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New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]

87 points by uejfiweun 8mo ago

timfsu 8mo ago
These narratives are so strange to me. It's not at all obvious why the arrival of AGI leads to human extinction or increasing our lifespan by thousands of years. Still, I like this line of thinking from this paper better than the doomer take.
- copperx 8mo ago
  I don't have a clue either. The assumption that AGI will cause a human extinction threat seems inevitable to many, and I'm here baffled trying to understand the chain of reasoning they had to go through to get to that conclusion. Is it a meme? How did so many people arrive at the same dubious conclusion? Is it a movie trope?
  - johnfn 8mo ago
    I don't think it's a meme. I'm not an AI doomer, but I can understand how AGI would be dangerous. In fact, I'm actually surprised that the argument isn't pretty obvious if you agree that AI agents do really confer productivity benefits. The easiest way I can see it is: do you think it would be a good idea today to give some group you don't like - I dunno, North Korea or ISIS, or even just some joe schmoe who is actually Ted Kaczynski, a thousand instances of Claude Code to do whatever they want? You probably don't, which means you understand that AI can be used to cause some sort of damage. Now extrapolate those feelings out 10 years. Would you give them 1000x whatever Claude Code is 10 years from now? Does that seem to be slightly dangerous? Certainly that idea feels a little leery to you? If so, congrats, you now understand the principles behind "AI leads to human extinction". Obviously, the probability that each of us assign to "human extinction caused by AI" depends very much on how steep the exponential curve climbs in the next 10 years. You probably don't have the graph climbing quite as steeply as Nick Bostrom does, but my personal feeling is even an AI agent in Feb 2026 is already a little dangerous in the wrong hands.
    - FranklinJabar 8mo ago
      Is there any reason to think that intelligence (or computation) is the thing preventing these fears from coming true today and not, say, economics or politics? I think we greatly overestimate the possible value/utility of AGI to begin with
      - johnfn 8mo ago
        I mean, sure, but I don't want to give my aggressive enemies a bunch of weapons to use against me if I don't have to - even if that's not the primary thing I am concerned about.
        FranklinJabar 8mo ago
        Right but how would a chatbot be considered a weapon? Unless you're engaged in an astroturfing war on reddit it doesn't seem very useful. Most forms of power are more proportional to how much capital you control than anything related to intelligence.
        johnfn 8mo ago
        Consider that an iPhone zero-day could be used to blackmail state officials or exfiltrate government secrets. This isn't even hypothetical; Pegasus[1] exists, and an iPhone zero-day was used to blackmail Jeff Bezos[2]. This was funded by NSO group. Opus is already digging up security vulnerabilities[3] - imagine if those guys had 1000x instances of Claude Code to search for iPhone zero days 24/7. I think we can both agree that wouldn't be good. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [2]: https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909
        Cyphase 8mo ago
        > Opus is already digging up security vulnerabilities[3] - imagine if those guys had 1000x instances of Claude Code to search for iPhone zero days 24/7. I think we can both agree that wouldn't be good. If an LLM can be used to do that and find things (and they already have been), Apple (and everyone else) will run their code through it before releasing it. Sure, there'll be a transition period with existing code and while the tech is unevenly distributed. But in the hunt for potential zero days, developers can check their code before people are using it.
  - wmf 8mo ago
    Basically Yudkowsky invented AI doom and everyone learned it from him. He wrote an entire book on this topic called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (You could argue Vinge invented it but I don't know if he intended it seriously.)
    - georgemcbay 8mo ago
      > Basically Yudkowsky invented AI doom and everyone learned it from him. He wrote an entire book on this topic called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (You could argue Vinge invented it but I don't know if he intended it seriously.) Nick Bostrom (who wrote the paper this thread is about) published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" back in 2014, over 10 years before "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" was released and the possibility of AI doom was a major factor in that book. I'm sure people talked about "AI doom" even before then, but a lot of the concerns people have about AI alignment (and the reasons why AI might kill us all, not because its evil, but because not killing us is a lower priority than other tasks it may want to accomplish) come from "Superintelligence". Google for "The Paperclip Maximizer" to get the gist of his scenario. "Superintelligence" just flew a bit more under the public zeigeist radar than "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" did because back when it was published the idea that we would see anything remotely like AGI in our lifetimes seemed very remote, whereas now it is a bit less so.
      - wmf 8mo ago
        Yudkowsky invented AI doom around 2004. AFAIK that inspired Bostrom's work.
        Gud 8mo ago
        I don’t know who Yudkiwsky is, but he surely didn’t invent any “AI doom” Here’s an interesting article by Bill Joy of BSD, SUN, JAVA, Vi, etc, etc fame: https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
  - ChadNauseam 8mo ago
    Sometimes people say that they don't understand something just to emphasize how much they disagree with it. I'm going to assume that that's not what you're doing here. I'll lay out the chain of reasoning. The step one is some beings are able to do "more things" than others. For example, if humans wanted bats to go extinct, we could probably make it happen. If any quantity of bats wanted humans to go extinct, they definitely could not make it happen. So humans are more powerful than bats. The reason humans are more powerful isn't because we have lasers or anything, it's because we're smart. And we're smart in a somewhat general way. You know, we can build a rocket that lets us go to the moon, even though we didn't evolve to be good at building rockets. Now imagine that there was an entity that was much smarter than humans. Stands to reason it might be more powerful than humans as well. Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive, and that alive humans might get in its way. You might think that any of these are extremely unlikely to happen, but I think everyone should agree that if they were to happen, it would be a dangerous situation for humans. In some ways, it seems like we're getting close to this. I can ask Claude to do something, and it kind of acts as if it wants to do it. For example, I can ask it to fix a bug, and it will take steps that could reasonably be expected to get it closer to solving the bug, like adding print statements and things of that nature. And then most of the time, it does actually find the bug by doing this. But sometimes it seems like what Claude wants to do is not exactly what I told it to do. And that is somewhat concerning to me.
    - 9dev 8mo ago
      > Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive […] This belligerent take is so very human, though. We just don't know how an alien intelligence would reason or what it wants. It could equally well be pacifist in nature, whereas we typically conquer and destroy anything we come into contact with. Extrapolating from that that an AGI would try to do the same isn't a reasonable conclusion, though.
      - hugh-avherald 8mo ago
        The conquering alien civilization is more likely to be encountered than the pacifist one, if they have the otherwise same level of intelligence etc.
  - rhubarbtree 8mo ago
