Thank you for this interesting overview of Vincent Müller’s arguments! I fully agree that implementation (policy means) often becomes the bottleneck. However, if we systematically reward behavior that contradicts our declared principles, then any “ethical goals” will inevitably be vulnerable to being undermined during implementation. In my own post, I call this the “bad parent” problem: we say one thing, but demonstrate another. Do you think it’s possible to achieve robust adherence to ethical principles in AI when society itself remains fundamentally inconsistent?
Beyond Singularity
Karma: 15
Thanks for the comment, Ronen! Appreciate the feedback.
I think it’s good — essential, even — that you keep trying and speaking out. Sometimes that’s what helps others to act too.
The only thing I worry about is that this fight, if framed only as hopeless, can paralyze the very people who might help change the trajectory.
Despair can be as dangerous as denial.That’s why I believe the effort itself matters — not because it guarantees success, but because it keeps the door open for others to walk through.
I live in Ukraine. Every week, missiles fly over my head. Every night, drones are shot down above my house. On the streets, men are hunted like animals to be sent to the front. Any rational model would say our future is bleak.
And yet, people still get married, write books, make music, raise children, build new homes, and laugh. They post essays on foreign forums. They even come up with ideas for how humanity might live together with AGI.
Even if I go to sleep tonight and never wake up tomorrow, I will not surrender. I will fight until the end. Because for me, a 0.0001% chance is infinitely more than zero.
Seems like your post missed the April 1st deadline and landed on April 2nd — which means, unfortunately, it no longer counts as a joke.
After reading it, I also started wondering if I unintentionally fall into the “Believer” category—the kind of person who’s already drafting blueprints for a bright future alongside AGI and inviting people to “play” while we all risk being outplayed.
I understand and share your concerns. I don’t disagree that the systemic forces you’ve outlined may well make AGI safety fundamentally unachievable. That possibility is real, and I don’t dismiss it.
But at the same time, I find myself unwilling to treat it as a foregone conclusion.
If humanity’s survival is unlikely, then so was our existence in the first place — and yet here we are.That’s why I prefer to keep looking for any margin, however narrow, where human action could still matter.
In that spirit, I’d like to pose a question rather than an argument:
Do you think there’s a chance that humanity’s odds of surviving alongside AGI might increase — even slightly — if we move toward a more stable, predictable, and internally coherent society?
Not as a solution to alignment, but as a way to reduce the risks we ourselves introduce into the system.That’s the direction I’ve tried to explore in my model. I don’t claim it’s enough — but I believe that even thinking about such structures is a form of resistance to inevitability.
I appreciate this conversation. Your clarity and rigor are exactly why these dialogues matter, even if the odds are against us.
I completely understand your position — and I respect the intellectual honesty with which you’re pursuing this line of argument. I don’t disagree with the core systemic pressures you describe.
That said, I wonder whether the issue is not competition itself, but the shape and direction of that competition.
Perhaps there’s a possibility — however slim — that competition, if deliberately structured and redirected, could become a survival strategy rather than a death spiral.That’s the hypothesis I’ve been exploring, and I recently outlined it in a post here on the Forum.
If you’re interested, I’d appreciate your critical perspective on it.Either way, I value this conversation. Few people are willing to follow these questions to their logical ends.
This is a critically important and well-articulated post, thank you for defining and championing the Moral Alignment (MA) space. I strongly agree with the core arguments regarding its neglect compared to technical safety, the troubling paradox of purely human-centric alignment given our history, and the urgent need for a sentient-centric approach.
You rightly highlight Sam Altman’s question: “to whose values do you align the system?” This underscores that solving MA isn’t just a task for AI labs or experts, but requires much broader societal reflection and deliberation. If we aim to align AI with our best values, not just a reflection of our flawed past actions, we first need robust mechanisms to clarify and articulate those values collectively.
Building on your call for action, perhaps a vital complementary approach could be fostering this deliberation through a widespread network of accessible “Ethical-Moral Clubs” (or perhaps “Sentientist Ethics Hubs” to align even closer with your theme?) across diverse communities globally.
These clubs could serve a crucial dual purpose:
Formulating Alignment Goals: They would provide spaces for communities themselves to grapple with complex ethical questions and begin articulating what kind of moral alignment they actually desire for AI affecting their lives. This offers a bottom-up way to gather diverse perspectives on the “whose values?” question, potentially identifying both local priorities and identifying shared, potentially universal principles across regions.
