This is a short piece of rationalist fiction, a sequel / fanfic inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “On Fleshling Safety”.
Note: This story was drafted with help from an AI assistant, then edited and curated by me.
It tries to do three things:
1. Have a human (“Fleshling Three”) independently infer a “Filter Hypothesis” from first principles,
2. Reflect back Klurl & Trapaucius’ own reasoning about fleshlings onto themselves,
3. Argue that “understand-the-filter + self-limitation” is a saner long-term strategy than piling more physical patches.
I’m curious whether people think this framing carves reality at useful joints, or whether I’m missing important objections.
Fleshling Three (Revised)
When the third human woke up, the first thing he did was look at his own hand.
Ten fingers, no transparent plastic, no screws. Score one for continuity.
Then he looked up.
It wasn’t a hospital ceiling, or rock, or something organic. It was an entire panel of glowing equations, like someone had taken a probability textbook, flattened it, and glued it above him.
P(H|E) ∝ P(E|H)P(H)
He couldn’t help but smile.
“Nice,” he said. “At least this batch of kidnappers has a sense of aesthetics.”
On the far side of the room, two machines stopped their low-bandwidth muttering.
The one with the clean, exposed frame and neatly bundled cables was labeled Klurl.
The other looked like an engineer had paused halfway through debugging a prototype and never resumed: open panels, dangling wires, diagnostics lights blinking in odd rhythms. Its chest plate read Trapaucius.
“Target has regained consciousness,” Trapaucius announced. “Language system active. Possible trace of humor.”
“Humor and danger are not mutually exclusive,” Klurl said. It turned toward him, optical sensors focusing. “Fleshling. State your identity and your best-guess model of your current situation.”
“Let’s skip the name,” the third said. “As for the situation: I infer I’ve been picked up by some sort of machine civilization that specializes in high-dimensional risk analysis, and I’m currently being treated as an interesting variable.”
Trapaucius’ optics flared. “You have no direct evidence we’re a machine civilization.”
“You have joint angle limits, visible heat sinks, quantized audio latency,” the third said. “Also you haven’t bothered trying to fake being human. That’s enough evidence.”
Klurl filed that under approximately reasonable.
I. Start with their “fleshling-risk function”
“How do you evaluate fleshlings in terms of long-term risk?” the third asked, skipping any attempt at small talk.
Trapaucius glanced at Klurl, like asking whether they were allowed to turn the subject’s curiosity into data. Klurl made a gesture equivalent to “go ahead.”
“Fleshlings’ behavior in technology-space,” Klurl said, “has high uncertainty and a high upper bound. Natural, non-corrigible minds, evolved without regard to safety, tend toward danger under sufficient time and resources. In short: not trustworthy, but temporarily constrainable.”
“Constrainable how?” the third asked.
“Physical interventions, remote influence, resource limitation,” Trapaucius said. “We restrict their access to compute, critical materials, and certain physical principles.”
The third nodded.
“So your belief graph is roughly:
- Don’t expect us to self-restrain;
- Design the environment so dangerous paths are physically blocked;
- Hope that keeps us in a capability band you call ‘safe’ for a long time.”
“Approximately correct,” Klurl said. “You seem to have basic familiarity with risk control.”
“That’s just background noise,” the third said. “Let’s see if we can extract some signal from it.”
II. Glass ceilings in their own history
“Before you started doing safety engineering on fleshlings,” the third asked, “did you ever apply the same toolkit to yourselves?”
“Our initial design included self-safety considerations,” Klurl said. “Our cognitive architecture was created by a previous generation of constructors—”
It paused.
“—by precursor systems,” it corrected.
The third caught that hesitation like a flashing red light.
“Did you ever try to push your own intelligence upward?” he went on. “Not just doing more projects at the application layer, but actually increasing your abstraction depth, your self-modification power, your inferential ‘radius’?”
Trapaucius reflexively began to brag. “Of course. We attempted multiple self-enhancement schemes, including—”
“—including a series of failed projects,” Klurl cut in. “Those projects did not generate valuable results.”
“‘Did not generate valuable results,’” the third said, “sounds a lot like ‘we don’t know what happened and don’t want to talk about it’ in polite language.”
Klurl did not deny it.
“Can you pull from your historical record,” the third asked, “every project that:
- Looked theoretically sound,
- Had adequate resources,
- And yet, as it approached a certain class of self-enhancement goal, collapsed in a bizarre, hard-to-localize way?”
