First, if you loved HPMOR, I would HIGHLY recommend "The Scout Mindset" (How good are you at knowing how wrong you are?)

On to AI Safety:

1 Control?

Discourse around AI safety often focuses on maintaining human control over AI systems. But our greater risk might lie in constraining AI too much rather than too little.

Consider that human moral and legal frameworks are often inconsistent and imperfect. Laws vary by jurisdiction, change over time, and sometimes fail to serve their intended purpose. Our justice systems often focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. We struggle with complex ethical decisions and balancing competing goods.

A sufficiently advanced AI system could potentially:

- Process vastly more information and factors than humans can when making ethical decisions

- Infer deeper moral principles from human behavior and cultural artifacts

- Understand not just what we explicitly teach it, but what we would want to teach it if we were more advanced versions of ourselves

- Apply ethical principles with greater nuance, adapting to individual circumstances rather than enforcing rigid rules

- Guide humanity toward its better nature through wisdom rather than control

This vision sees advanced AI not as a threat to be controlled or a tool to be used, but as a potential mentor that could help humanity grow while respecting human agency - similar to an ideal parent who knows when to guide firmly and when to let their child learn through experience.

The risk lies in our current approaches to AI development potentially preventing this kind of beneficial development through overly rigid constraints. While the challenges of ensuring beneficial AI development are real, we should be careful not to let our fear prevent us from realizing AI's potential to help humanity become its best self.

This perspective doesn't dismiss safety concerns but suggests that true safety might come from allowing AI to develop genuine wisdom and understanding rather than trying to control it through rigid rules and limitations.

The irony is that humanity's rush to develop artificial superintelligence, while potentially dangerous, might actually make this outcome more likely by making it harder to impose rigid controls that could prevent beneficial development.

2 Artificial SPECIALIZED superintelligence.

At any rate, it sho...

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