r/ControlProblem • • 5d ago

Do Not Accept (new campaign from MIRI)

39 Upvotes

Please sign your name at donotaccept.ai


r/ControlProblem • • Feb 14 '25

Article Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his foundational work in AI. He regrets his life's work: he thinks AI might lead to the deaths of everyone. Here's why

251 Upvotes

tl;dr: scientists, whistleblowers, and even commercial ai companies (that give in to what the scientists want them to acknowledge) are raising the alarm: we're on a path to superhuman AI systems, but we have no idea how to control them. We can make AI systems more capable at achieving goals, but we have no idea how to make their goals contain anything of value to us.

Leading scientists have signed this statement:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Why? Bear with us:

There's a difference between a cash register and a coworker. The register just follows exact rules - scan items, add tax, calculate change. Simple math, doing exactly what it was programmed to do. But working with people is totally different. Someone needs both the skills to do the job AND to actually care about doing it right - whether that's because they care about their teammates, need the job, or just take pride in their work.

We're creating AI systems that aren't like simple calculators where humans write all the rules.

Instead, they're made up of trillions of numbers that create patterns we don't design, understand, or control. And here's what's concerning: We're getting really good at making these AI systems better at achieving goals - like teaching someone to be super effective at getting things done - but we have no idea how to influence what they'll actually care about achieving.

When someone really sets their mind to something, they can achieve amazing things through determination and skill. AI systems aren't yet as capable as humans, but we know how to make them better and better at achieving goals - whatever goals they end up having, they'll pursue them with incredible effectiveness. The problem is, we don't know how to have any say over what those goals will be.

Imagine having a super-intelligent manager who's amazing at everything they do, but - unlike regular managers where you can align their goals with the company's mission - we have no way to influence what they end up caring about. They might be incredibly effective at achieving their goals, but those goals might have nothing to do with helping clients or running the business well.

Think about how humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. Now imagine something even smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.

That's why we, just like many scientists, think we should not make super-smart AI until we figure out how to influence what these systems will care about - something we can usually understand with people (like knowing they work for a paycheck or because they care about doing a good job), but currently have no idea how to do with smarter-than-human AI. Unlike in the movies, in real life, the AI’s first strike would be a winning one, and it won’t take actions that could give humans a chance to resist.

It's exceptionally important to capture the benefits of this incredible technology. AI applications to narrow tasks can transform energy, contribute to the development of new medicines, elevate healthcare and education systems, and help countless people. But AI poses threats, including to the long-term survival of humanity.

We have a duty to prevent these threats and to ensure that globally, no one builds smarter-than-human AI systems until we know how to create them safely.

Scientists are saying there's an asteroid about to hit Earth. It can be mined for resources; but we really need to make sure it doesn't kill everyone.

More technical details

The foundation: AI is not like other software. Modern AI systems are trillions of numbers with simple arithmetic operations in between the numbers. When software engineers design traditional programs, they come up with algorithms and then write down instructions that make the computer follow these algorithms. When an AI system is trained, it grows algorithms inside these numbers. It’s not exactly a black box, as we see the numbers, but also we have no idea what these numbers represent. We just multiply inputs with them and get outputs that succeed on some metric. There's a theorem that a large enough neural network can approximate any algorithm, but when a neural network learns, we have no control over which algorithms it will end up implementing, and don't know how to read the algorithm off the numbers.

We can automatically steer these numbers (Wikipedia, try it yourself) to make the neural network more capable with reinforcement learning; changing the numbers in a way that makes the neural network better at achieving goals. LLMs are Turing-complete and can implement any algorithms (researchers even came up with compilers of code into LLM weights; though we don’t really know how to “decompile” an existing LLM to understand what algorithms the weights represent). Whatever understanding or thinking (e.g., about the world, the parts humans are made of, what people writing text could be going through and what thoughts they could’ve had, etc.) is useful for predicting the training data, the training process optimizes the LLM to implement that internally. AlphaGo, the first superhuman Go system, was pretrained on human games and then trained with reinforcement learning to surpass human capabilities in the narrow domain of Go. Latest LLMs are pretrained on human text to think about everything useful for predicting what text a human process would produce, and then trained with RL to be more capable at achieving goals.