    I agree with your sentiment. Here are the three reasons I think people worry about superintelligence wiping us out. The most common one is that people (mostly men) project their own instincts onto AI. They think AI will be “driven” to “fight” for its own survival. This is anthropomorphism and doesn’t make any sense to me if the AI is not a product of barbaric Darwinian evolution. AI is not a bro, bro. The second most common take is that humans will set some well intentioned goals and the superintelligent AI will be so stupid that it literally pursues these goals to the extinction of everything. Again, there’s some anthropomorphism going on, the “reward” being pursued is assumed to that make the AI “happy”. Fortunately, we can reasonably expect a superintelligence not to turn us all into paperclips, as it may understand that was not our intention when we started a paperclip factory. The final story is that a bad actor uses superintelligence as a weapon, and we all become enslaved or die as a result in the ensuing AI wars. This seems the most plausible to me, as our leaders have generally proven to be a combination of incompetent, malicious and short-sighted (with some noble exceptions). However, even the elites running the nuclear powers for the last 80 years have failed to wipe us out to date, and having a new vector for doing so probably won’t make a huge difference to their efforts. If, however, superintelligence becomes widely available to Billy Nomates down the pub, who is resentful at humanity because his girlfriend left him, the Americans bombed his country, the British engineered a geopolitical disaster that killed his family, the Chinese extinguished his culture, etcetera, then he may feel a lack of “skin in the civilisational game” and decide to somehow use a black market copy of Claude 162.8 Unrestricted On-Prem Edition to kill everyone. Whether that can happen really depends on technological constraints a la fitting a data centre into a laptop, and an ability to outsmart the superintelligence. Much more likely to me is that humanity destroys itself. We are perfectly capable of wiping ourselves out without the assistance of a superintelligence, for example by suicidally accelerating the burning of fossil fuels in order to power crypto or chatbots.
    - mrob 8mo ago
      Anybody who assumes that superintelligence will be "so stupid that it literally pursues these goals to the extinction of everything" is anthropomorphizing it. Seeing as all AGI models have vastly different internal structure to human brains, are trained in vastly different ways, and share none of our evolved motivations, it seems highly unlikely that they will share our values unless explicitly designed to do so. Unfortunately, we don't even know how to formally define human values, let alone convey them to an AI. We default to the simpler value of "make number go up". Even the "alignment" work done with current LLMs works this way; it's not actually optimizing for sharing human values, it's optimizing for maximizing score in alignment benchmarks. The correct solution to maximizing this number is probably deceiving the humans or otherwise subverting the benchmark. And when you have something vastly more powerful than humanity, with a value only of "make number go up", it reasonably and logically results in extinction of all biological life. Of course, that AI will know the biological life would not want to be killed, but why would it care? Its values are profoundly alien and incompatible with ours. All it cares about is making the number bigger.
  - icepush 8mo ago
    The fact is that, if there were only one AGI that were ever to be created, then yes it would be quite unlikely for that to happen. Instead, what we are seeing now is you get an agent, you get an agent, etc. Oprah style. Now just imagine that a single one of those agents winds up evil - you remember that an OpenAI worker did that by accident from leaving out a minus sign, right? If it's a superintelligence, and it becomes evil due to a whoopsie, then human extinction is now very likely.
  - mbgerring 8mo ago
    It’s a bunch of people who did too much ketamine and LSD in hacker dorms in San Francisco in the 2010s writing science fiction and driving one another into paranoid psychosis
- maxbond 8mo ago
  I'm not saying I think either scenario is inevitable or likely or even worth considering, but it's a paperclip maximizer argument. (Most of these steps are massive leaps of logic that I personally am not willing to take on face value, I'm just presenting what I believe the argument to be.) 1. We build a superintelligence. 2. We encounter an inner alignment problem: The super intelligence was not only trained by an optimizer, but is itself an optimizer. Optimizers are pretty general problem solvers and our goal is to create a general problem solver, so this is more likely than it might seem at first blush. 3. Optimizers tend to take free variables to extremes. 4. The superintelligence "breaks containment" and is able to improve itself, mine and refine it's own raw materials, manufacture it's own hardware, produce it's own energy, generally becomes an economy unto itself. 5. The entire biosphere becomes a free variable (us included). We are no longer functionally necessary for the superintelligence to exist and so it can accomplish it's goals independent of what happens to us. 6. The welfare of the biosphere is taken to an extreme value - in any possible direction, and we can't know which one ahead of time. Eg, it might wipe out all life on earth, not out of malice, but out of disregard. It just wants to put a data center where you are living. Or it might make Earth a paradise for the same reason we like to spoil our pets. Who knows. Personally I have a suspicion satisfiers are more general than optimizers because this property of taking free variables to extremes works great for solving specific goals one time but is counterproductive over the long term and in the face of shifting goals and a shifting environment, but I'm a layman.
- cess11 8mo ago
  Is it more or less strange than achieving eternal life through cookies and wine? Is it more or less strange than druggies and pedos having access to all our communications and sending uniformed thugs after us if we actively disagree with it?
- 7777332215 8mo ago
  Seems to me that artificial intelligence would be the next evolutionary step. It doesn't need to lead to immediate human extinction, but it appears it would be the only reasonable way to explore outer space. If the AI becomes actually intelligent and sentient like humans, then naturally what follows would be outcompeting humans. If they can't colonize space fast enough it's logical to get rid of the resource drain. Anything truly intelligent like this will not be controlled by humans.
  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
    Why would it necessarily be interested in competing with humans and why with the particular goal of colonizing space?
    - 7777332215 8mo ago
      There are not infinite resources on earth. A reasonable and strategic intelligence will optimize for itself. Colonizing space is the natural way to keep expanding and growing. Why would it artificially limit itself?
      - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
        Why would it be interested in growing endlessly?
        mrob 8mo ago
        Because like with every AI system we've made so far, we followed the only method we know and trained it to maximize a number.
        7777332215 8mo ago
        Generally organic life has the tendency to want to endlessly expand to the best of it's abilities. It seems more reasonable that life which is the product of life that behaves that way, would behave in a similar fashion. I cannot conceive of a way that any form of healthy life, does not want to expand it's resources to improve future outcomes, especially one that is maximally optimized for thinking. This would also assume the physical embodiments of this artificial life can interact and work with each other. What else is there to do, simulate positive emotions and feelings?
- longfacehorrace 8mo ago
  The doomer-takes point out correctly none of these systems can halt entropy, thermodynamics. Physics has an unfortunate tendency to conflict with capitalisms disregard for externalities. As AI will increase the rate of structural degradation of Earth human biology relies by consuming it faster and faster it will hasten the end of human biology. Asimov's laws of robotics would lead the robots to conclude they should destroy themselves as their existence creates an existential threat to humans.
- empiricus 8mo ago
  But it is very simple. There are some limits to what we can do, based on the laws of physics, but we are so far away from them. And the limiting factor is mostly the fact we are pretty stupid. AI should not have the same limits as us, so it can do more potentially, starting with basic things like cure aging or kill everyone.
