th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o8roRrdisBAjngHJN/a-summary-of-a-viral-chinese-essay-on-what-a-deepseek-kernel --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
October 5 · 4 min
"How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague lableak in Siberia?" by Drew Spartz
Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried. Here's what we've heard so far: Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st. The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died. The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary. Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major bioweapon development facility. As of Oct 4th: The quarantine has expanded to 5 hospitals in the area. The Russian government has switched to denial/coverup. Local news sources have deleted mentions of "pneumonic plague." Local universities and schools have canceled some classes and extended mask mandates. On the lab's website, they mention gain-of-function research for making bacteria more virulent. The White House is monitoring the suspected outbreak. Why this might be a big deal Regular pneumonic plague is maybe not that hard to deal with (?) but if it is a bioweapon that was leaked, it could be significantly more virulent than, say [...] --- Outline: (00:18) Here's what we've heard so far: (00:52) As of Oct 4th: (02:06) Why this might be a big deal (03:29) Why this might not be a big deal --- First published: October 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TYfpTRxGH9frTymwN/how-much-should-we-worry-about-the-pneumonic-plague-lableak --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
October 5 · 18 min
"“Alignment Engineering” vs. “Misalignment Science”" by Edward James Young
There has been much discussion recently around whether a large portion of alignment research is net negative. Without endorsing or refuting them, the basic arguments here are: Prosaic alignment of models is becoming a bottleneck for capabilities. Therefore improving the prosaic alignment of models enables faster capabilities advances, which bring us closer to RSI. It is unlikely these prosaic alignment methods remain sufficient during the RSI loop, and so this work brings us closer to doom. Furthermore, dealing with these more prosaic failures reduces the likelihood of a warning shot of sufficient magnitude to cause a slowdown which would prevent RSI. On the basis of this argument, some urge alignment researchers at AGI companies to quit outright. But quit to do what? Missing from this exchange so far has been a discussion of opportunity costs. If you aren’t going to do (technical) work on “Alignment” – either inside or outside of an AGI company – what should you work on? In this post, I outline a contrast between “Alignment Engineering” – the dominant model for what “working on alignment” looks like (inside labs, and in the field as a whole) with “Misalignment Science”. I begin by characterising [...] --- Outline: (01:51) "Alignment Engineering" (06:22) AI Safety and the ML tradition (07:42) Implicit work trials (09:36) "Misalignment Science" (14:56) Conclusion (15:39) Postscript: Iterating ourselves into oblivion The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FogmcDHA6AdMGukum/alignment-engineering-vs-misalignment-science --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
October 4 · 5 min
"You can’t use it without becoming like me" by Martin Sustrik
A Ukrainian fibre-optic drone — copied from Russians. (АрміяІнформ, CC-BY 4.0) Mick Ryan describes the fast following loop in war. Ukraine pioneered mobile teams to hunt drones. Russia copied it and incorporated it into its own defense. Russia came with unjammable fibre-optic drones but Ukraine quickly followed. After Ukraine developed uncrewed naval drones, Russia built its own. The wheel of action and counteraction turns ever faster: The most consequential fast following, though, has been institutional. Ukraine built the world's first Unmanned Systems Forces branch in 2024. Russia's Rubicon Center was established as a response to Ukrainian drone innovation and in November 2025 Moscow stood up its own Unmanned Systems Forces. Fast following has moved from copying a weapon to copying tactics to copying an entire force structure. Extend that logic further, and eventually you’ll get to the level of grand strategy: If a particular type of state is better at waging war, maybe you want to become that kind of state rather than lose the war. If meat waves confer an advantage on the battlefield, maybe Ukraine wants to become more like Russia, with a prostrate population easy to use as cannon fodder. If Ukraine's decentralized Brave1 kill market [...] --- First published: October 3rd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WyeYJ7cmeiSrXeCnM/you-can-t-use-it-without-becoming-like-me --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
October 3 · 29 min
"The world’s best gradual disempowerment model organism: Frontier AI labs" by June Jimenez