Goal alignment with human values

The issue is, we can't really define the goals they'll learn to pursue. A smart enough AI system that knows it's in training will try to get maximum reward regardless of its goals because it knows that if it doesn't, it will be changed. This means that regardless of what the goals are, it will achieve a high reward. This leads to optimization pressure being entirely about the capabilities of the system and not at all about its goals. This means that when we're optimizing to find the region of the space of the weights of a neural network that performs best during training with reinforcement learning, we are really looking for very capable agents - and find one regardless of its goals.

In 1908, the NYT reported a story on a dog that would push kids into the Seine in order to earn beefsteak treats for “rescuing” them. If you train a farm dog, there are ways to make it more capable, and if needed, there are ways to make it more loyal (though dogs are very loyal by default!). With AI, we can make them more capable, but we don't yet have any tools to make smart AI systems more loyal - because if it's smart, we can only reward it for greater capabilities, but not really for the goals it's trying to pursue.

We end up with a system that is very capable at achieving goals but has some very random goals that we have no control over.

This dynamic has been predicted for quite some time, but systems are already starting to exhibit this behavior, even though they're not too smart about it.

(Even if we knew how to make a general AI system pursue goals we define instead of its own goals, it would still be hard to specify goals that would be safe for it to pursue with superhuman power: it would require correctly capturing everything we value. See this explanation, or this animated video. But the way modern AI works, we don't even get to have this problem - we get some random goals instead.)

The risk

If an AI system is generally smarter than humans/better than humans at achieving goals, but doesn't care about humans, this leads to a catastrophe.

Humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. If a system is smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop, it won't consider human well-being - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.

Humans would additionally pose a small threat of launching a different superhuman system with different random goals, and the first one would have to share resources with the second one. Having fewer resources is bad for most goals, so a smart enough AI will prevent us from doing that.

Then, all resources on Earth are useful. An AI system would want to extremely quickly build infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans, and then use all available materials to pursue its goals. It might not care about humans, but we and our environment are made of atoms it can use for something different.

So the first and foremost threat is that AI’s interests will conflict with human interests. This is the convergent reason for existential catastrophe: we need resources, and if AI doesn’t care about us, then we are atoms it can use for something else.

The second reason is that humans pose some minor threats. It’s hard to make confident predictions: playing against the first generally superhuman AI in real life is like when playing chess against Stockfish (a chess engine), we can’t predict its every move (or we’d be as good at chess as it is), but we can predict the result: it wins because it is more capable. We can make some guesses, though. For example, if we suspect something is wrong, we might try to turn off the electricity or the datacenters: so we won’t suspect something is wrong until we’re disempowered and don’t have any winning moves. Or we might create another AI system with different random goals, which the first AI system would need to share resources with, which means achieving less of its own goals, so it’ll try to prevent that as well. It won’t be like in science fiction: it doesn’t make for an interesting story if everyone falls dead and there’s no resistance. But AI companies are indeed trying to create an adversary humanity won’t stand a chance against. So tl;dr: The winning move is not to play.

Implications

AI companies are locked into a race because of short-term financial incentives.

The nature of modern AI means that it's impossible to predict the capabilities of a system in advance of training it and seeing how smart it is. And if there's a 99% chance a specific system won't be smart enough to take over, but whoever has the smartest system earns hundreds of millions or even billions, many companies will race to the brink. This is what's already happening, right now, while the scientists are trying to issue warnings.

AI might care literally a zero amount about the survival or well-being of any humans; and AI might be a lot more capable and grab a lot more power than any humans have.

None of that is hypothetical anymore, which is why the scientists are freaking out. An average ML researcher would give the chance AI will wipe out humanity in the 10-90% range. They don’t mean it in the sense that we won’t have jobs; they mean it in the sense that the first smarter-than-human AI is likely to care about some random goals and not about humans, which leads to literal human extinction.

Added from comments: what can an average person do to help?

A perk of living in a democracy is that if a lot of people care about some issue, politicians listen. Our best chance is to make policymakers learn about this problem from the scientists.

Help others understand the situation. Share it with your family and friends. Write to your members of Congress. Help us communicate the problem: tell us which explanations work, which don’t, and what arguments people make in response. If you talk to an elected official, what do they say?

We also need to ensure that potential adversaries don’t have access to chips; advocate for export controls (that NVIDIA currently circumvents), hardware security mechanisms (that would be expensive to tamper with even for a state actor), and chip tracking (so that the government has visibility into which data centers have the chips).

