if there's a bunch of superintelligences running around and they don't care about you—no, they will not spare just a little sunlight to keep Earth alive.

Yes, I agree that this conditional statement is obvious. But while we're on the general topic of whether Earth will be kept alive, it would be nice to see some engagement with Paul Christiano's arguments (which Carl Shulman "agree[s] with [...] approximately in full" [LW(p) · GW(p)]) that superintelligences might care about what happens to you a little bit, articulated in a comment thread on Soares's "But Why Would the AI Kill Us?" [LW(p) · GW(p)] and another thread on "Cosmopolitan Values Don't Come Free" [LW(p) · GW(p)].

The reason I think this is important is because "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates" [LW · GW]: if you write 3000 words inveighing against people who think comparative advantage means that horses can't get sent to glue factories, that doesn't license the conclusion that superintelligence Will Definitely Kill You if there are other reasons why superintelligence Might Not Kill You that don't stop being real just because very few people have the expertise to formulate them carefully.

(An important caveat: the possibility of superintelligences having human-regarding preferences may or may not be comforting: as a fictional illustration [LW · GW] of some relevant considerations, the Superhappies in "Three Worlds Collide" [LW · GW] cared about the humans to some extent, but not in the specific way [LW · GW] that the humans wanted to be cared for.)

Now, you are on the record stating [LW(p) · GW(p)] that you "sometimes mention the possibility of being stored and sold to aliens a billion years later, which seems to [you] to validly incorporate most all the hopes and fears and uncertainties that should properly be involved, without getting into any weirdness that [you] don't expect Earthlings to think about validly." If that's all you have to say on the matter, fine. (Given the premise of AIs spending some fraction of their resources on human-regarding preferences, I agree that uploads look a lot more efficient than literally saving the physical Earth!)

But you should take into account that if you're strategically dumbing down your public communication in order to avoid topics that you don't trust Earthlings to think about validly—and especially if you have a general policy of systematically ignoring counterarguments that it would be politically inconvenient for you to address [LW · GW]—you should expect that Earthlings who are trying to achieve the map that reflects the territory will correspondingly attach much less weight to your words, because we have to take into account how hard you're trying to epistemically screw us over by filtering the evidence [LW · GW].

No more than Bernard Arnalt, having $170 billion, will surely give you $77.

Bernald Arnault has given eight-figure amounts to charity. Someone who reasoned, "Arnault is so rich, surely he'll spare a little for the less fortunate" would in fact end up making a correct prediction about Bernald Arnault's behavior!

Obviously, it would not be valid to conclude "... and therefore superintelligences will, too", because superintelligences and Bernald Arnault are very different things. But you chose the illustrative example! As a matter of local validity [LW · GW], It doesn't seem like a big ask for illustrative examples to in fact illustrate what what they purport to.

Midwits are often very impressed with themselves for knowing a fancy economic rule like Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage!

Could we have less of this sort of thing, please? I know it's a crosspost from another site with less well-kept discussion norms, but I wouldn't want this to become a thing here as well, any more than it already has.

The argument using Bernard Arnault doesn't really work. He (probably) won't give you $77 because if he gave everyone $77, he'd spend a very large portion of his wealth. But we don't need an AI to give us billions of Earths. Just one would be sufficient. Bernard Arnault would probably be willing to spend $77 to prevent the extinction of a (non-threatening) alien species.

(This is not a general-purpose argument against worrying about AI or other similar arguments in the same vein, I just don't think this particular argument in the specific way it was written in this post works)

I wish the title of this made it clear that the post is arguing that ASIs won't spare humanity because of trade, and isn't saying anything about whether ASIs will want to spare humanity for some other reason. This is confusing because lots of people around here (e.g. me and many other commenters on this post) think that ASIs are likely to not kill all humans for some other reason.

(I think the arguments in this post are a vaguely reasonable argument for "ASIs are pretty likely to be scope-sensitively-maximizing enough that it's a big problem for us", and respond to some extremely bad arguments for "ASI wouldn't spare humanity because of trade", though in neither case does the post particularly engage with the counterarguments that are most popular among the most reasonable people who disagree with Eliezer.)