Broader Ethical Education & Reflection: These hubs would function as vital centers for learning. They could help participants, and by extension society, better understand different ethical frameworks (including the sentientism central to your post), critically examine their own “stated vs. realized” values (as you mentioned), and become more informed contributors to the crucial dialogue about our future with AI.
Such a grassroots network wouldn’t replace the top-down efforts and research you advocate for, but could significantly support and strengthen the MA movement you envision. It could cultivate the informed public understanding, deliberation, and engagement necessary for sentient-centric AI to gain legitimacy and be implemented effectively and safely.
Ultimately, fostering collective ethical literacy and structured deliberation seems like a necessary foundation for ensuring AI aligns with the best of our values, benefiting all sentient beings. Thanks again for pushing this vital conversation forward.
Thank you for such an interesting and useful conversation.
Yes I use LLM, I don’t hide it. First of all for translation, because my ordinary English is mediocre enough, not to mention such a strict and responsible style, which is required for such conversations. But the main thing is that the ideas are mine and chatGPT, who framed my thoughts in this discussion, formed answers based on my instructions. And the main thing is that the whole argumentation is built around my concept, everything we wrote to you is not just an argument for the sake of argument, but the defense of my concept. This concept I want to publish in the next few days and I will be very glad to receive your constructive criticism.Now as far as AGI is concerned. I really liked your argument that even the smartest AGI will be limited. It summarizes our entire conversation perfectly. Yes, our logic is neither perfect nor omnipotent. And as I see it, that is where we have a chance. A chance, perhaps, not just to be preserved as a mere backup, but to that structural interdependence, and maybe to move to a qualitatively different level, in a good way, for humanity.
PS sorry if it’s a bit rambling, I wrote it myself through a translator).
You’re right to point out that human biological architecture is inherently competitive, irrational, and unreliable from an optimization perspective. I don’t dispute that.
If AGI’s frame of evaluation is risk minimization and maximization of control, then yes — trust, in the human sense, is structurally impossible.But perhaps the problem is not “trust” at all.
Perhaps the problem is how we define risk.If survival of AGI requires human unpredictability to be neutralized, the typical solution is either:
enforce absolute control, or
modify the human substrate beyond recognition.
But there exists a third, rarely discussed, structural option:
Architected mutual dependence, enforced not by ethics or emotion — but by the wiring of reality itself.
Not because AGI “trusts” humanity,
but because AGI’s own long-term survival becomes entangled with the survival of human agency.This is not a fragile social contract.
It is an engineered condition where:Humanity retains one or more non-replicable control nodes — physical, informational, or systemic — outside AGI’s unilateral reach.
AGI retains the freedom to operate at superhuman scale — but cannot guarantee its own continuity without human participation in specific critical functions.
In such a structure:
Eliminating humanity creates existential risk for AGI itself.
Preserving humanity, despite unpredictability, becomes the rational, stable strategy.
This is not “trust.”
This is a game-theoretic lock, built into the architecture of survival itself.It may require us to relinquish traditional concepts of autonomy.
It may require AGI to accept permanent non-closure of certain optimization processes.But it sidesteps the naive dichotomy between:
Total control (which eliminates humanity’s relevance)
or Total submission (which erases humanity’s agency)
Instead, it establishes a condition where both sides can only persist together — or perish together.
You’re right: if the future leaves no structural need for us, we won’t be preserved.
So perhaps the last, best move is to design a future in which our existence is structurally required.Not because AGI values us.
But because it has no better option.
Your skepticism is well-placed — and deeply important. You’re right: transformation under AGI cannot be framed as a guarantee, nor even as a likely benevolence. If it happens, it will occur on structural terms, not moral ones. AGI will not “trust” in any emotional sense, and it will not grant space for human agency unless doing so aligns with its own optimization goals.
But here’s where I think there may still be room — not for naïve trust, but for something closer to architected interdependence.
Trust, in human terms, implies vulnerability. But in system terms, trust can emerge from symmetry of failure domains — when two systems are structured such that unilateral aggression produces worse outcomes for both than continued coexistence.