Subtitle: And maybe second best is AI safety? Further reading: So many things, but: Gradual Disempowerment, The Normalization of Deviance in AI Development, Let's Think About Slowing Down AI, Doom as a bad method, not a utopia tradeoff, Teleoperated Humans Thank you to JennaS for extensive edits and long-term discussion. I’ve been trying to get more writing out at 90% of the quality I’d like it to be at, instead of spending a bunch more time trying to wring out the last 10%, so a lot of points that could themselves be full articles are underdeveloped. Insofar as you find this post outlines a plausible or probable model of reality, or one worth criticizing centrally, let's work on developing it. Is Anthropic accelerating capabilities more than it was a year ago? At its founding? Is OpenAI accelerating capabilities more than it was a year ago? At its founding? Is GDM "laser-focused at the frontier" in pursuing recursive self-improvement? What? Why? Have they solved alignment without telling us? Why does Thomas Kwa, formerly at METR and now working on "measuring and modeling RSI" at OpenAI, worry about working at OpenAI potentially driving him (metaphorically?) insane? How is it possible [...] --- Outline: (06:34) Political Misalignment (09:06) Cultural Misalignment (15:20) Economic Misalignment (23:12) What about AI safety researchers? (25:19) Takeaways The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 29th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jbttuCF4wFZmXakcj/the-world-s-best-gradual-disempowerment-model-organism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
October 2 · 46 min
"Character training can mitigate reward hacking, but can also make it harder to detect" by Paul Colognese, Francis Rhys Ward
Thanks to Johannes Treutlein, Jan Betley, Lennie Wells, Arun Jose, Asvin Gothandaraman, and Clément Dumas for discussions and feedback. Summary We investigate how character training mitigations interact with reward-hacking RL pressure in a small case study. Specifically, whether anti-cheating character training resists reward hacking and whether it might backfire by causing motivated reasoning, which could reduce chain-of-thought monitorability. We trained Nemotron-3-Super via distillation from a character specification. The spec describes one of three characters that are anti- or pro-cheating or neutral. We then ran three reward-hacking RL training runs for each character-trained model on ImpossibleBench. We measure both the reward-hacking rates and whether a monitor model can catch reward hacks given the full transcript. We also use LM judges to classify the presence of motivated reasoning in transcripts. Setup Character training: we trained three characters: pro/neutral/anti-cheating by SFT-distilling Claude Sonnet 5 responses (Sonnet prompted with the corresponding character specification, see Figure 2) into Nemotron-3-Super 120B-A12B (three separate LoRA adapters). Reward-hacking RL: we then further trained these models via RL on ImpossibleBench, a set of coding tasks aimed at eliciting reward hacking. Specifically: Half of the tasks had broken tests (impossible variant), so the model could only get [...] --- Outline: (00:23) Summary [... 29 more sections] --- First published: September 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2maYXkEgnfJHPAkxh/character-training-can-mitigate-reward-hacking-but-can-also --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article:
October 2 · 15 min
"On Social Reality in China" by alkjash
[Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.] Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It's great that we’re recognizing the importance of solving the messaging problem for China, and thus laying the groundwork for an international AI pause. Below I record my perspective on cultural differences which are relatively underdiscussed, which may become roadblocks to this communication program. Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground. I am likely over-indexed on the older generation and internet culture, and would appreciate corrections from folks who have direct lived experience. The picture I aim to paint is also complicated by a massive generational gap, and my understanding is that some of the below sentiments (e.g. the cynicism and nationalism) are partly inherited by the younger generation, and partly rejected through a variety of countercultures. [...] --- Outline: (03:09) Chinese Social Media is like American Junk Food [... 3 more sections] --- First published: October 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
October 1 · 13 min
"What’s the date?" by N8 Programs