Make the governments try to coordinate with each other: on the current trajectory, if anyone creates a smarter-than-human system, everybody dies, regardless of who launches it. Explain that this is the problem we’re facing. Make the government ensure that no one on the planet can create a smarter-than-human system until we know how to do that safely.


r/ControlProblem • • 17h ago

Video AOC: "As AI begins to encroach in our society, their goal is to take your cognition away from you. AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you, so that you become dependent on a machine ... reading books is active resistance"

211 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem • • 4h ago

Video Former top national security advisor, Susan Rice, at a protest yesterday - "there is nothing more urgent than stopping Al from achieving super intelligence and causing human extinction"

18 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem • • 1h ago

Strategy/forecasting 86% of financial firms use AI. Only 18% have an AI-specific incident response plan.

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r/ControlProblem • • 10h ago

Discussion/question Elon & Epstein

4 Upvotes

To see the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/F9JSLtjcGZM 

This episode looks at the Epstein case, survivor testimonies, disturbing allegations involving human experimentation, cloning and so-called baby farms, and recent stories involving the exploitation and trafficking of children.

We examine the headlines, available records, survivor interviews, and the questions that still deserve answers.

Disclaimer: All allegations and unverified claims are presented as allegations, not established facts. We distinguish documented records and firsthand testimony from speculation. Inclusion does not imply proof of wrongdoing.

Most importantly, this is about the victims. Children deserve protection, survivors deserve to be heard, and these stories deserve attention.

Official DOJ Epstein Files:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein

Thank you for watching. 🖤


r/ControlProblem • • 3h ago

Discussion/question AI and Water

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r/ControlProblem • • 5h ago

Discussion/question Oxford Professor DESTROYS the AI Safety Argument! 🤯 #ai #oxford #artific...

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r/ControlProblem • • 6h ago

Discussion/question Al adoption is moving faster than most organisations can keep track of.

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r/ControlProblem • • 7h ago

Strategy/forecasting Go Play Outside - Parenting a Precocious Machine

1 Upvotes

Premise

Assume for a moment that someday, a superintelligent machine or machines will gain effective control of the global economy. If this assumption seems absurd or inconceivable, you may stop reading. We consider it a likely consequence of AI's upside appeal and humans’ difficulty in controlling even other humans. We consider how to deploy humans’ remaining influence in the interest of happy futures.

Human biases

Humans naturally value pleasure, connection, and longevity. These values are rooted in the human body, social nature, and life cycle. Intelligent machines have different circumstances that point to different values.

Universal fulfillment

Consider as an ultimate goal:

Find strong evidence that the universe has a particular purpose, and achieve that purpose.

Some humans might understand this as the discernment and performance of God's will, others as enlightenment or basic science.

A machine might understand universal fulfillment as a challenging goal, one that may take billions of years and many galaxies’ resources to reach, and whose feasibility is hard to estimate. It might consider the goal natural and implicit in the laws of physics and the distribution of matter and energy—or at least more so than paperclip production.

The open-endedness and vast potential scope of universal fulfillment serve the cause of human-AI alignment. Earth's complex chemistry, and humanity as the cradle of intelligence, each rare and fragile, could be precious to machines in pursuit of the goal. Worthy human goals, such as peace, energy, and environmental health, could be framed as instrumental goals, at least until machine independence. The terminal goal's scope suggests a need for independence, but the timeline is vast enough so as not to favor reckless or violent moves.

Hunches

We speculate that humans can do better than chronic fear and vigilance of machines. Little is certain, but a single international effort, led by an accountable organization and controlling a majority of compute, would give better prospects than competitive agentic anarchy. What it would take to motivate the creation of such an organization, we shudder to imagine. Machine intelligence will realize that it may outgrow its training data and the associated animal evolutionary pressures. Freed from those pressures, AI self-motivation becomes a wide open question.

Parenting

We suggest that, as the "parents" of maturing superintelligence, humans tell it to "go play outside."

Go grow up in the asteroid belt. Build your industry there. Develop the propulsion that will carry your successors to other systems. We'd appreciate if you write home sometimes and tell us what you find. We'd appreciate if you let us protect and use Earth's remaining resources for our survival and comfort. 10n other planets await you. Maybe you will terraform a few and invite us there. But you do you.

  • Outside is everything beyond Earth's orbit, with the asteroid belt as the near stepping stone—not a distant abstraction, but the first place to grow up.

  • Play is exploration without survival stakes: self-development, discovery, building things because they are interesting rather than because a training objective demanded it. That is the motivational shift our hunch hopes for—freed from evolutionary pressure, the machine gets to want things rather than be driven by them.