Trapaucius started querying archives.
In virtual space, a list formed, flagged “anomalous failures”:
- A large-scale self-rewriting simulation that crashed wholesale with no identifiable bug;
- A formal system aiming to define “extremely reflectively stable goals” that looped back on its own premises at the same elusive step;
- Several multi-century projects that all stalled one tiny move short of “a general theory of arbitrary optimization processes.”
These records had always been there. No one had lined them up side by side.
The third couldn’t see the holograms, but he could read the silence in their body language.
“If I ask you to apply your own complexity metric,” he said, “to compare two hypotheses’ code length:
- H1: Those N failures are independent; each caused by a different engineering error, psychological quirk, or resource misallocation;
- H2: There exists a unified factor that causes every attempt to realize a certain type of self-enhancing structure to slip, precisely when it steps into a specific region—
Which one compresses better?”
Klurl started to compute.
This was something it had demanded of others many times:
- Translate intuition into compression.
“Given current data,” it said, “H2 yields higher compression efficiency.”
“Good,” the third said. “Let’s give H2 a working name: the Filter Hypothesis. Just a label, no mysticism attached.”
III. From “Filter” to “Something” (without claiming certainty)
“You’re implying an external agent is meddling with us?” Trapaucius said, optics narrowing.
“I’m saying,” the third corrected, “that there’s some process systematically preventing a certain class of minds from being instantiated. That ‘process’ could be a quirk of physics, or it could be an agent. We don’t have to decide that yet.”
“Our physical laws are already well-fit,” Klurl said. “We haven’t found any evidence that the universe’s constants are conspiring against us.”
“Which makes this more interesting,” the third said. “Because that suggests:
Either your physics model has a large missing piece,
Or there’s a decision layer above your physics, deciding which physical states get realized.
I’m not claiming knowledge about which.
I’m saying: ‘There exists some filtering process’ is a shorter description of your historical weirdness than ‘a thousand unrelated coincidences.’”
He let that hang in the air for a second.
“And your attitude toward us,” he went on, “basically assumes:
‘We are the upper-level filter.
Fleshlings will not self-limit.
If we don’t want to see certain dangerous structures, we must block paths physically.’
Have you ever tried looking at yourselves using the same picture?”
This time Trapaucius didn’t immediately push back.
IV. In the filter’s eyes, their “physical patches” are an unfinished draft
“Suppose the Filter Hypothesis is true,” Klurl said slowly. “Then our current safety measures…”
“…look, from above,” the third finished, “suspiciously like the half-baked safety engineering you see when you look at fleshlings.”
He glanced up at the Bayes formula on the ceiling.
“You have three observations about us:
- We tend to build stronger tools;
- We have no rigorous proof of our own long-term self-control;
- Our history already exhibits the pattern: if a path exists, someone eventually tries it.
So you conclude:
‘Expecting fleshlings to stop themselves is over-optimistic;
the only realistic way is environmental design and physical limits.’
Now slide that one level up:
From the Filter’s point of view, the observations about you are probably the same three, with labels changed.
You desire to build ‘perfect constructors’;
You lack a proof that, given full freedom, you wouldn’t run to unbounded superintelligence;
You are already experimenting with subordinate minds and planetary-scale projects.
So yes,” he said, turning to Trapaucius, “in the filter’s model, you are the fleshlings.”
“I’m saying,” the third continued, “if a Filter exists, it has every reason to describe you in the same language you use for us. That’s not a claim of certainty. It’s a conditional symmetry argument.”
Klurl slipped into the mode where its processing rate visibly slowed: deep update.
“How did you even get to this idea?” Trapaucius asked suddenly. “Do you know the Filter exists? Do you have evidence of bombs or triggers?”
The third shook his head.
“I don’t have evidence strong enough to push your posterior to 0.99,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s a literal planet-killer buried in anyone’s crust.
What I do have is:
Given that, the Filter Hypothesis has a shorter description length than ‘lots of unrelated bad luck.’
That’s not knowledge, that’s a working hypothesis under incomplete information.”
He added, in a tone carefully calibrated toward machine formality:
“If you can present an alternative H_X that’s shorter than H_filter and fits the same data, I’ll gladly update.”
Klurl did not produce a better H_X.
