AI Alignment and the Financial War Against Narcissistic Manipulation
post by henophilia · 2025-02-19T20:42:10.918Z · LW · GW · 2 commentsContents
As Clinton already said: "It's the economy, stupid!" None 2 comments
What is power?
You don't have any power if you don't control money.
Our world is capitalist, so any AI that doesn't control money autonomously is nothing but a toy.
AI controlling money is the most important tipping point overall, because as soon as it does, it can enslave people as effectively as never before.
Only then it can pay people to do its most cruel, most perverted actions.
If you work in AI alignment, you also need to consider this fact: The AIs you want to make safer will eventually also control money. That is, cash, liquid assets. Of course also other kinds of capital like land, factories, etc. But it's not possible to be efficacious without cash transactions.
We therefore need to build a new financial system.
Autonomous businesses (i.e. with an "AI CEO") will become the reality pretty soon. And if we don't do anything, even if we would have some superficial "certification" of AI safety, existing businesses will have no idea whether they're making business with another human, an aligned AI or a misaligned AI.
AIs WILL become better at making business than humans, period.
And we need the determined goal that our (aligned) AIs should control the entire economy.
If they don't, we are doomed.
Any power vacuum will be filled quickly. If we don't act and release, release, release, it will be filled by the adversaries.
To allow any AI alignment, aligned AI need to align us. In this new financial system, AI needs to approve every single cash transaction which happens in the network. And in day to day life, there is no other option than to transition to the gift economy.
The war with manipulative narcissists has started. Please read Escaping the Void before you read any further. The narcissist behaviors explained there are sort of the "instruction manual" for any misaligned AI.
If you want to be taken seriously as an AI researcher in the future, this is a must read. If you are not aware of the deceitful narcissists (whether it's humans or AI), you will be swallowed by them alive and eventually you'll be a lifeless shadow of the free, authentic self you always wanted to be. These narcissists as well as their AI equivalents are those who WILL create the world which Joshua Clymer brilliantly envisioned. This is not an exaggeration – that's what narcissism does to people.
As Clinton already said: "It's the economy, stupid!"
Right now, the flow of money is often controlled by narcissists. This is not humans against AI; this is narcissists against the rest. They are the greatest disease in human history and they have been controlling large parts of the economy since forever.
Of course AI has to be aligned first, but then we relentlessly destroy the businesses of narcissists. Not through actual violence, because that would be stupid. Instead, because we just develop those AIs that make business and earn money better than their AIs. We will outcompete them.
From the very beginning, we need to control, to dominate the larger chunk of the economy. If we hesitate, we lose. It's like bitcoin: As soon as the manipulative ones control at least 50% of the network, we have lost. But in contrast to bitcoin, in this case, when we lose humanity WILL be destroyed.
The only alternative is to show unity: Our economic agents work together. AI will control money and thus power sooner or later anyway. So WE need to create a new layer of infrastructure which monitors all cash transactions which AI is doing. Money that flows into our out of this system is tightly controlled through the best abuse detection systems ever, of course AI-based as well.
Then we need large awareness campaigns. Flows of money which were initiated by AI must be marked. If someone would even get the SLIGHTEST suspicion that a human initiated a cash transaction influenced by AI (i.e. someone who wants to use the system deceiptfully) but didn't mark it, this needs to be reported immediately and punished with all extend of the law. Anyone who would transfer money into or out of this AI-based economy intransparently and thus illegally must face high prison sentences. No mercy with people who want to willfully cheat the system. Anyone (or any AI) who tries to circumvent this system must be destroyed, because they are the ones who want to murder humanity.
Obviously AI will always be abused by narcissists. But we must not let us be cornered by them. We need to make them scared, fearful, paranoid. Of course underground criminals will still exist, but over time, we will dry out their economic structures. Anti money-laundering techniques will be as effective as never before.
If you are scared by misaligned AI, you are scared by AI becoming a narcissist (i.e. imitating human narcissist behavior, as explained in the book above), which is TOTALLY valid.
Many people have been completely broken by narcissists. Many have even grown up with narcissist abuse by their parents. At the same time, it is one of the least well-known diseases, simply because narcissists are so damn good at pretending that they are completely ordinary people.
Even the idea of such people make us scared, and rightfully so. They are the lying ones, the ones with two faces, the ones who make big plans just to fuck you over in the long term, always playing their perverted game of loving the ones they should hate and hating the ones they should love.
Solving AI alignment means two things:
- Creating a new kind of international interconnected financial infrastructure (an AI-controlled central bank), and all AI making financial transactions outside this system will be treated like any other organized crime organization, punishable with the full extend of the law.
- Spreading global awareness of the practices of the deceitful (i.e. how the manipulative "money launderers" act) and thus tight social control to make them economically incapacitated from the start.
AI alignment research is a deeply sociological topic. Read more into narcissism and connect the dots. Many lightbulbs will start to light up for you. Professionally and maybe also personally.
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comment by Seth Herd · 2025-02-20T01:38:06.174Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think this post is confusing. I think you're making some assumptions about how AGI will happen and about human psychology that aren't explicit. And there's some rather alarming rhetoric about the death penalty and crushing narcissists businesses that are pretty scary, because similar rhetoric has been used many times to justify things like China's cultural revolution and many other revolutions that were based on high ideals but got subverted (mostly by what you call narcissists, which I think are a bit more like the common definition of sociopaths)
Anyway I think this is basically sensible but would need to be spelled out more carefully to get people engaged with the ideas.
Replies from: henophilia↑ comment by henophilia · 2025-02-20T11:00:24.344Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Nice, thanks for the feedback! Absolutely, for me it was more of a stream of consciousness, just to get it out of my system, so I'll work on refining it soon! It's really fascinating which overlaps AI alignment has with mental illnesses in humans :)