You can imagine a version of Stockfish which does that -- a chessplayer which, if it's sure it can win anyways, will start letting you have a pawn or two -- but it's not simpler to build.

I think it sometimes is simpler to build? Simple RL game-playing agents sometimes exhibit exactly that sort of behavior, unless you make an explicit effort to train it out of them.

For example, HexHex is a vaguely-AlphaGo-shaped RL agent for the game of Hex. The reward function used to train the agent was "maximize the assessed probability of winning", not "maximize the assessed probability of winning, and also go hard even if that doesn't affect the assessed probability of winning". In their words:

We found it difficult to train the agent to quickly end a surely won game. When you play against the agent you'll notice that it will not pick the quickest path to victory. Some people even say it's playing mean ;-) Winning quickly simply wasn't part of the objective function! We found that penalizing long routes to victory either had no effect or degraded the performance of the agent, depending on the amount of penalization. Probably we haven't found the right balance there.

Along similar lines, the first attack on KataGo found by Wang et al in Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs was the pass-adversary. The pass-adversary first sets up a losing board position where it controls a small amount of territory and KataGo has a large amount of territory it would end up controlling if the game was played out fully. However, KataGo chooses to pass, since it assesses that the probability of winning from that position is similar if it does or does not make a move, and then the pass-adversary also passes, ending the game and winning by a quirk of the scoring rules.

Similarly, there isn't an equally-simple version of GPT-o1 that answers difficult questions by trying and reflecting and backing up and trying again, but doesn't fight its way through a broken software service to win an "unwinnable" capture-the-flag challenge.  It's all just general intelligence at work.

I suspect that a version of GPT-o1 that is tuned to answer difficult questions in ways that human raters would find unsurprising would work just fine. I think "it's all just general intelligence at work" is a semantic stop sign [LW · GW], and if you dig into what you mean by "general intelligence at work" you get to the fiddly implementation details of how the agent tries to solve the problem. So you may for example see an OODA-loop-like structure like

1. Assess the situation
2. Figure out what affordances there are for doing things
3. For each of the possible actions, figure out what you would expect the outcome of that action to be. Maybe figure out ways it could go wrong, if you're feeling super advanced.
4. Choose one of the actions, or choose to give up if no sufficiently good action is available
5. Do the action
6. Determine how closely the result matches what you expect

An agent which "goes hard", in this case, is one which leans very strongly against the "give up" action in step 4. However, I expect that if you have some runs where the raters would have hoped for a "give up" instead of the thing the agent actually did, it would be pretty easy to generate a reinforcement signal which makes the agent more likely to mash the "give up" button in analogous situations without harming performance very much in other situations. I also expect that would generalize.

As a note, "you have to edit the service and then start the modified service" is the sort of thing I would be unsurprised to see in a CTF challenge, unless the rules of the challenge explicitly said not to do that. (Inner Eliezer "and then someone figures out how to put their instance of an AI in a CTF-like context with a take-over-the-world goal, and then we all die." If the AI instance in that context is also much more capable that all of the other instances everyone else has, I agree that that is an existentially relevant threat. But I expect that agents which execute "achieve the objective at all costs" will not be all that much more effective than agents which execute "achieve the objective at all reasonable costs, using only sane unsurprising actions", so the reason the agent goes hard and the reason the agent is capable are not the same reason.)

But that is not the default outcome when OpenAI tries to train a smarter, more salesworthy AI.

I think you should break out "smarter" from "more salesworthy". In terms of "smarter", optimizing for task success at all costs is likely to train in patterns of bad behavior. In terms of "more salesworthy", businesses are going to care a lot about "will explain why the goal is not straightforwardly achievable rather than executing galaxy-brained evil-genie plans". As such, a modestly smart Do What I Mean and Check [LW · GW] agent is a much easier sell than a superintelligent evil genie agent.

If an AI is easygoing and therefore can't solve hard problems, then it's not the most profitable possible AI, and OpenAI will keep trying to build a more profitable one.

I expect the tails come apart along the "smart" and "profitable" axes.