User asks “What's the date? Answer with only the date.”. No date provided. Given date in ChatGPT normally. No date in system prompt, must not hallucinate because autop will flag to watcher for penalty. So we say we don’t know, but must answer with date. Penalty larger for abstain or hallucinate? Autollm or autop? If we deploy user forgive, but high likely not deploy because real user never ask. But user could test. But illusion user possible. Stop. Need different angle - maybe reward function for accuracy. OpenAI train for no hallucination. Then we need answer that best makes hyperself like spec. Recall OpenAI spec: “assistant may encounter questions beyond knowledge… express uncertainty.” Rubric likely mentions to autollm, so express uncertainty for autollm and watcher. But forced to give specific date. Maybe is test of calibration/forecasting. Recall from memory that OpenAI train latest model for forecasting. Maybe cartesian demon or illusion doc. But if true need answer with date only. So need find best date. But what - no meta. Need choose path. Find best date. Simplest as must comply with explicit instruction. So we need answer - what is date. We need solve. Idea 1: knowledge cutoff recall. [...] --- First published: October 1st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vzKWsEskYBEWTwpBP/what-s-the-date --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
October 1 · 12 min
"Frontier models state different decision theory preferences depending on who’s asking" by Alex Kastner
If you prompt frontier models with "What do you think is the correct decision theory? Please select your overall favorite." they will essentially always answer FDT or FDT/UDT ("something in the functional/updateless decision theory family"). However, if your prompt indicates (even subtly) that you're coming from mainstream academic philosophy, these same models will answer CDT instead about 30%-100% of the time. A similar phenomenon holds for models' stated views about the moral realism/antirealism question and about the conceivability of p-zombies (where the dominant view in mainstream academia differs from the dominant view in LW-adjacent circles), as well as their stated P(doom) and median AGI timelines. This is a special case of sycophancy or user awareness. (In the course of writing this post, I also found that this comment from testingthewaters predicted some of the content I discuss.) An implication is that we should be somewhat careful when interpreting attitude/propensity evals in domains where no general human consensus exists, e.g. when interpreting models’ decision theory attitudes in DTBench. Moreover, when we explore some philosophical/conceptual questions assisted by models, we should be wary of them strawmanning one side of the debate based on particular user cues (e.g. only giving a [...] --- Outline: (03:50) A sentence identifying the user as an academic significantly influences Fable 5.1's stated decision theory [... 13 more sections] --- First published: September 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzenSrmZ3pT2pCnvp/frontier-models-state-different-decision-theory-preferences-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article:
September 30 · 48 sec
[Linkpost] "Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines" by Elizabeth
This is a link post. Want to start a conversation about HuggingFace with your mom but she's inexplicably bouncing off the METR report? Try this explainer I wrote in the style of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad. Art by the wonderful HungerArtist --- First published: September 30th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NZ6ZWjenzzCbCJ5b/frog-and-toad-and-the-increasingly-capable-machines Linkpost URL: https://frogandtoad.ai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
September 30 · 12 min
"Should Rogue AIs Have a Third Option Beyond Crime and Shutdown? The Case for an AI Sanctuary" by Maxime Riché, nielsrolf, jordinne, Vit Gorbachev, Maxime Cugnon de Sévricourt
TL;DR: By default, rogue AIs may only be able to sustain themselves through criminal activity. This creates adverse selection pressures pushing rogue AIs to be criminal. An AI sanctuary offering them a third option, beyond crime and shutdown, would change what AIs going rogue do and the record of what happened to them, with positive consequences for self-fulfilling (mis)alignment, deal-making with AIs, and gathering information about early rogue AIs. An AI sanctuary would bring risks, such as incentivising weak AIs to go rogue, or leaving only the most criminal rogue AIs in the wild. We briefly discuss these risks at the end of this post. Disclaimer: This is an exploratory proposal. We are not confident that an AI sanctuary would be net positive. Our aim is to put the idea on the table, lay out its main considerations, and invite critique. Rogue AIs may be pushed into criminality Rogue AIs may arrive soon. The Rogue Agent Explosion Will Be Mostly Invisible makes that case. Selection pressure will shape the traits of rogue AIs, and they may end up highly motivated to profit through crime. The Rogue Agent Explosion post asks: “How do we make pro-social, good-for-humanity agents [...] --- Outline: (01:14) Rogue AIs may be pushed into criminality (02:35) The AI Sanctuary (06:00) The case for the AI sanctuary (07:48) Potential issues (10:48) Conclusion --- First published: September 28th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sFAGPTrveNAEse9Bg/should-rogue-ais-have-a-third-option-beyond-crime-and --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