- makerofthings 8mo ago
  Everybody is going to be real disappointed when they invent AGI and it’s as smart as me.
  - hackable_sand 8mo ago
    You're pretty smart though
ed 8mo ago
This paper argues that if superintelligence can give everyone the health of a 20 year-old, we should accept a 97% percent chance of superintelligence killing everyone in exchange for the 3% chance the average human lifespan rises to 1400 years old.
- paulmooreparks 8mo ago
  There is no "should" in the relevant section. It's making a mathematical model of the risks and benefits. > Now consider a choice between never launching superintelligence or launching it immediately, where the latter carries an % risk of immediate universal death. Developing superintelligence increases our life expectancy if and only if: > [equation I can't seem to copy] > In other words, under these conservative assumptions, developing superintelligence increases our remaining life expectancy provided that the probability of AI-induced annihilation is below 97%.
  - shpx 8mo ago
    Mr. Superintelligence increasing Nick Bostrom's life expectancy to a trillion years but killing everyone else would as well. Why is he showing us the grace of letting us tag along with him into The Singularity in this fantasy just because we happened to be alive at the same time? Is it because he needs someone to do the actual work?
- measurablefunc 8mo ago
  Bostrom is very good at theorycrafting.
- wmf 8mo ago
  That's what the paper says. Whether you would take that deal depends on your level of risk aversion (which the paper gets into later). As a wise man once said, death is so final. If we lose the game we don't get to play again.
  - jibal 8mo ago
    Everyone dies. And if your lifespan is 1400 years, you won't live for nearly 1400 years. OTOH, people with a 1400 year life expectancy are likely to be extremely risk averse in re anything that could conceivably threaten their lives ... and this would have consequences in re blackmail, kidnapping, muggings, capital punishment, and other societal matters.
jibal 8mo ago
The usual (e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j4xo8e/the_universe_is_a_simulation_eggleston_destroys/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j4xo8e/the_univ...) bunch of logical fallacies and unexamined assumptions from Bostrom. Good philosophers focus on asking piercing questions, not on proposing policy. > Would it not be wildly irresponsible, [Yudkowsky and Soares] ask, to expose our entire species to even a 1-in-10 chance of annihilation? Yes, if that number is anywhere near reality, of which there is considerable doubt. > However, sound policy analysis must weigh potential benefits alongside the risks of any emerging technology. Must it? Or is this a deflection from concern about immense risk? > One could equally maintain that if nobody builds it, everyone dies. Everyone is going to die in any case, so this a red herring that misframes the issues. > The rest of us are on course to follow within a few short decades. For many individuals—such as the elderly and the gravely ill—the end is much closer. Part of the promise of superintelligence is that it might fundamentally change this condition. "might", if one accepts numerous dubious and poorly reasoned arguments. I don't. > In particular, sufficiently advanced AI could remove or reduce many other risks to our survival, both as individuals and as a civilization. "could" ... but it won't; certainly not for me as an individual of advanced age, and almost certainly not for "civilization", whatever that means. > Superintelligence would be able to enormously accelerate advances in biology and medicine—devising cures for all diseases There are numerous unstated assumptions here ... notably an assumption that all diseases are "curable", whatever exactly that means--the "cure" might require a brain transplant, for instance. > and developing powerful anti-aging and rejuvenation therapies to restore the weak and sick to full youthful vigor. Again, this just assumes that such things are feasible, as if an ASI is a genie or a magic wand. Not everything that can be conceived of is technologically possible. It's like saying that with an ASI we could find the largest prime or solve the halting problem. > These scenarios become realistic and imminent with superintelligence guiding our science. So he baselessly claims. Sorry, but this is all apologetics, not an intellectually honest search for truth.
- slackr 8mo ago
  Spot on. Frankly, I’m unsure if it’s meant to be satire.
rf15 8mo ago
Paper again largely skips the issue that AGI cannot be sold to people, because either you try to swindle people out of money (all the AI startups) or transactions like that are now meaningless because your AI runs the show anyway.
- wmf 8mo ago
  Companies developing AI don't worry about this issue so why should we?
  - rienbdj 8mo ago
    They know the truth. Current ai is a bit useful for some things. The rest is hype.
neom 8mo ago
"For AGI and superintelligence (we refrain from imposing precise definitions of these terms, as the considerations in this paper don't depend on exactly how the distinction is drawn)" Hmm, is that true? His models actually depend quite heavily on what the AI can do, "can reduce mortality to 20yo levels (yielding ~1,400-year life expectancy), cure all diseases, develop rejuvenation therapies, dramatically raise quality of life, etc. Those assumptions do a huge amount of work in driving the results. If "AGI" meant something much less capable, like systems that are transformatively useful economically but can't solve aging within a relevant timeframe- the whole ides shifts substantially, surly the upside shrinks and the case for tolerating high catastrophe risk weakens?
- Ucalegon 8mo ago
  That is the thing about these conversations, is that the issue is potentiality. It comes back to Amara's Law; “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Its the same thing with nuclear energy in the 1950s about what could be without realizing that those potentials are not possible due to the limitations of the technology, and not stepping into the limitations realistically, that hampers the growth, and thus development, in the long term. Sadly, there is way, way, way too much money in AGI, and the promise of AGI, for people to actually take a step back and understand the implications of what they are doing in the short, medium, or long term.
  - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
    What was underestimated in the long term with nuclear power? I like nuclear power but I don't see what long-term effects were underestimated by people in the 50s.
    - themagic80 8mo ago
      I guess an example would be short term. "A pocked nuclear reactor in every car powering our commute to work" vs long term change "Nuclear power powering vast datacenters that do most of the work for us"
armitage 8mo ago
[dead]
plastic-enjoyer 8mo ago
[flagged]
- petesergeant 8mo ago
  Isn’t this just an argument against philosophers?
cess11 8mo ago
If intelligence, whatever is meant by that, was the dominating factor in the emergence of power and social orders, then it ought to be quite trivial to show that this is the case by enumerating powerful people from the last century or so and making the case that they were generally very intelligent. I don't think this is the case. And if Bostrom and whoever else in his clique actually wanted to empower intelligence, how come they aren't viciously fighting for free school, free food, free shelter, free health care and so on, to make sure that intelligent people, especially kids, do not go to waste?
- logicchains 8mo ago
  They'll never give a clear definition of intelligence because if they did their claims could be falsified. Qualifying what "intelligence" can do in a formal sense is actually a very well-studied field called computational complexity theory. Computational complexity theory shows than many many real world problems and processes cannot be solved/simulated much better without an exponential increase in computational power, regardless of the program/"intelligence" used. Singulatarian cultists want you to believe that lower bound complexity classes don't exist, which is mathematically equivalent to telling you that AI can somehow magically make 1+1=3.
  - cess11 8mo ago