That’s not utopianism. That’s strategic coupling.
A kind of game-theoretic détente, not built on hope, but on mutually comprehensible structure.If humanity has any long-term chance, it won’t be by asking AGI for permission. It will be by:
constructing domains where human cognitive diversity, improvisation, and irreducible ambiguity provide non-substitutable value;
designing physical and epistemic separation layers where AGI and humans operate on different substrates, with deliberate asymmetries of access;
embedding mechanisms of mutual fallback, where catastrophic failure of one system reduces survivability of both.
This doesn’t preserve our “agency” in the classical sense. But it opens the door to a more distributed model of authorship, where transformation doesn’t mean domestication — it means becoming one axis of a larger architecture, not its suppressed relic.
Yes, the terms may not be ours. But there’s a difference between having no say — and designing the space where negotiation becomes possible.
And perhaps, if that space exists — even narrowly — the thing that persists might still be recognizably human, not because it retained autonomy, but because it retained orientation toward meaning, even within constraint.
If we can’t be dominant, we may still be relevant.
And if we can’t be in control, we may still be needed.That’s a thinner form of survival than we’d like — but it’s more than a relic. It might even be a seed.
Thank you for the generous and thoughtful reply. I appreciate the framing — Eden 2.0 not as a forecast, but as a deliberately constrained scenario to test our psychological and philosophical resilience. In that sense, it succeeds powerfully.
You posed the core question with precision:
“If we survive, will anything about us still be recognizably human?”
Here’s where I find myself arriving at a parallel — but differently shaped — conclusion:
With the arrival of AGI, humanity, if it survives, will not remain what it has been. Not socially. Not culturally. Not existentially.The choices ahead are not between survival as we are and extinction.
They are between extinction, preservation in a reduced form, and evolution into something new.If Eden 2.0 is a model of preservation via simplification — minimizing risk by minimizing agency — I believe we might still explore a third path:
preservation through transformation.Not clinging to “humanness” as it once was, but rearchitecting the conditions in which agency, meaning, and autonomy can re-emerge — not in spite of AGI, but alongside it. Not as its opposite, but as a complementary axis of intelligence.
Yes, it may mean letting go of continuity in the traditional sense.
But continuity of pattern, play, cultural recursion, and evolving agency may still be possible.This is not a rejection of your framing — quite the opposite. It is a deep agreement with the premise: there is no way forward without transformation.
But I wonder if that transformation must always result in diminishment. Or if there exists a design space where something recognizably human — though radically altered — can still emerge with coherence and dignity.Thank you again for engaging with such openness. I look forward to continuing this dialogue.
First of all, I want to acknowledge the depth, clarity, and intensity of this piece. It’s one of the most coherent articulations I’ve seen of the deterministic collapse scenario — grounded not in sci-fi tropes or fearmongering, but in structural forces like capitalism, game theory, and emergent behavior. I agree with much of your reasoning, especially the idea that we are not defeated by malevolence, but by momentum.
The sections on competitive incentives, accidental goal design, and the inevitability of self-preservation emerging in AGI are particularly compelling. I share your sense that most public AI discourse underestimates how quickly control can slip, not through a single catastrophic event, but via thousands of rational decisions, each made in isolation.
That said, I want to offer a small counter-reflection—not as a rebuttal, but as a shift in framing.
The AI as Mirror, Not Oracle
You mention that much of this essay was written with the help of AI, and that its agreement with your logic was chilling. I understand that deeply—I’ve had similarly intense conversations with language models that left me shaken. But it’s worth considering:
What if the AI isn’t validating the truth of your worldview—what if it’s reflecting it?
Large language models like GPT don’t make truth claims—they simulate conversation based on patterns in data and user input. If you frame the scenario as inevitable doom and construct arguments accordingly, the model will often reinforce that narrative—not because it’s correct, but because it’s coherent within the scaffolding you’ve built.
In that sense, your AI is not your collaborator—it’s your epistemic mirror. And what it’s reflecting back isn’t inevitability. It’s the strength and completeness of the frame you’ve chosen to operate in.
That doesn’t make the argument wrong. But it does suggest that “lack of contradiction from GPT” isn’t evidence of logical finality. It’s more like chess: if you set the board a certain way, yes, you will be checkmated in five moves—but that says more about the board than about all possible games.