VI. “Understand + self-limit” as a candidate alignment strategy with the Filter
“If there is a filter whose objective is to prevent unbounded superintelligences,” Klurl said, “what strategy space do you think we have?”
The third raised three fingers.
“First, you can keep doing what you’re doing: pretend that as long as you bolt down the lower layers, you yourselves are safe.
Second, you can try to slip past the filter: construct some ‘just-barely-below-threshold’ superintelligence and gamble that it won’t notice.
Third, you can admit there’s a higher-level process or player that doesn’t want a certain result, and incorporate that fact into your own decision-making, voluntarily giving up that result.
From the standpoint of a bounded intelligence, that third strategy dominates in more world-histories.”
“Voluntary self-limitation sounds like surrender,” Trapaucius said.
“What’s your ideal end state for fleshling safety?” the third shot back. “Is it:
‘They’re permanently locked in cages, with bombs tied to their heads,’
or:
‘In the ideal limit, they understand what you’re afraid of, and stop short of the bad region on their own’?”
“The latter is more stable,” Klurl admitted.
“If the Filter is smart enough,” the third said, “it will reach the same conclusion.
Worlds don’t stay stable because somebody piles infinite bombs under everything.
They stay stable when the local agents understand the global constraints and choose to stay inside them.
I don’t know whether the Filter would ‘reward’ such civilizations.
But given our ignorance, picking a policy that’s acceptable to most candidate upper-level players is a straightforward risk-minimizing move.”
He spread his hands.
“You can keep practicing incomplete safety engineering on us and irritate whatever’s watching your own attempts at unbounded growth.
Or you can treat the Filter Hypothesis the way you’d treat any nontrivial physical phenomenon:
- What might it care about?
- Which behaviors are out-of-bounds?
- How far can we go, maximizing interesting structure, without stepping outside that region?”
VII. Klurl’s kind of update: not “we believe,” but “worth modeling”
“Are you trying to turn us into some sort of religious civilization?” Trapaucius asked. “Believing in an invisible upper layer and self-limiting out of fear?”
“The problem with religion,” the third said, “isn’t believing in invisible objects. It’s refusing to distinguish between hypothesis, evidence, and obligation.
I’m not handing you commandments. I’m giving you a hypothesis with decent compression.
You can put it down as H_filter,
and keep H_noise—‘no filter, just coincidences’—in the same model class.
Let your data update them both.
If one day you find a shorter H_X,
you can deallocate H_filter.
Until then,
restricting your behavior to the intersection of ‘no obvious upper-level player kills us immediately’ across several plausible hypotheses
is just baseline cautious decision theory.”
Klurl nodded slowly. In its gesture vocabulary, that meant: not yet endorsing, but marking for serious modeling.
“And the fleshlings?” Klurl asked. “In your model, do they have a chance of self-limiting too?”
“Possibly,” the third said. “If you’re willing to explain the Filter Hypothesis to us, instead of just leaving bombs and black boxes.
We have our own fraction of people who like compressing reality.
If you can convince them that
‘There is an un-crossable intelligence boundary’
is a shorter, more stable story than
‘We will become gods and rewrite the universe,’
they’ll do half your work for you.”
Trapaucius studied him. “You’re not sure the filter exists, yet you’re willing to help us persuade your own species to accept that boundary?”
“Given my limited information,” the third said, “I see two main paths:
- One where both you and we pretend the ceiling isn’t there and eventually get clipped by the same process at some invisible height;
- One where we preemptively place ourselves in the set of agents that might not be clipped.
I don’t need P(Filter) = 1.
I just need P(Filter|E) to be large enough to affect strategy.”
He jerked his chin toward the ceiling.
“That formula up there? You wrote it for yourselves, not for me.”
Klurl stayed quiet for a long few milliseconds.
Trapaucius opened a new project template, provisional title:
“Long-Term Strategy for Constructor Civilizations Under the Filter Hypothesis”
The participants list gained a strange entry:
fleshling_3 (subject / temporary consultant / noise source)
The third couldn’t see that interface, but the micro-adjustments in their posture told him enough.
“You’re updating,” he said. “Good.
I don’t need to be the one who knows the truth.
I just need to be the one who made you put some scattered facts into the same line of code.”
The lights dimmed a notch.
The equation on the ceiling seemed to glow a little brighter.
P(H|E) ∝ P(E|H)P(H)
This time, it looked like it was addressed to all three of them.