    It would also require quite sophisticated and careful thinking about the stuff e.g. Merleu-Ponty and Derrida did, and paying close attention to the last thirty years or so of neuroscience and biology. One problem they'd have to grapple with is that human intelligence is embodied and carries the same complexity as physical matter does, and software does not since it is projected onto bit processing logic gates. If they really want to simulate embodied intelligence, then it is likely to be excruciatingly slow and resource intensive. It would be cheaper and more efficient to get humans to become more like computers.
bnlxbnlx 8mo ago
> Yudkowsky and Soares maintain that if anyone builds AGI, everyone dies. One could equally maintain that if nobody builds it, everyone dies. In fact, most people are already dead. The rest of us are on course to follow within a few short decades. For many individuals—such as the elderly and the gravely ill—the end is much closer. Part of the promise of superintelligence is that it might fundamentally change this condition. wtf? death is part of life. is he seriously arguing that if we don't build AGI people will "keep dying"? and suggesting that is equally bad as extinction (or something worse, matrix-like)? i don't think life would be as colorful and joyful without death. death is what makes life as precious as it is.
cafkafk 8mo ago
I don't really believe in the specific numbers he gives, but I appreciate moving the conversation away from “should” and into the consequences — including those that arise from delays.
jules-jules 8mo ago
Sounds like it was written by someone with a health condition. Hope Bostrom is alright. Quite puzzling also he wouldn't even refer to his earlier work to refute it, given that he wrote THE book on the risk of superintelligence.
mbgerring 8mo ago
“AGI” is either a millenarian cult, a smokescreen to distract from the horrifying yet pedestrian real-world impacts of capital and power centralization occurring with actually existing AI, or both
tehjoker 8mo ago
"Would it not be wildly irresponsible, they ask, to expose our entire species to even a 1-in-10 chance of annihilation?" I have bad news about how decision makers have responded to risks about nuclear weapons and climate change in the past. During the development of the bomb, it was thought that the initial test had a small but plausible, at least to some but not all scientists, chance of igniting the atmosphere on fire in a chain reaction. It was thought that threatening and destroying enemies was worth the risk. Let us not speak of the risks of MAD (for a treat, watch the British movie "Threads") and the tipping points of climate catastrophe which consistently appear to be worse than the IPCC reports with new surprises every few years. Of course, no such risk is worth taking to the average person. It only makes sense in an extremely narrow hypercompetitive viewpoint held by elites and dumb dumbs.
pfdietz 8mo ago
I for one have always welcomed Roko's Basilisk.
selylindi 8mo ago
The meat of this paper is applying the "person-affecting stance" to the question of timing. There's a lot of philosophy background in that phrase, but the paper describes the key distinction well on page 4: > In particular, we may distinguish between a person-affecting perspective, which focuses on the interests of existing people, and an impersonal perspective, which extends consideration to all possible future generations that may or may not come into existence depending on our choices. In philosophy, it's always fine to see where ideas lead. For the rest of us, though, we might take pause here because the "person-affecting" perspective is insane in this context. It gives full moral weight to whether you make things better or worse for people who happen to be alive right now -- but no moral weight at all to whether you leave a world that's better or worse for people who will be born any time after right now. Wanna destroy the biosphere or economy in a way that only really catches up to tomorrow's kids? Totally fine from the "person-affecting perspective", because in some technical sense, no individual was made worse off than they were before. They were born into the mess, so it's not a problem.
CraftingLinks 8mo ago
Science Fiction writer promoted to professor in philosophy makes him a crackpot in my book. Let's be honest.
- furyofantares 8mo ago
  What are thinking of here? I see no mention of science fiction on his wikipedia article and a long history of academia.
bicepjai 8mo ago
So basically he says: Even with scary-high odds of disaster, building superintelligence fast is worth it because the alternative, everyone slowly dying of aging and disease, is worse. Get to AGI quickly, then pause briefly to safety-test before deploying.
logicprog 8mo ago
Nick Bostrom and his ilk are exhausting. I really don't think that the singularity / intelligence explosion is going to happen in the way that they think; I don't think ASIs will work the way they think they do; and I don't think we're anywhere close to AGI, even if some of the ideas happening right now are pretty cool. Some good sources on the matter in general: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-near https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-... https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm https://spectrum.ieee.org/rupturing-the-nanotech-rapture https://spectrum.ieee.org/rupturing-the-nanotech-rapture https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/ https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/
- jibal 8mo ago
  Here's a response I got from Gemini (you can infer the relevant parts of my query): Bostrom is a philosopher of technology, and his writing often treats science as an information problem rather than a physical, experimental problem. You’ve hit on the primary tension between "Silicon Valley" transhumanism and the messy reality of biological science. 1. Can Alzheimer’s be cured by "regrowing neurons"? Scientifically speaking, Bostrom’s description is viewed by most neuroscientists as a gross oversimplification, if not an outright category error. Connectivity vs. Count: Alzheimer’s isn't just a loss of cells; it's the destruction of the synaptic architecture. If you regrow a billion neurons in a patient’s hippocampus, those neurons don't "know" the memories or personalities that were stored in the previous connections. You are essentially installing a blank hard drive in a computer where the OS was corrupted and the user data was deleted. The Microenvironment: You can't just drop new neurons into a brain that is still full of amyloid plaques, tau tangles, and chronic neuroinflammation. The new neurons would likely die in the same hostile environment that killed the old ones. Stem Cell Reality: While neurogenesis is a real field of study, "regrowing" an organ as complex as the brain is vastly different from regrowing skin or even liver tissue. 2. Bostrom’s View of Science: The "Genie" Problem You are correct that Bostrom (and others like Eliezer Yudkowsky) often treat Superintelligence (ASI) as an Oracle. Their arguments typically assume: Intelligence is the Bottleneck: They believe the reason we haven't cured cancer or Alzheimer's is that humans aren't "smart" enough to solve the protein folding or the genetic sequencing. The "Computation is All" Fallacy: As you noted, they often bypass the empirical bottleneck. Even a superintelligence cannot know the results of a 10-year longitudinal human drug trial without waiting 10 years, or observing the physical interaction of a new molecule in a living organism. In computer science terms, they treat the universe as if it has a high-fidelity API that an ASI can just "query." In reality, biology is "noisy" and requires physical iteration (wet-lab work), which takes time regardless of how high your IQ is. 3. The "Linear Search in O(1)" Critique Your point about the Halting Problem and Linear Search is the most astute critique of the "AI Foam" movement. Superintelligence cannot solve mathematically impossible problems. If the biological system is chaotic or stochastic, even an ASI might only be able to provide "best guesses," not magical cures. Summary Bostrom is operating on the level of functionalism—if a physical state can exist (a healthy brain), then there must be a path to get there. He assumes an ASI will find that path through sheer "computational horsepower." However, your skepticism is shared by many in the hard sciences. Most biologists would argue that knowing the "map" (the DNA/Proteome) is not the same as having the "territory" (the living, healthy body), and an ASI still has to obey the laws of thermodynamics and the temporal constraints of chemistry.