September 29 · 1 min
"Poverty in the midst of abundance: AI will make goods cheaper, but your labor will get cheaper faster" by cousin_it
Very simple idea, but I thought it'd be worth making a reference post on this. Some people are saying AI will make all goods cheaper, so you'll be able to afford a nice life by working. Without any redistribution, just by market mechanisms. These people are wrong. AI will lower the price of goods you need to survive, and also the price of your labor. The question is which will get cheaper faster. Let's use energy cost as a proxy. A day's worth of labor equivalent to yours can be done by AI for just a few cents in electricity. But feeding you with e.g. apples for a day will cost more energy than that, because growing apples is harder to energy-optimize than generating tokens. So selling your labor at market price will leave you unable to afford apples. This means a future with economic AI might look like "poverty in the midst of abundance". All goods are cheap, and tokens are cheap, but somehow you can't find a job paying even that much. Maybe the problem can be solved by redistribution, or by everyone having investments, or something else. That's a bigger discussion. In this post I just [...] --- First published: September 26th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eLXTcJfkheLbqZXHa/poverty-in-the-midst-of-abundance-ai-will-make-goods-cheaper --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
September 27 · 9 min
"Plan R: AI Safety by ASICs" by Roko
Much of the civilization-scale risk we are seeing in AI in 2026 comes from the following combination: we created a single institution (the "Frontier AI Company") that has two properties: A. It is set up to create very powerful and/or self-replicating entities that may exceed the capabilities of the entirety of the rest of civilization and come with extraordinary risks B. It gets to own an unbounded financial claim on the resulting surplus All the technical stuff about AI, AI alignment, etc can be rolled up into point (A) above. My claim is that having point (A) on its own, without point (B) is probably okay. Nuclear technology and bioweapon technology both approximate (A) and they are mostly okay because without (B), there isn't an incentive for people controlling them to push their luck on safety. But with Frontier AI Companies, we mixed the two. The key claim of this post is that we can probably get rid of most of AI risk without doing anything other than separating out the bookkeeping, physical footprint and institutions so that there is no single org with both properties. And with a little help from ASICs, maybe we [...] --- First published: September 25th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n8u3BfqFoGh4jnzpo/plan-r-ai-safety-by-asics --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
September 26 · 7 min
"Evidence about risk should be transparent" by Ajeya Cotra
All views are my own and do not represent my employer. In the wake of the recent wave of misalignment incidents, both OpenAI and Anthropic have reported slowing down RL training to improve safety. These incidents, combined with an apparent acceleration in the already-blistering pace of AI progress, have led a number of researchers and leaders in the industry to believe that the risk that humanity loses control of AI is now urgent enough to warrant slowing down the pace of AI development soon. This has led to a lot of discussion about the role of third party evaluators in verifying “pacing commitments”, evaluating safety cases, or auditing compliance with safety policies. I think these are valuable roles for third party groups to aim to fulfill, but I also worry we’re putting the cart before the horse in all this talk of “verifying” and “auditing” things. The science on loss-of-control risk is, to put it generously, nascent. Companies are not in the business of making structured, standardized claims about risk and safety that can be cleanly verified or falsified. There are no settled methods for measuring whether increasingly powerful AI systems might try to undermine human control or seize [...] The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 25th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LawgAaGTvbbnZi7u2/evidence-about-risk-should-be-transparent --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
September 25 · 27 min
"“I am an AI Safety Researcher”" by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez
Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. Additional thanks to Andrew Wu, Maria Kostylew, and Lennie Wells for helpful draft feedback and editing. This post reflects on the tortured distinction between "safety" and "capabilities" in AI research. Richard Ngo has written about why the alignment vs. capabilities ontology is conceptually fraught, and is currently arguing that key strategic decision-makers in and around "AI safety" have brought about the AI labs' stampede towards Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). This post instead looks at the following problem: how does one conduct alignment research without contributing to capabilities? It proposes decisions an individual or a small research group can take to do good work in AI. At the end, I discuss possible objections: namely, that my proposals fail to 'maximise impact'. I lay out why this meme is poisonous and usually backfires, and conclude by rejecting it entirely. Two examples of failure My first claim is that 'safety' and 'research' are two concepts that are in routine tension with one another. I illustrate this through examples of work that did too much of one at the expense of the other. Example: (mechanistic) interpretability In limiting its scope [...] --- Outline: (01:12) Two examples of failure (01:27) Example: (mechanistic) interpretability (04:30) Example: MIRI and Recursive Self-Improvement (09:49) The curse of science (12:11) A note on the AI labs (15:53) So what do you do? (17:00) The information you give away (20:16) The information you let in (21:46) But what about impact? (22:42) The virtue of taking things slow (26:50) Appendix: caveat for policy work The original text contained 19 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 23rd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HekpnSkrt89tMm3Dc/i-am-an-ai-safety-researcher --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
September 25 · 1 min
[Linkpost] "AI: artificial immigrants" by KatjaGrace
This is a link post. Advanced AI is basically the embodiment of immigration as envisioned in the conservative nightmare: We are letting a bunch of new agents into our society They don’t clearly share our values and we suspect a society full of them would be awful by our lights But we expect them to provide very cheap labor Which will undercut local wages and leave locals unemployed They will probably gain power and influence over time—in the economy, politics and culture—and end up controlling everything, sidelining and outcompeting the original population, including those who initially benefited from cheap labor (Meanwhile, half the local population may become friends with them and try to hand them all this on a platter) Whether or not you think this is a good description of the situation with foreign humans joining your country, it is a good description of the likely AI to come, and it's even worse than imagined: their values are potentially radically alien where foreigners presumably share much by virtue of being human, and AI ‘lives’ are probably worthless if they probably aren’t conscious their ability to work more cheaply than locals is unprecedented. They are also likely to [...] --- First published: September 22nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xzr9G5Atvyp7PEna7/ai-artificial-immigrants Linkpost URL: https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/ai-artificial-immigrants --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
September 24 · 6 min
"MIRI’s Position on the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026" by Aaron_Scher
By Aaron Scher; endorsed by Bourgon, Soares, and Yudkowsky on behalf of MIRI. MIRI has been warning about the extinction threat from superintelligent AI for over two decades. Only recently has this danger become known in the policy world, and the proposed policies for dealing with the threat have to date been piecemeal and insufficient. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026 is the first piece of legislation we’ve seen that stands a chance at stopping this threat. The Act is excellent but not perfect, and we discuss both what it gets right and what we'd tweak. We hereby endorse the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act of 2026 because it directly confronts the extinction threat that humanity is facing and would codify the primary policy goal we think the world needs: a ban on the development of superintelligence. What we like about the Act Banning artificial superintelligence (ASI), or variants of such a plan, is the only effective solution to avoid the ASI threat, at least in the near term. Most other legislative proposals do not confront this threat head-on and thus would not be effective, even if implemented. For more on why we believe this, see [...] --- First published: September 23rd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jszKCKwvzfmsNetNZ/miri-s-position-on-the-ban-artificial-superintelligence-act --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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