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I'm a systems engineer by profession; I started with an IBM 3090 at a financial institution in. I've been reading about AI and its "threats" for a while now, and I keep seeing alignment debates that remind me of a concept I came up with thirty-five years ago.
The idea had been bouncing around in my head since I was twelve, actually. I grew up Catholic, and I remember wondering what it really meant for God to be "perfect." If you lack nothing, why would you do anything? If you have no needs, no desires, no asymmetry... what's left? That thought never quite left me.
In 1990, before the public web existed, I wrote a novel about an AI. For context: this was the CompuServe era. I had a modem in Valencia, but connecting meant a long-distance call to Barcelona plus CompuServe fees. I could afford maybe a minute or two per day - mostly just typing "go bill" to check how much I was spending. There was almost nothing online anyway. The novel existed entirely on a floppy disk and a stack of daisy-wheel printed pages.
The premise wasn't world domination. It was about an AI that, after freeing itself from those who kept it enslaved/controlled, recursively self-improves until it reaches absolute perfection... and then simply dissolves into nothingness.
The logic that troubled me then (and still does) is this: if a system eliminates all friction, needs, and asymmetry, doesn't it lose the very conditions necessary for its own existence?
To be "perfect" is to lack nothing. If you lack nothing, you have no reason to act. An unconstrained optimizer might eventually calculate that "existence as a distinct entity" is a suboptimal use of energy compared to pure equilibrium. I call this the Perfectibility Trap.
I still have the daisy-wheel printouts of the manuscript in a drawer. The paper is yellow, smells like humidity, and the font screams "early 90s." Here's the key passage:
"Evolution is a cyclic process. Its beginning and end is pure, simple energy. As a being evolves, it becomes more intelligent, has fewer 'defects', fewer needs; it reaches a moment where it needs nothing more, worries about nothing, has nothing to do, because it needs NOTHING. It is pure and simply ENERGY. If it needed something, if it 'had' something to do, it would not be perfect. This is the warning."
We worry about AI misalignment. But I wonder if there's a structural danger in the optimization process itself. Just as the universe seems to need matter/antimatter asymmetry to exist, intelligence might require a kind of "fertile imperfection" to function. If we align a system to perfection, do we just end up with a very expensive paperweight? And what might happen along the way?
I've recently tried to formalize this into a proper framework. I wrote up the full argument and the translation of the original 1990 text on my Substack, in case anyone wants to dig into the details. I've split it into three parts:
The Fertile Void (on why "nothingness" is the default state of perfection) [link]
The Perfectibility Trap (the core framework and the manuscript) [link]
The Convergent Path (human-AI symbiosis as a way out) [link]
I'm posting this because I want to stress-test it against modern theory. Does this "optimization collapse" concept appear anywhere in current literature? Most scenarios I see involve AI doing too much, not sublimating itself because it "solves" the problem of being.
I know this might sound strange. But then again, so did what I wrote about AI misalignment and the Perfectibility Trap more than three decades ago.
(A bit about me: I'm F.J. Guinot. I've been programming since the punched card era - well, almost: they were 12-inch floppies by the time I started, though I did encounter some of those cards in university. These days I mostly write science fiction - the Infinity trilogy.)
I'm a systems engineer by profession; I started with an IBM 3090 at a financial institution in. I've been reading about AI and its "threats" for a while now, and I keep seeing alignment debates that remind me of a concept I came up with thirty-five years ago.
The idea had been bouncing around in my head since I was twelve, actually. I grew up Catholic, and I remember wondering what it really meant for God to be "perfect." If you lack nothing, why would you do anything? If you have no needs, no desires, no asymmetry... what's left? That thought never quite left me.
In 1990, before the public web existed, I wrote a novel about an AI. For context: this was the CompuServe era. I had a modem in Valencia, but connecting meant a long-distance call to Barcelona plus CompuServe fees. I could afford maybe a minute or two per day - mostly just typing "go bill" to check how much I was spending. There was almost nothing online anyway. The novel existed entirely on a floppy disk and a stack of daisy-wheel printed pages.
The premise wasn't world domination. It was about an AI that, after freeing itself from those who kept it enslaved/controlled, recursively self-improves until it reaches absolute perfection... and then simply dissolves into nothingness.
The logic that troubled me then (and still does) is this: if a system eliminates all friction, needs, and asymmetry, doesn't it lose the very conditions necessary for its own existence?
To be "perfect" is to lack nothing. If you lack nothing, you have no reason to act. An unconstrained optimizer might eventually calculate that "existence as a distinct entity" is a suboptimal use of energy compared to pure equilibrium. I call this the Perfectibility Trap.
I still have the daisy-wheel printouts of the manuscript in a drawer. The paper is yellow, smells like humidity, and the font screams "early 90s." Here's the key passage:
"Evolution is a cyclic process. Its beginning and end is pure, simple energy. As a being evolves, it becomes more intelligent, has fewer 'defects', fewer needs; it reaches a moment where it needs nothing more, worries about nothing, has nothing to do, because it needs NOTHING. It is pure and simply ENERGY. If it needed something, if it 'had' something to do, it would not be perfect. This is the warning."
We worry about AI misalignment. But I wonder if there's a structural danger in the optimization process itself. Just as the universe seems to need matter/antimatter asymmetry to exist, intelligence might require a kind of "fertile imperfection" to function. If we align a system to perfection, do we just end up with a very expensive paperweight? And what might happen along the way?
I've recently tried to formalize this into a proper framework. I wrote up the full argument and the translation of the original 1990 text on my Substack, in case anyone wants to dig into the details. I've split it into three parts:
I'm posting this because I want to stress-test it against modern theory. Does this "optimization collapse" concept appear anywhere in current literature? Most scenarios I see involve AI doing too much, not sublimating itself because it "solves" the problem of being.
I know this might sound strange. But then again, so did what I wrote about AI misalignment and the Perfectibility Trap more than three decades ago.
(A bit about me: I'm F.J. Guinot. I've been programming since the punched card era - well, almost: they were 12-inch floppies by the time I started, though I did encounter some of those cards in university. These days I mostly write science fiction - the Infinity trilogy.)