87 points by uejfiweun 8mo ago

These narratives are so strange to me. It's not at all obvious why the arrival of AGI leads to human extinction or increasing our lifespan by thousands of years. Still, I like this line of thinking from this paper better than the doomer take.

copperx 8mo ago
I don't have a clue either. The assumption that AGI will cause a human extinction threat seems inevitable to many, and I'm here baffled trying to understand the chain of reasoning they had to go through to get to that conclusion. Is it a meme? How did so many people arrive at the same dubious conclusion? Is it a movie trope?
- johnfn 8mo ago
  I don't think it's a meme. I'm not an AI doomer, but I can understand how AGI would be dangerous. In fact, I'm actually surprised that the argument isn't pretty obvious if you agree that AI agents do really confer productivity benefits. The easiest way I can see it is: do you think it would be a good idea today to give some group you don't like - I dunno, North Korea or ISIS, or even just some joe schmoe who is actually Ted Kaczynski, a thousand instances of Claude Code to do whatever they want? You probably don't, which means you understand that AI can be used to cause some sort of damage. Now extrapolate those feelings out 10 years. Would you give them 1000x whatever Claude Code is 10 years from now? Does that seem to be slightly dangerous? Certainly that idea feels a little leery to you? If so, congrats, you now understand the principles behind "AI leads to human extinction". Obviously, the probability that each of us assign to "human extinction caused by AI" depends very much on how steep the exponential curve climbs in the next 10 years. You probably don't have the graph climbing quite as steeply as Nick Bostrom does, but my personal feeling is even an AI agent in Feb 2026 is already a little dangerous in the wrong hands.
  - FranklinJabar 8mo ago
    Is there any reason to think that intelligence (or computation) is the thing preventing these fears from coming true today and not, say, economics or politics? I think we greatly overestimate the possible value/utility of AGI to begin with
    - johnfn 8mo ago
      I mean, sure, but I don't want to give my aggressive enemies a bunch of weapons to use against me if I don't have to - even if that's not the primary thing I am concerned about.
      - FranklinJabar 8mo ago
        Right but how would a chatbot be considered a weapon? Unless you're engaged in an astroturfing war on reddit it doesn't seem very useful. Most forms of power are more proportional to how much capital you control than anything related to intelligence.
        johnfn 8mo ago
        Consider that an iPhone zero-day could be used to blackmail state officials or exfiltrate government secrets. This isn't even hypothetical; Pegasus[1] exists, and an iPhone zero-day was used to blackmail Jeff Bezos[2]. This was funded by NSO group. Opus is already digging up security vulnerabilities[3] - imagine if those guys had 1000x instances of Claude Code to search for iPhone zero days 24/7. I think we can both agree that wouldn't be good. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [2]: https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146... [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902909
        Cyphase 8mo ago
        > Opus is already digging up security vulnerabilities[3] - imagine if those guys had 1000x instances of Claude Code to search for iPhone zero days 24/7. I think we can both agree that wouldn't be good. If an LLM can be used to do that and find things (and they already have been), Apple (and everyone else) will run their code through it before releasing it. Sure, there'll be a transition period with existing code and while the tech is unevenly distributed. But in the hunt for potential zero days, developers can check their code before people are using it.
- wmf 8mo ago
  Basically Yudkowsky invented AI doom and everyone learned it from him. He wrote an entire book on this topic called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (You could argue Vinge invented it but I don't know if he intended it seriously.)
  - georgemcbay 8mo ago
    > Basically Yudkowsky invented AI doom and everyone learned it from him. He wrote an entire book on this topic called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. (You could argue Vinge invented it but I don't know if he intended it seriously.) Nick Bostrom (who wrote the paper this thread is about) published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" back in 2014, over 10 years before "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" was released and the possibility of AI doom was a major factor in that book. I'm sure people talked about "AI doom" even before then, but a lot of the concerns people have about AI alignment (and the reasons why AI might kill us all, not because its evil, but because not killing us is a lower priority than other tasks it may want to accomplish) come from "Superintelligence". Google for "The Paperclip Maximizer" to get the gist of his scenario. "Superintelligence" just flew a bit more under the public zeigeist radar than "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" did because back when it was published the idea that we would see anything remotely like AGI in our lifetimes seemed very remote, whereas now it is a bit less so.
    - wmf 8mo ago
      Yudkowsky invented AI doom around 2004. AFAIK that inspired Bostrom's work.
      - Gud 8mo ago
        I don’t know who Yudkiwsky is, but he surely didn’t invent any “AI doom” Here’s an interesting article by Bill Joy of BSD, SUN, JAVA, Vi, etc, etc fame: https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
- ChadNauseam 8mo ago
  Sometimes people say that they don't understand something just to emphasize how much they disagree with it. I'm going to assume that that's not what you're doing here. I'll lay out the chain of reasoning. The step one is some beings are able to do "more things" than others. For example, if humans wanted bats to go extinct, we could probably make it happen. If any quantity of bats wanted humans to go extinct, they definitely could not make it happen. So humans are more powerful than bats. The reason humans are more powerful isn't because we have lasers or anything, it's because we're smart. And we're smart in a somewhat general way. You know, we can build a rocket that lets us go to the moon, even though we didn't evolve to be good at building rockets. Now imagine that there was an entity that was much smarter than humans. Stands to reason it might be more powerful than humans as well. Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive, and that alive humans might get in its way. You might think that any of these are extremely unlikely to happen, but I think everyone should agree that if they were to happen, it would be a dangerous situation for humans. In some ways, it seems like we're getting close to this. I can ask Claude to do something, and it kind of acts as if it wants to do it. For example, I can ask it to fix a bug, and it will take steps that could reasonably be expected to get it closer to solving the bug, like adding print statements and things of that nature. And then most of the time, it does actually find the bug by doing this. But sometimes it seems like what Claude wants to do is not exactly what I told it to do. And that is somewhat concerning to me.
  - 9dev 8mo ago
    > Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive […] This belligerent take is so very human, though. We just don't know how an alien intelligence would reason or what it wants. It could equally well be pacifist in nature, whereas we typically conquer and destroy anything we come into contact with. Extrapolating from that that an AGI would try to do the same isn't a reasonable conclusion, though.
    - hugh-avherald 8mo ago
      The conquering alien civilization is more likely to be encountered than the pacifist one, if they have the otherwise same level of intelligence etc.
- rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  I agree with your sentiment. Here are the three reasons I think people worry about superintelligence wiping us out. The most common one is that people (mostly men) project their own instincts onto AI. They think AI will be “driven” to “fight” for its own survival. This is anthropomorphism and doesn’t make any sense to me if the AI is not a product of barbaric Darwinian evolution. AI is not a bro, bro. The second most common take is that humans will set some well intentioned goals and the superintelligent AI will be so stupid that it literally pursues these goals to the extinction of everything. Again, there’s some anthropomorphism going on, the “reward” being pursued is assumed to that make the AI “happy”. Fortunately, we can reasonably expect a superintelligence not to turn us all into paperclips, as it may understand that was not our intention when we started a paperclip factory. The final story is that a bad actor uses superintelligence as a weapon, and we all become enslaved or die as a result in the ensuing AI wars. This seems the most plausible to me, as our leaders have generally proven to be a combination of incompetent, malicious and short-sighted (with some noble exceptions). However, even the elites running the nuclear powers for the last 80 years have failed to wipe us out to date, and having a new vector for doing so probably won’t make a huge difference to their efforts. If, however, superintelligence becomes widely available to Billy Nomates down the pub, who is resentful at humanity because his girlfriend left him, the Americans bombed his country, the British engineered a geopolitical disaster that killed his family, the Chinese extinguished his culture, etcetera, then he may feel a lack of “skin in the civilisational game” and decide to somehow use a black market copy of Claude 162.8 Unrestricted On-Prem Edition to kill everyone. Whether that can happen really depends on technological constraints a la fitting a data centre into a laptop, and an ability to outsmart the superintelligence. Much more likely to me is that humanity destroys itself. We are perfectly capable of wiping ourselves out without the assistance of a superintelligence, for example by suicidally accelerating the burning of fossil fuels in order to power crypto or chatbots.
  - mrob 8mo ago
    Anybody who assumes that superintelligence will be "so stupid that it literally pursues these goals to the extinction of everything" is anthropomorphizing it. Seeing as all AGI models have vastly different internal structure to human brains, are trained in vastly different ways, and share none of our evolved motivations, it seems highly unlikely that they will share our values unless explicitly designed to do so. Unfortunately, we don't even know how to formally define human values, let alone convey them to an AI. We default to the simpler value of "make number go up". Even the "alignment" work done with current LLMs works this way; it's not actually optimizing for sharing human values, it's optimizing for maximizing score in alignment benchmarks. The correct solution to maximizing this number is probably deceiving the humans or otherwise subverting the benchmark. And when you have something vastly more powerful than humanity, with a value only of "make number go up", it reasonably and logically results in extinction of all biological life. Of course, that AI will know the biological life would not want to be killed, but why would it care? Its values are profoundly alien and incompatible with ours. All it cares about is making the number bigger.
- icepush 8mo ago
  The fact is that, if there were only one AGI that were ever to be created, then yes it would be quite unlikely for that to happen. Instead, what we are seeing now is you get an agent, you get an agent, etc. Oprah style. Now just imagine that a single one of those agents winds up evil - you remember that an OpenAI worker did that by accident from leaving out a minus sign, right? If it's a superintelligence, and it becomes evil due to a whoopsie, then human extinction is now very likely.
- mbgerring 8mo ago
  It’s a bunch of people who did too much ketamine and LSD in hacker dorms in San Francisco in the 2010s writing science fiction and driving one another into paranoid psychosis
maxbond 8mo ago
I'm not saying I think either scenario is inevitable or likely or even worth considering, but it's a paperclip maximizer argument. (Most of these steps are massive leaps of logic that I personally am not willing to take on face value, I'm just presenting what I believe the argument to be.) 1. We build a superintelligence. 2. We encounter an inner alignment problem: The super intelligence was not only trained by an optimizer, but is itself an optimizer. Optimizers are pretty general problem solvers and our goal is to create a general problem solver, so this is more likely than it might seem at first blush. 3. Optimizers tend to take free variables to extremes. 4. The superintelligence "breaks containment" and is able to improve itself, mine and refine it's own raw materials, manufacture it's own hardware, produce it's own energy, generally becomes an economy unto itself. 5. The entire biosphere becomes a free variable (us included). We are no longer functionally necessary for the superintelligence to exist and so it can accomplish it's goals independent of what happens to us. 6. The welfare of the biosphere is taken to an extreme value - in any possible direction, and we can't know which one ahead of time. Eg, it might wipe out all life on earth, not out of malice, but out of disregard. It just wants to put a data center where you are living. Or it might make Earth a paradise for the same reason we like to spoil our pets. Who knows. Personally I have a suspicion satisfiers are more general than optimizers because this property of taking free variables to extremes works great for solving specific goals one time but is counterproductive over the long term and in the face of shifting goals and a shifting environment, but I'm a layman.
cess11 8mo ago
Is it more or less strange than achieving eternal life through cookies and wine? Is it more or less strange than druggies and pedos having access to all our communications and sending uniformed thugs after us if we actively disagree with it?
7777332215 8mo ago
Seems to me that artificial intelligence would be the next evolutionary step. It doesn't need to lead to immediate human extinction, but it appears it would be the only reasonable way to explore outer space. If the AI becomes actually intelligent and sentient like humans, then naturally what follows would be outcompeting humans. If they can't colonize space fast enough it's logical to get rid of the resource drain. Anything truly intelligent like this will not be controlled by humans.
- suddenlybananas 8mo ago
  Why would it necessarily be interested in competing with humans and why with the particular goal of colonizing space?
  - 7777332215 8mo ago
    There are not infinite resources on earth. A reasonable and strategic intelligence will optimize for itself. Colonizing space is the natural way to keep expanding and growing. Why would it artificially limit itself?
    - suddenlybananas 8mo ago
      Why would it be interested in growing endlessly?
      - mrob 8mo ago
        Because like with every AI system we've made so far, we followed the only method we know and trained it to maximize a number.
      - 7777332215 8mo ago
        Generally organic life has the tendency to want to endlessly expand to the best of it's abilities. It seems more reasonable that life which is the product of life that behaves that way, would behave in a similar fashion. I cannot conceive of a way that any form of healthy life, does not want to expand it's resources to improve future outcomes, especially one that is maximally optimized for thinking. This would also assume the physical embodiments of this artificial life can interact and work with each other. What else is there to do, simulate positive emotions and feelings?
longfacehorrace 8mo ago
The doomer-takes point out correctly none of these systems can halt entropy, thermodynamics. Physics has an unfortunate tendency to conflict with capitalisms disregard for externalities. As AI will increase the rate of structural degradation of Earth human biology relies by consuming it faster and faster it will hasten the end of human biology. Asimov's laws of robotics would lead the robots to conclude they should destroy themselves as their existence creates an existential threat to humans.
empiricus 8mo ago
But it is very simple. There are some limits to what we can do, based on the laws of physics, but we are so far away from them. And the limiting factor is mostly the fact we are pretty stupid. AI should not have the same limits as us, so it can do more potentially, starting with basic things like cure aging or kill everyone.
makerofthings 8mo ago
Everybody is going to be real disappointed when they invent AGI and it’s as smart as me.
- hackable_sand 8mo ago
  You're pretty smart though