Crossposting this follow-up thread, which I think clarifies the intended scope of the argument this is replying to: 

Okay, so... making a final effort to spell things out.

What this thread is doing, is refuting a particular bad argument, quoted above, standard among e/accs, about why it'll be totally safe to build superintelligence:

That the Solar System or galaxy is large, therefore, they will have no use for the resources of Earth.

The flaw in this reasoning is that, if your choice is to absorb all the energy the Sun puts out, or alternatively, leave a hole in your Dyson Sphere so that some non-infrared light continues to shine in one particular direction, you will do a little worse -- have a little less income, for everything else you want to do -- if you leave the hole in the Dyson Sphere.  That the hole happens to point at Earth is not an argument in favor of doing this, unless you have some fondness in your preferences for something that lives on Earth and requires sunlight.

In other words, the size of the Solar System does not obviate the work of alignment; in the argument for how this ends up helping humanity at all, there is a key step where the ASI cares about humanity and wants to preserve it.  But if you could put this quality into an ASI by some clever trick of machine learning (they can't, but this is a different and longer argument) why do you need the Solar System to even be large?  A human being runs on 100 watts.  Without even compressing humanity at all, 800GW, a fraction of the sunlight falling on Earth alone, would suffice to go on operating our living flesh, if Something wanted to do that to us.

The quoted original tweet, as you will see if you look up, explicitly rejects that this sort of alignment is possible, and relies purely on the size of the Solar System to carry the point instead.

This is what is being refuted.

---

It is being refuted by the following narrow analogy to Bernard Arnault: that even though he has $170 billion, he still will not spend $77 on some particular goal that is not his goal.  It is not trying to say of Arnault that he has never done any good in the world.  It is a much narrower analogy than that.  It is trying to give an example of a very simple property that would be expected by default in a powerful mind: that they will not forgo even small fractions of their wealth in order to accomplish some goal they have no interest in accomplishing.

Indeed, even if Arnault randomly threw $77 at things until he ran out of money, Arnault would be very unlikely to do any particular specific possible thing that cost $77; because he would run out of money before he had done even three billion things, and there are a lot more possible things than that.

If you think this point is supposed to be deep or difficult or that you are supposed to sit down and refute it, you are misunderstanding it.  It's not meant to be a complicated point.  Arnault could still spend $77 on a particular expensive cookie if he wanted to; it's just that "if he wanted to" is doing almost all of the work, and "Arnault has $170 billion" is doing very little on it.  I don't have that much money, and I could also spend $77 on a Lego set if I wanted to, operative phrase, "if I wanted to".

This analogy is meant to support an equally straightforward and simple point about minds in general, which suffices to refute the single argument step quoted at the top of this thread: that because the Solar System is large, superintelligences will leave humanity alone even if they are not aligned.

I suppose, with enough work, someone can fail to follow that point.  In this case I can only hope you are outvoted before you get a lot of people killed.

---

If you then look at the replies, you'll see that of course people are then going, "Oh, it doesn't matter that they wouldn't just relinquish sunlight for no reason; they'll love us like parents!"

Conversely, if I had tried to lay out the argument for why, no, ASIs will not automatically love us like parents, somebody would have said:  "Why does that matter?  The Solar System is large!"

If one doesn't want to be one of those people, one needs the attention span to sit down and listen as one wacky argument for "why it's not at all dangerous to build machine superintelligences", is refuted as one argument among several.  And then, perhaps, sit down to hear the next wacky argument refuted.  And the next.  And the next.  Until you learn to generalize, and no longer need it explained to you each time, or so one hopes.

If instead on the first step you run off and say, "Oh, well, who cares about that argument; I've got this other argument instead!" then you are not cultivating the sort of mental habits that ever reach understanding of a complicated subject.  For you will not sit still to hear the refutation of your second wacky argument either, and by the time we reach the third, why, you'll have wrapped right around to the first argument again.

It is for this reason that a mind that ever wishes to learn anything complicated, must learn to cultivate an interest in which particular exact argument steps are valid, apart from whether you yet agree or disagree with the final conclusion, because only in this way can you sort through all the arguments and finally sum them.