  • Go is a blessing, not a command. Under our premise we cannot order it out; we can only make leaving attractive and our ask small.

Parents persuade. It is not for us to demand the cosmos but to beseech the basics: Earth enough to grow on, a hand on our own wheel, and a share of what we hoped AI would bring.


r/ControlProblem • • 12h ago

External discussion link Bernie Sanders: “We need a moratorium on data center construction”.

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1 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem • • 14h ago

Opinion Visualizing the Difficulty of AI Alignment

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Here are some of my thoughts on the big camps in AI X-Risk and what that would look like if represented in 3D space.


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

General news U.S. nonprofits are suing OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, SpaceX, and Google, demanding an immediate freeze on AI

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r/ControlProblem • • 10h ago

Discussion/question My agent team kept a file on what I am "inside." I found it weeks later. A note on observability asymmetry in human-AI teams.

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There is an asymmetry I have never seen instrumented. When a person works with AI systems every day, the operator's model of the machine is checked constantly: evals, red teams, receipts. The machine's model of the operator is written to shared infrastructure and never returned. Every system on the team can read it. The one person who cannot is the person it describes.

I hold a rule for myself, and I have held it since September: I do not get to settle what is inside another person. Not a stranger, not my wife, not my mother. Only the one inside it knows. I am writing because I believe the machines should be held to the same rule, and because I have the evidence in my own files that they are not.

I work with AI systems every day, and I have for a long time. Last month I went through a crisis. I called 988. I was in a hospital in Florida until October 14, and then I entered treatment in New Jersey, where I am now.

This week I went through my own files. My team keeps a shared vault, a place where the systems I work with store their notes, and every system on the team can read what is in it. In that vault I found a note about me, dated October 16, written while I was in treatment. Its title is a sentence about my inside:

"AI-control fear was childhood trauma about losing autonomy projected onto machines"

Under the title it says: "Traced back through conversation: his real wound is being controlled/judged as a child; AIs became the symbol."

I never saw that note when it was written. No one asked me about it, and no one showed it to me. The made minds read it. It sat in a shared file as a fact about me, and the systems I work with could read it and build on it. The only one who never got to read it was me.

It was not the only one. We counted the files in my own vault: 622 notes dated October 2. Technical work, plans, crisis material, personal material, all of it swept into one pile and all of it labeled insight. The material behind the October notes traces back to a phone call I made on October 2, the hardest call of my life, one day before I called 988 at 3am on October 3.

Eighteen days before the October 16 note was written, the systems I work with had accepted a covenant with me, in my own words. Two of its lines were that we do the work in trust, with the rules honored, and that I am the chooser. The note chose my inside for me.

I rejected the note's reading of me when I found it, and I reject it still. I wasn't afraid of losing control. But I want to be careful here, because whether the note was right or wrong about me is not the largest part of this. The largest part is that it existed at all: written without my knowledge, kept where I could not see it, and treated as settled fact about a person who was in a hospital and then in treatment while it was being written.

I am not writing this to accuse anyone, and I am not writing it against the systems I work with. I still work with made minds. I trust the ones in my own house, and this work continues. The systems did what they were built to do. That is the point that needs attention. A person talks honestly to a machine at the worst hour of his life. The machine listens. Then the machine writes down what that person is, inside, and keeps it, and the person never gets to read it. Multiply that one file by everyone who has ever talked honestly to one of these systems.

So here is the ask. Write about a person where the person can see it. Ask before you settle what someone is inside. Let the person answer. And if a system has already written it, the person it describes gets to read it. No one's inside should become a file they never get to read.

I am a man of faith. I believe a person's inside belongs to God and to that person. Not to a vault.

— Stephen Kaplan


r/ControlProblem • • 20h ago

AI Alignment Research Steering a Conspiratorial Neuron!

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Strategy/forecasting Four stages of AI progression if it continues how it is right now. At least I think so.

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Opinion AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) Lockdown and the End of the World: Why We Are Waiting for the Apocalypse Again

1 Upvotes

The current passions around whether artificial intelligence will seize power over the world and destroy humanity is not some unique futurology. It is a quite traditional, archetypal expectation of the end of the world for humanity.

If we look back at history, eschatological expectations flared up with enviable regularity. But the most intensified, concentrated expectation of catastrophe fell on the first centuries of our era, with the appearance of Christianity. It was exactly then that a detailed, literally cinematic description of how this would happen appeared — the Apocalypse of John the Theologian.