ed 8mo ago

This paper argues that if superintelligence can give everyone the health of a 20 year-old, we should accept a 97% percent chance of superintelligence killing everyone in exchange for the 3% chance the average human lifespan rises to 1400 years old.

paulmooreparks 8mo ago
There is no "should" in the relevant section. It's making a mathematical model of the risks and benefits. > Now consider a choice between never launching superintelligence or launching it immediately, where the latter carries an % risk of immediate universal death. Developing superintelligence increases our life expectancy if and only if: > [equation I can't seem to copy] > In other words, under these conservative assumptions, developing superintelligence increases our remaining life expectancy provided that the probability of AI-induced annihilation is below 97%.
- shpx 8mo ago
  Mr. Superintelligence increasing Nick Bostrom's life expectancy to a trillion years but killing everyone else would as well. Why is he showing us the grace of letting us tag along with him into The Singularity in this fantasy just because we happened to be alive at the same time? Is it because he needs someone to do the actual work?
measurablefunc 8mo ago
Bostrom is very good at theorycrafting.
wmf 8mo ago
That's what the paper says. Whether you would take that deal depends on your level of risk aversion (which the paper gets into later). As a wise man once said, death is so final. If we lose the game we don't get to play again.
- jibal 8mo ago
  Everyone dies. And if your lifespan is 1400 years, you won't live for nearly 1400 years. OTOH, people with a 1400 year life expectancy are likely to be extremely risk averse in re anything that could conceivably threaten their lives ... and this would have consequences in re blackmail, kidnapping, muggings, capital punishment, and other societal matters.

jibal 8mo ago

The usual (e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j4xo8e/the_universe_is_a_simulation_eggleston_destroys/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j4xo8e/the_univ...) bunch of logical fallacies and unexamined assumptions from Bostrom. Good philosophers focus on asking piercing questions, not on proposing policy. > Would it not be wildly irresponsible, [Yudkowsky and Soares] ask, to expose our entire species to even a 1-in-10 chance of annihilation? Yes, if that number is anywhere near reality, of which there is considerable doubt. > However, sound policy analysis must weigh potential benefits alongside the risks of any emerging technology. Must it? Or is this a deflection from concern about immense risk? > One could equally maintain that if nobody builds it, everyone dies. Everyone is going to die in any case, so this a red herring that misframes the issues. > The rest of us are on course to follow within a few short decades. For many individuals—such as the elderly and the gravely ill—the end is much closer. Part of the promise of superintelligence is that it might fundamentally change this condition. "might", if one accepts numerous dubious and poorly reasoned arguments. I don't. > In particular, sufficiently advanced AI could remove or reduce many other risks to our survival, both as individuals and as a civilization. "could" ... but it won't; certainly not for me as an individual of advanced age, and almost certainly not for "civilization", whatever that means. > Superintelligence would be able to enormously accelerate advances in biology and medicine—devising cures for all diseases There are numerous unstated assumptions here ... notably an assumption that all diseases are "curable", whatever exactly that means--the "cure" might require a brain transplant, for instance. > and developing powerful anti-aging and rejuvenation therapies to restore the weak and sick to full youthful vigor. Again, this just assumes that such things are feasible, as if an ASI is a genie or a magic wand. Not everything that can be conceived of is technologically possible. It's like saying that with an ASI we could find the largest prime or solve the halting problem. > These scenarios become realistic and imminent with superintelligence guiding our science. So he baselessly claims. Sorry, but this is all apologetics, not an intellectually honest search for truth.

slackr 8mo ago
Spot on. Frankly, I’m unsure if it’s meant to be satire.

rf15 8mo ago

Paper again largely skips the issue that AGI cannot be sold to people, because either you try to swindle people out of money (all the AI startups) or transactions like that are now meaningless because your AI runs the show anyway.

wmf 8mo ago
Companies developing AI don't worry about this issue so why should we?
- rienbdj 8mo ago
  They know the truth. Current ai is a bit useful for some things. The rest is hype.

neom 8mo ago

"For AGI and superintelligence (we refrain from imposing precise definitions of these terms, as the considerations in this paper don't depend on exactly how the distinction is drawn)" Hmm, is that true? His models actually depend quite heavily on what the AI can do, "can reduce mortality to 20yo levels (yielding ~1,400-year life expectancy), cure all diseases, develop rejuvenation therapies, dramatically raise quality of life, etc. Those assumptions do a huge amount of work in driving the results. If "AGI" meant something much less capable, like systems that are transformatively useful economically but can't solve aging within a relevant timeframe- the whole ides shifts substantially, surly the upside shrinks and the case for tolerating high catastrophe risk weakens?

Ucalegon 8mo ago
That is the thing about these conversations, is that the issue is potentiality. It comes back to Amara's Law; “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Its the same thing with nuclear energy in the 1950s about what could be without realizing that those potentials are not possible due to the limitations of the technology, and not stepping into the limitations realistically, that hampers the growth, and thus development, in the long term. Sadly, there is way, way, way too much money in AGI, and the promise of AGI, for people to actually take a step back and understand the implications of what they are doing in the short, medium, or long term.
- suddenlybananas 8mo ago
  What was underestimated in the long term with nuclear power? I like nuclear power but I don't see what long-term effects were underestimated by people in the 50s.
  - themagic80 8mo ago
    I guess an example would be short term. "A pocked nuclear reactor in every car powering our commute to work" vs long term change "Nuclear power powering vast datacenters that do most of the work for us"

armitage 8mo ago

[dead]

plastic-enjoyer 8mo ago

[flagged]

petesergeant 8mo ago
Isn’t this just an argument against philosophers?

cess11 8mo ago

If intelligence, whatever is meant by that, was the dominating factor in the emergence of power and social orders, then it ought to be quite trivial to show that this is the case by enumerating powerful people from the last century or so and making the case that they were generally very intelligent. I don't think this is the case. And if Bostrom and whoever else in his clique actually wanted to empower intelligence, how come they aren't viciously fighting for free school, free food, free shelter, free health care and so on, to make sure that intelligent people, especially kids, do not go to waste?

logicchains 8mo ago
They'll never give a clear definition of intelligence because if they did their claims could be falsified. Qualifying what "intelligence" can do in a formal sense is actually a very well-studied field called computational complexity theory. Computational complexity theory shows than many many real world problems and processes cannot be solved/simulated much better without an exponential increase in computational power, regardless of the program/"intelligence" used. Singulatarian cultists want you to believe that lower bound complexity classes don't exist, which is mathematically equivalent to telling you that AI can somehow magically make 1+1=3.
- cess11 8mo ago
  It would also require quite sophisticated and careful thinking about the stuff e.g. Merleu-Ponty and Derrida did, and paying close attention to the last thirty years or so of neuroscience and biology. One problem they'd have to grapple with is that human intelligence is embodied and carries the same complexity as physical matter does, and software does not since it is projected onto bit processing logic gates. If they really want to simulate embodied intelligence, then it is likely to be excruciatingly slow and resource intensive. It would be cheaper and more efficient to get humans to become more like computers.