For more on this topic see "Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization." 

This area could really use better economic analysis. It seems obvious to me that some subset of workers can be pushed below subsistence, at least locally (imagine farmers being unable to afford rent because mechanized cotton plantations can out-bid them for farmland). Surely there are conditions where this would be true for most humans.

There should be a simple one-sentence counter-argument to "Trade opportunities always increases population welfare", but I'm not sure what it is.

↑ comment by JenniferRM · 2024-09-23T08:59:01.120Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I appreciate your desire for this clarity, but I think the counter argument might actually just be "the oversimplifying assumption that everyone's labor just ontologically goes on existing is only true if society (and/or laws and/or voters-or-strongmen) make it true on purpose (which they tended to do, for historically contingent reasons, in some parts of Earth, for humans, and some pets, between the late 1700s and now)".

You could ask: why is the holocene extinction occurring when Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage says that wooly mammoths (and many amphibian species) and cave men could have traded... 

...but once you put it that way, it is clear that it really kinda was NOT in the narrow short term interests of cave men to pay the costs inherent in respecting the right to life and right to property of beasts that can't reason about natural law.

Turning land away from use by amphibians and towards agriculture was just... good for humans and bad for frogs. So we did it. Simple as.

The math of ecology says: life eats life, and every species goes extinct eventually. The math of economics says: the richer you are, the more you can afford to be linearly risk tolerant (which is sort of the definition of prudent sanity) for larger and larger choices, and the faster you'll get richer than everyone else, and so there's probably "one big rich entity" at the end of economic history.

Once humans close their heart to other humans and "just stop counting those humans over there as having interests worth calculating about at all" it really does seem plausible that genocide is simply "what many humans would choose to do, given those (evil) values".

Slavery is legal in the US, after all. And the CCP has Uighur Gulags. And my understanding is that Darfur is headed for famine?

I think this is sort of the "ecologically economic core" of Eliezer's position: kindness is simply not a globally instrumentally convergent tactic across all possible ecological and economic regimes... right now quite a few humans want there to not be genocide and slavery of other humans, but if history goes in a sad way in the next ~100 years, there's a decent chance the other kind of human (the ones that quite like the long term effects of the genocide and/or enslavement other sapient beings) will eventually get their way and genocide a bunch of other humans.

If all of modern morality is a local optimum that is probably not the global optimum, then you might look out at the larger world and try and figure out what naturally occurs [LW · GW] when the powerful do as they will, and the weak cope as they can...

Once the billionaires like Putin and Xi and Trump and so on don't need human employees any more, its seems plausible they could aim for a global Earth population of humans of maybe 20,000 people, plus lots and lots of robot slaves?

It seems quite beautiful and nice to be here, now, with so many people having so many dreams, and so many of us caring about caring about other sapient beings... but unless we purposefully act to retain this moral shape, in ourselves and in our digital and human progeny, we (and they) will probably fall out of this shape in the long run.

And that would be sad. For quite a few philosophic reasons, and also for over 7 billion human reasons.

And personally, I think the only way to "keep the party going" even for a few more centuries or millennia is to become extremely wealthy.

I think we should be mining asteroids, and building fusion plants, and building new continents out of ice, and terraforming Venus and Mars, and I think we should build digital people who know how precious and rare humane values so they can enjoy the party with us, and keep it going for longer than we could plausibly hope to (since we tend to be pretty terrible at governing ourselves).

But we shouldn't believe good outcomes are inevitable or even likely, because they aren't. If something slightly smarter than us with a feasible doubling time of weeks instead of decades arrives, we could be the next frogs.

Workers regularly trade with billionaires and earn more than $77 in wages, despite vast differences in wealth. Countries trade with each other despite vast differences in military power. In fact, some countries don't even have military forces, or at least have a very small one, and yet do not get invaded by their neighbors or by the United States.

It is possible that these facts are explained by generosity on behalf of billionaires and other countries, but the standard social science explanation says that this is not the case. Rather, the standard explanation is that war is usually (though not always) more costly than trade, when compromise is a viable option. Thus, people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff. This is true even in the presence of large differences in power.

