If Artificial General Intelligence has an okay outcome, what will be the reason?

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22kṀ360k

2200

16%

J. Something 'just works' on the order of eg: train a predictive/imitative/generative AI on a human-generated dataset, and RLHF her to be unfailingly nice, generous to weaker entities, and determined to make the cosmos a lovely place.

13%

K. Somebody discovers a new AI paradigm that's powerful enough and matures fast enough to beat deep learning to the punch, and the new paradigm is much much more alignable than giant inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers.

13%

C. Solving prosaic alignment on the first critical try is not as difficult, nor as dangerous, nor taking as much extra time, as Yudkowsky predicts; whatever effort is put forth by the leading coalition works inside of their lead time.

10%

A. Humanity successfully coordinates worldwide to prevent the creation of powerful AGIs for long enough to develop human intelligence augmentation, uploading, or some other pathway into transcending humanity's window of fragility.

10%

I. The tech path to AGI superintelligence is naturally slow enough and gradual enough, that world-destroyingly-critical alignment problems never appear faster than previous discoveries generalize to allow safe further experimentation.

M. "We'll make the AI do our AI alignment homework" just works as a plan. (Eg the helping AI doesn't need to be smart enough to be deadly; the alignment proposals that most impress human judges are honest and truthful and successful.)

Something wonderful happens that isn't well-described by any option listed. (The semantics of this option may change if other options are added.)

E. Whatever strange motivations end up inside an unalignable AGI, or the internal slice through that AGI which codes its successor, they max out at a universe full of cheerful qualia-bearing life and an okay outcome for existing humans.

B. Humanity puts forth a tremendous effort, and delays AI for long enough, and puts enough desperate work into alignment, that alignment gets solved first.

O. Early applications of AI/AGI drastically increase human civilization's sanity and coordination ability; enabling humanity to solve alignment, or slow down further descent into AGI, etc. (Not in principle mutex with all other answers.)

L. Earth's present civilization crashes before powerful AGI, and the next civilization that rises is wiser and better at ops. (Exception to 'okay' as defined originally, will be said to count as 'okay' even if many current humans die.)

D. Early powerful AGIs realize that they wouldn't be able to align their own future selves/successors if their intelligence got raised further, and work honestly with humans on solving the problem in a way acceptable to both factions.

H. Many competing AGIs form an equilibrium whereby no faction is allowed to get too powerful, and humanity is part of this equilibrium and survives and gets a big chunk of cosmic pie.

An outcome is "okay" if it gets at least 20% of the maximum attainable cosmopolitan value that could've been attained by a positive Singularity (a la full Coherent Extrapolated Volition done correctly), and existing humans don't suffer death or any other awful fates.

This market is a duplicate of https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/if-we-survive-general-artificial-in with different options. https://manifold.markets/EliezerYudkowsky/if-artificial-general-intelligence-539844cd3ba1?r=RWxpZXplcll1ZGtvd3NreQ is this same question but with user-submitted answers.

(Please note: It's a known cognitive bias that you can make people assign more probability to one bucket over another, by unpacking one bucket into lots of subcategories, but not the other bucket, and asking people to assign probabilities to everything listed. This is the disjunctive dual of the Multiple Stage Fallacy, whereby you can unpack any outcome into a big list of supposedly necessary conjuncts that you ask people to assign probabilities to, and make the final outcome seem very improbable.

So: That famed fiction writer Eliezer Yudkowsky can rationalize at least 15 different stories (options 'A' through 'O') about how things could maybe possibly turn out okay; and that the option texts don't have enough room to list out all the reasons each story is unlikely; and that you get 15 different chances to be mistaken about how plausible each story sounds; does not mean that Reality will be terribly impressed with how disjunctive the okay outcome bucket has been made to sound. Reality need not actually allocate more total probability into all the okayness disjuncts listed, from out of all the disjunctive bad ends and intervening difficulties not detailed here.)

Update 2025-07-02 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Regarding answer option E: This option will not be the resolution if the okay outcome is achieved through careful alignment work. Such a scenario would resolve to a different answer.

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