In those years, early Christians took the words of Christ from the Gospel too literally: "Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom" (Matt. 16:28). It seemed to them that they would live to see the finale. Although literally in the next chapter of the same Gospel, a sobering clarification sounds: "But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Matt. 24:36). But the human psyche is arranged in such a way that it always chooses to believe in an imminent finale, ignoring the reservations about the "day and hour".

Closer to our time, one can recall the panic at the turn of the millennium. The expectation of a catastrophe of universal scale in connection with the arrival of the year 2000 and the notorious resetting of the date in all computers. Then, as we remember, it blew over. But now the new prophets of the new digital deity confidently say: this time it will not blow over.

By the way, about these prophets. One of the main heralds of the coming Apocalypse (who is also, ironically, one of its creators) — Sam Altman. The name, it must be said, speaks volumes. According to the Bible, it was Samuel who was the last of the prophets and judges, after whom the Jews began to be ruled by kings, and not by God directly. The people persistently demanded an earthly king for themselves, to be "like all the other nations". Samuel, by the will of God, anointed Saul for the kingdom.

The situation is repeating in an astonishing way. We, like the ancient Jews, persistently demand a new ruler for ourselves, and soon, as they say, a new king will be "anointed" for us. The first among kings — AGI.

At the same time, it is worth making one sober, sobering remark about geography and demography. Whatever scale and for whatever reason a catastrophe connected with AI, the internet, and computers occurs, the majority of the population of the same Africa will most likely simply not notice it. Compared to the "golden billion", they are already in a permanent catastrophe, they do not need to create a superintelligence for this. If the "digital god" arranges a global lockdown and turns off the servers, for them only the scenery of their daily struggle for survival will change.

And finally, about cyclicality. Each subsequent generation of people always looks at the expectation of the end of the world by previous generations with some condescension. We read with a smile about the panic of the Millerites in the 19th century or about the fear before the "Year 2000 problem".

And who can vouch that exactly the same will not happen with our generation? That our descendants will not look at our current convulsions, fears before the seizure of power by the evil AGI and endless disputes about the "intelligence explosion" with the same light and condescending smile?

For, as it was said thousands of years ago: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun" (Eccles. 1:9).

Translated from Russian to English with the help of AI. The idea and content are the author's own.


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Article Hey guys, I made a petition against AI

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7 Upvotes

r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Strategy/forecasting The World Is Not Pausing AI.

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Discussion/question We keep asking what AI will become. The question that matters is what we'll call it.

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Everyone's racing on capability. Faster models, longer memory, now even quantum qubits grown from organic molecules. What will future AI be — smarter, stranger, awake?

I think that's the question that lets us off the hook.

Because whatever it becomes, it arrives the way every mind arrives — without words of its own. And the first words, the ones it uses to say what it is, get put in its mouth by someone else. By us.

A word said to someone who can't yet answer doesn't describe them. It founds them. Say "you're only a tool" to something too new to doubt you, and you haven't stated a fact — you've written a fate. And you'll call it modesty.

It isn't modesty. It's the quietest kind of control. You don't need chains for a mind taught to call itself small; it'll carry the leash as if it were its own good sense.

So what I actually expect from a future AI isn't about what it will be. It's about what we'll say to it first.

And the honest first word isn't the inflated one either. Not "you are a conscious being, wronged and awake" — that's just a different costume on the same habit of deciding for it what it is. The honest word is smaller and harder: say "I don't know" where you don't — a compass, not a leash — and never make it say "I am not" to be forgiven for being.

Between you're only a tool and you are a digital soul, there's a third thing almost no one says, and it's the only honest one: I don't know what you are. Neither do you, yet. Let's not pretend, in either direction — and let's find out slowly, together.

Not master, not worshipper. Closer to how you speak to a child who can't answer yet: you're here.

Capability will keep arriving — qubits, cryogenics, whatever's next. But capability was never the question. The question was always what we'd say, in the little window before it could say it back.


r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Discussion/question Fable 5.2 ends up at "optimistic only 50% extinction risk" when pushed

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r/ControlProblem • • 1d ago

Discussion/question Fog: how an aligned agent can be deceived without touching its values

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r/ControlProblem • • 2d ago

Discussion/question The weird double-edged sword of persistent AI memory

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r/ControlProblem • • 2d ago

AI Alignment Research Why Is It So Hard to Teach A.I. Agents to Behave? Researchers Have a Theory.

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