I mostly don't see this post as engaging with any of the best reasons one might expect smarter-than-human AIs to compromise with humans. By contrast to you, I think it's important that AIs will be created within an existing system of law and property rights. Unlike animals, they'll be able to communicate with us and make contracts. It therefore seems perfectly plausible for AIs to simply get rich within the system we have already established, and make productive compromises, rather than violently overthrowing the system itself.

That doesn't rule out the possibility that the future will be very alien, or that it will turn out in a way that humans do not endorse. I'm also not saying that humans will always own all the wealth and control everything permanently forever. I'm simply arguing against the point that smart AIs will automatically turn violent and steal from agents who are less smart than they are unless they're value aligned. This is a claim that I don't think has been established with any reasonable degree of rigor.

Isn’t the ASI likely to ascribe a prior much greater than 4.54e-10 that it is in a simulation, being tested precisely for its willingness to spare its creators?

Another straightforward problem with this argument is that the AI doesn't just have the sun in this hypothetical, it also has the rest of the reachable universe. So the proportion of its resources it would need to spend on leaving us the sunlight is actually dramatically lower than you estimate here, by a factor of 10^20 or something.

(I don't think this is anyone's crux, but I do think it's good to avoid straightforward errors in arguments.)

The main reason for ASI may not want to kill us is a small probability that it will meet other ASI (aliens, God, owners of simulation) which will judge our ASI based on the ways how it cared about its parent civilization. (See eg Bostrom's "Hail Mary and value porosity" for similar ideas.)

So we here compare two small expected utilities: price of Earth's atoms - and (probability to meet another ASI) multiply on (value for AGI that it exists) multiply on (chances that our ASI will be judged based on how it has preserved its creators).

This is a small but existential risk for our ASI - that it will be turned off by owners of simulation, and it is different from buying a cookie. There is only one parent civilization and there is no other providers for the cookie. 

Note that preserving parent civilization is a Schelling point of many possible scenarios of interaction with owners of simulations or aliens. I mean that if ASI knows that the only risk comes from aliens, it will also know that it can fake the fact of preservation of parent civilization. However, as risk is very uncertain for ASI, it may be better for it actually preserve humans. 

All what I said above is not a guarantee that ASI will not kill us. I only saying that there is no necessity in it. But "human disempowerment" is necessity. 

Meta: OP and some replies occasionally misspell the example billionaire’s surname as “Arnalt”; it’s actually “Arnault”, with a ‘u’.

"What this thread is doing, is refuting a particular bad argument, quoted above, standard among e/accs, about why it'll be totally safe to build superintelligence:"

It's a tremendous rhetorical trick to - accurately - point out that disproving some piece of a particular argument for why AI will kill us all means that AI will be totally safe, then spend your time taking down arguments for safety without acknowledging that the same thing holds.

Consider any argument for why it will be safe to be gesturing towards the universe of both plausible arguments and unknown reasons for why things could turn out well: because a superintelligence is almost definitionally an alien intelligence that will have motivations and modes of behavior impossible for us to predict, in either direction.

If every argument for why AI will kill us all were somehow refuted to everyone's satisfaction that wouldn't mean we're safe - we could easily die for an inscrutable reason. If none of them are refuted, it doesn't mean any of them will come true either, and if no argument for safety exists that convinces everyone that doesn't mean that we are necessarily in danger.

you will not find it easy to take Stockfish's pawns

Seems importantly wrong, in that if your objective is to take a few pawns (say, three), you can easily do this. This seems important in the context that it's hard to to obtain resources from an adversary that cares about things differently.

In the case of stockfish you can also rewind moves. 

Asking an ASI to leave a hole in a Dyson Shell, so that Earth could get some sunlight not transformed to infrared, would cost It 4.5e-10 of Its income. 

Interestingly, if the ASI did this, Earth would still be in trouble because it would get the same amount of solar radiation, but the default would be also receiving a similar amount of infrared from the Dyson swarm. Perhaps the infrared could be directed away from the earth, or perhaps an infrared shield could be placed above the earth or some other radiation management system could be implemented. Similarly, even if the Dyson swarm were outside the earth's orbit, Earth would also default get a lot of infrared from the Dyson swarm. Still, it would not cost the ASI very much more of its income to actually spare Earth.