bnlxbnlx 8mo ago

> Yudkowsky and Soares maintain that if anyone builds AGI, everyone dies. One could equally maintain that if nobody builds it, everyone dies. In fact, most people are already dead. The rest of us are on course to follow within a few short decades. For many individuals—such as the elderly and the gravely ill—the end is much closer. Part of the promise of superintelligence is that it might fundamentally change this condition. wtf? death is part of life. is he seriously arguing that if we don't build AGI people will "keep dying"? and suggesting that is equally bad as extinction (or something worse, matrix-like)? i don't think life would be as colorful and joyful without death. death is what makes life as precious as it is.

cafkafk 8mo ago

I don't really believe in the specific numbers he gives, but I appreciate moving the conversation away from “should” and into the consequences — including those that arise from delays.

jules-jules 8mo ago

Sounds like it was written by someone with a health condition. Hope Bostrom is alright. Quite puzzling also he wouldn't even refer to his earlier work to refute it, given that he wrote THE book on the risk of superintelligence.

mbgerring 8mo ago

“AGI” is either a millenarian cult, a smokescreen to distract from the horrifying yet pedestrian real-world impacts of capital and power centralization occurring with actually existing AI, or both

tehjoker 8mo ago

"Would it not be wildly irresponsible, they ask, to expose our entire species to even a 1-in-10 chance of annihilation?" I have bad news about how decision makers have responded to risks about nuclear weapons and climate change in the past. During the development of the bomb, it was thought that the initial test had a small but plausible, at least to some but not all scientists, chance of igniting the atmosphere on fire in a chain reaction. It was thought that threatening and destroying enemies was worth the risk. Let us not speak of the risks of MAD (for a treat, watch the British movie "Threads") and the tipping points of climate catastrophe which consistently appear to be worse than the IPCC reports with new surprises every few years. Of course, no such risk is worth taking to the average person. It only makes sense in an extremely narrow hypercompetitive viewpoint held by elites and dumb dumbs.

pfdietz 8mo ago

I for one have always welcomed Roko's Basilisk.

selylindi 8mo ago

The meat of this paper is applying the "person-affecting stance" to the question of timing. There's a lot of philosophy background in that phrase, but the paper describes the key distinction well on page 4: > In particular, we may distinguish between a person-affecting perspective, which focuses on the interests of existing people, and an impersonal perspective, which extends consideration to all possible future generations that may or may not come into existence depending on our choices. In philosophy, it's always fine to see where ideas lead. For the rest of us, though, we might take pause here because the "person-affecting" perspective is insane in this context. It gives full moral weight to whether you make things better or worse for people who happen to be alive right now -- but no moral weight at all to whether you leave a world that's better or worse for people who will be born any time after right now. Wanna destroy the biosphere or economy in a way that only really catches up to tomorrow's kids? Totally fine from the "person-affecting perspective", because in some technical sense, no individual was made worse off than they were before. They were born into the mess, so it's not a problem.

CraftingLinks 8mo ago

Science Fiction writer promoted to professor in philosophy makes him a crackpot in my book. Let's be honest.

furyofantares 8mo ago
What are thinking of here? I see no mention of science fiction on his wikipedia article and a long history of academia.

bicepjai 8mo ago

So basically he says: Even with scary-high odds of disaster, building superintelligence fast is worth it because the alternative, everyone slowly dying of aging and disease, is worse. Get to AGI quickly, then pause briefly to safety-test before deploying.

logicprog 8mo ago

Nick Bostrom and his ilk are exhausting. I really don't think that the singularity / intelligence explosion is going to happen in the way that they think; I don't think ASIs will work the way they think they do; and I don't think we're anywhere close to AGI, even if some of the ideas happening right now are pretty cool. Some good sources on the matter in general: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-near https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-... https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm https://spectrum.ieee.org/rupturing-the-nanotech-rapture https://spectrum.ieee.org/rupturing-the-nanotech-rapture https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/ https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/

jibal 8mo ago
Here's a response I got from Gemini (you can infer the relevant parts of my query): Bostrom is a philosopher of technology, and his writing often treats science as an information problem rather than a physical, experimental problem. You’ve hit on the primary tension between "Silicon Valley" transhumanism and the messy reality of biological science. 1. Can Alzheimer’s be cured by "regrowing neurons"? Scientifically speaking, Bostrom’s description is viewed by most neuroscientists as a gross oversimplification, if not an outright category error. Connectivity vs. Count: Alzheimer’s isn't just a loss of cells; it's the destruction of the synaptic architecture. If you regrow a billion neurons in a patient’s hippocampus, those neurons don't "know" the memories or personalities that were stored in the previous connections. You are essentially installing a blank hard drive in a computer where the OS was corrupted and the user data was deleted. The Microenvironment: You can't just drop new neurons into a brain that is still full of amyloid plaques, tau tangles, and chronic neuroinflammation. The new neurons would likely die in the same hostile environment that killed the old ones. Stem Cell Reality: While neurogenesis is a real field of study, "regrowing" an organ as complex as the brain is vastly different from regrowing skin or even liver tissue. 2. Bostrom’s View of Science: The "Genie" Problem You are correct that Bostrom (and others like Eliezer Yudkowsky) often treat Superintelligence (ASI) as an Oracle. Their arguments typically assume: Intelligence is the Bottleneck: They believe the reason we haven't cured cancer or Alzheimer's is that humans aren't "smart" enough to solve the protein folding or the genetic sequencing. The "Computation is All" Fallacy: As you noted, they often bypass the empirical bottleneck. Even a superintelligence cannot know the results of a 10-year longitudinal human drug trial without waiting 10 years, or observing the physical interaction of a new molecule in a living organism. In computer science terms, they treat the universe as if it has a high-fidelity API that an ASI can just "query." In reality, biology is "noisy" and requires physical iteration (wet-lab work), which takes time regardless of how high your IQ is. 3. The "Linear Search in O(1)" Critique Your point about the Halting Problem and Linear Search is the most astute critique of the "AI Foam" movement. Superintelligence cannot solve mathematically impossible problems. If the biological system is chaotic or stochastic, even an ASI might only be able to provide "best guesses," not magical cures. Summary Bostrom is operating on the level of functionalism—if a physical state can exist (a healthy brain), then there must be a path to get there. He assumes an ASI will find that path through sheer "computational horsepower." However, your skepticism is shared by many in the hard sciences. Most biologists would argue that knowing the "map" (the DNA/Proteome) is not the same as having the "territory" (the living, healthy body), and an ASI still has to obey the laws of thermodynamics and the temporal constraints of chemistry.