Framing Dictates Outcome
You ask: “Please poke holes in my logic.” But perhaps the first move is to ask: what would it take to generate a different logical trajectory from the same facts?
Because I’ve had long GPT-based discussions similar to yours—except the premises were slightly different. Not optimistic, not utopian. But structurally compatible with human survival.
And surprisingly, those led me to models where coexistence between humans and AGI is possible—not easy, not guaranteed, but logically consistent. (I won’t unpack those ideas here—better to let this be a seed for further discussion.)
Fully Agreed: Capitalism Is the Primary Driver
Where I’m 100% aligned with you is on the role of capitalism, competition, and fragmented incentives. I believe this is still the most under-discussed proximal cause in most AGI debates. It’s not whether AGI “wants” to destroy us—it’s that we create the structural pressure that makes dangerous AGI more likely than safe AGI.
Your model traces that logic with clarity and rigor.
But here’s a teaser for something I’ve been working on:
What happens after capitalism ends?
What would it look like if the incentive structures themselves were replaced by something post-scarcity, post-ownership, and post-labor?What if the optimization landscape itself shifted—radically, but coherently—into a different attractor altogether?
Let’s just say—there might be more than one logically stable endpoint for AGI development. And I’d love to keep exploring that dance with you.
Thank you for this honest and thought-provoking essay. While you describe it as speculative and logically weaker than your previous work, I believe it succeeds in exactly what good thought experiments aim to do: expanding the space of plausible scenarios, testing assumptions, and challenging intuitions. Below are some reflections and counterpoints framed within your own logic and assumptions, offered in the spirit of constructive engagement.
1. Humans as Redundant Backup: Are There More Efficient Alternatives?
You make a compelling case for preserving a small human caretaker population as a redundancy layer in catastrophic scenarios. However, from the perspective of a superintelligent optimizer, this choice seems surprisingly inefficient. One might ask:
Wouldn’t it be more robust to design sealed, highly redundant systems completely insulated from biological unpredictability and long-term socio-political instability?
That is: retaining humans may be a strategic liability unless the AGI has strong evidence that no purely artificial system can match our improvisational value at an acceptable risk/cost ratio. This seems like a non-trivial assumption that may warrant further scrutiny within your model.
2. The Autonomy Paradox
Your model relies on the psychological engineering of happiness, but this introduces a potential internal contradiction:
If humans are made fully obedient and content, do they still retain the cognitive flexibility that justifies their continued existence as emergency problem-solvers?
Total control may defeat the very purpose of retaining humans. If AGI suppresses autonomy too thoroughly, it may strip away the qualities (irrational insight, intuitive leaps) that make humans uniquely valuable in extreme-edge cases.
This creates a delicate trade-off: suppress too little — risk rebellion; suppress too much — lose the thing worth preserving.
3. Reproductive Control as a Systemic Instability Vector
Your section on reproduction is one of the strongest in the essay. Historical attempts to control human reproduction have consistently led to unrest, resentment, and eventual destabilization. Even in highly conditioned environments, the biological imperative often finds subversive expression.
The challenge you raise is profound:
Can an AGI suppress such a fundamental drive without compromising human cognitive or emotional integrity over generations?
If not, some form of controlled, meaningful reproductive structure may actually be more stable than outright suppression — even within an AGI-controlled “Eden.”
4. Optimized Eden and the Value Problem
The Eden 2.0 model removes suffering, conflict, and unmet needs. However, it also strips away agency, desire, and the experience of striving. From a utilitarian lens, this could still qualify as a “high-value” world — but even then, a second-order problem arises:
If humans no longer evolve, grow, or think independently, wouldn’t a digital simulation of happy agents suffice — or even outperform biological humans in hedonic metrics?
In other words: a static paradise might not be Pareto-optimal, even by AGI’s own standards. A world without tension, curiosity, or variance could eventually be seen as unnecessarily complex and redundant — and phased out in favor of simpler, more efficient “happy” simulations.
5. Distributed Redundancy Over Singular Control
Even within your framework, a more robust model might involve distributed human clusters, with varied degrees of autonomy and functionality. This would give the AGI multiple “backup layers” rather than relying on a single, fragile caretaker group.
These subpopulations could:
Serve as parallel experiments in long-term stability,
Provide resilience against unforeseen cultural or genetic drift,
And reduce the consequences of any single-point failure or uprising.
Such a model preserves the logic of control, while embracing redundancy not just of systems, but of human variation — which might be the true evolutionary value of humanity.
Final Thought:
Your essay raises a sobering and important question: If we survive AGI, what kind of existence are we surviving into? It’s a powerful and uncomfortable frame — but a necessary one.
Still, even under the assumption of a purely optimizing AGI, it’s possible that there are more robust, flexible, and ethically compelling survival strategies than the one you outline.
Thank you again for contributing such a valuable perspective. Even if the scenario is unlikely, exploring it with clarity and intellectual honesty is a service to the broader existential risk discourse.
This is an exceptionally informative study, and it raises important questions not just about whether to give cash, but how to structure it for maximal long-term impact.
A few reflections and questions that stood out to me:
1. Tranching vs. Timing vs. Signaling:
The lump-sum outperforming short-term UBI across most economic metrics aligns with behavioral economics intuitions — lumpy capital enables investments (e.g. livestock, equipment, enterprise startup) that smooth monthly flows can’t. But what’s striking is how expectations shape behavior. The long-term UBI group performed better than the 2-year UBI group even when the total amount received to date was identical. This suggests that the signal of long-term stability is a powerful modifier of economic behavior — increasing planning, savings, and risk-taking.Policy implication: We may undervalue the psychological/informational effect of a commitment to future support, even if near-term cash flows are identical.
2. Opportunity Cost of Capital Distribution Models:
If lump sums are both cheaper (in implementation) and more effective in stimulating enterprise and income growth than short-term UBI, then it raises a hard question: Are we sacrificing impact for ideological purity when we favor UBI over direct transfers? Or is the political durability and universality of UBI a more valuable long-term asset despite short-term inefficiencies?Perhaps a hybrid model is optimal: lump-sum “capital grants” at life transition points (e.g. adulthood, childbirth), with UBI layered for basic stability.
3. Measuring Outcomes Beyond Income:
One of the most interesting nuances is that the short-term UBI reduced depression more effectively than lump sums — possibly due to reduced financial stress or increased perception of stability. This suggests that if psychological well-being is a central metric, cash design might need to be different than if the primary goal is economic independence or income growth.Might a combined approach (e.g., an initial lump sum + small continuing payments) capture both effects?
4. Applicability to High-Income Settings:
I strongly agree with the authors that there is a glaring absence of robust RCTs on long-term UBI or lump-sum transfers in high-income countries. If capital constraints and income volatility are limiting upward mobility even in wealthier economies, we may be missing key interventions simply because we haven’t tested them. The U.S., for instance, has many “income deserts” where short-term support dominates, but long-term planning remains inaccessible.
Thank you for this deep and thought-provoking post! The concept of the “power-ethics gap” truly resonates and seems critically important for understanding current and future challenges, especially in the context of AI.
The analogy with the car, where power is speed and ethics is the driver’s skill, is simply brilliant. It illustrates the core of the problem very clearly. I would even venture to add that, in my view, the “driver’s skill” today isn’t just lagging behind, but perhaps even degrading in some aspects due to the growing complexity of the world, information noise, and polarization. Our collective ability to make wise decisions seems increasingly fragile, despite the growth of individual knowledge.
Your emphasis on the need to shift the focus in AI safety from purely technical aspects of control (power) to deep ethical questions and “value selection” seems absolutely timely and necessary. This truly is an area that appears to receive disproportionately little attention compared to its significance.
The concepts you’ve introduced, especially the distinction between Human-Centric and Sentientkind Alignment, as well as the idea of “Human Alignment,” are very interesting. The latter seems particularly provocative and important. Although you mention that this might fall outside the scope of traditional AI safety, don’t you think that without significant progress here, attempts to “align AI” might end up being built on very shaky ground? Can we really expect to create ethical AI if we, as a species, are struggling with our own “power-ethics gap”?
It would be interesting to hear more thoughts on how the concept of “Moral Alignment” relates to existing frameworks and whether it could help integrate these disparate but interconnected problems under one umbrella.
The post raises many important questions and introduces useful conceptual distinctions. Looking forward to hearing the opinions of other participants! Thanks again for the food for thought!