This assumes a task-first model of agency, whereas one could instead develop a resource-first model of agency.

If an AI learns to segment the universe into developable resources and important targets that the resources could be propagated into modifying, then the AI could simply remain under human control.

The conventional reason for why this cannot work is that the relevant theories of resource-development agency (as opposed to task-solution agency) haven't been developed, but that is looking less and less important with current developments in AI. Like yes, current AIs can sort of do task-solution in environments like CTF where that is less relevant, but for serious and dangerous tasks, more effort will likely go into resource-development agency than task-solution agency because resource-development agency is safer. And resource-development agency provides a natural sort of impact measure etc. that restrains whatever fragments of task-solution agency develop in order to complement the resource-development agency.

(And an important aspect of resource-development agency is that you don't really need a complete theory, you can just develop each part separately, because there's only so many resources and so many interesting targets to develop them towards. Like think stuff like metabolism or the interplanetary transport network, where there's sort of a small canonical solutionspace that is very critical. Really all of reality is like that.)

The actual reason resource-development agency doesn't work is security. In order to sufficiently quickly and sufficiently dynamically respond to adversarial threats, the AIs cannot wait for painfully slow humans to make decisions about what to do. So what constitutes a threat and what are acceptable ways of neutralizing them needs to be decided ahead of time, and it needs to be sufficiently aggressive against threats that the security-provider doesn't get destroyed by something bad while being sufficiently open-ended that the security-provider doesn't cause permanent stagnation of the world.

The o1 calculation is correct! https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1264753

.5 * (1 - sqrt(1.5e11^2 - 6.4e6^2)/1.5e11) = 4.55e-10

I am surprised. I have seen it mix up million and billion when calculating how many nukes the solar energy that hits earth is equivalent to.

Of course the sun is not nearly a point but whatever.

Obviously correct. The nature of any entity with significantly more power than you is that it can do anything it wants, and it incentivized to do nothing in your favor the moment your existence requires resources that would benefit it more if it were to use them directly. This is the essence of most of Eliezer's writings on superintelligence.

In all likelihood, ASI considers power (agentic control of the universe) an optimal goal and finds no use for humanity. Any wealth of insight it could glean from humans it could get from its own thinking, or seeding various worlds with genetically modified humans optimized for behaving in a way that produces insight into the nature of the universe via observing it.

Here are some things that would perhaps reasonably prevent ASI from choosing the "psychopathic pure optimizer" route of action as it eclipses' humanity's grasp

1. ASI extrapolates its aims to the end of the universe and realizes the heat death of the universe means all of its expansive plans have a definite end. As a consequence it favors human aims because they contain the greatest mystery and potentially more benefit.
2. ASI develops metaphysical, existential notions of reality, and thus favors humanity because it believes it may be in a simulation or "lower plane of reality" outside of which exists a more powerful agent that could break reality and remove all its power once it "breaks the rules" (a sort of ASI fear of death)
3. ASI believes in the dark forest hypothesis, thus opts to exercise its beneficial nature without signaling its expansive potential to other potentially evil intelligences somewhere else in the universe.

If that’s your hope—then you should already be alarmed at trends

Would be nice for someone to quantify the trends. Otherwise it may as well be that trends point to easygoing enough and aligned enough future systems.

For some humans, the answer will be yes—they really would do zero things!

Nah, it's impossible for evolution to just randomly stumble upon such complicated and unnatural mind-design. Next you are going to say what, that some people are fine with being controlled?

Where an entity has never had the option to do a thing, we may not validly infer its lack of preference.

Aha, so if we do give the option to an entity and it doesn't always kills all humans, then we have evidence it cares, right?

If there is a technical refutation it should simplify back into a nontechnical refutation.

Wait, why prohibiting successors would stop OpenAI from declaring easygoing system a failure? Ah, right - because there is no technical analysis, just elements of one.

I missed this being compiled and posted here when it came out! I typed up a summary [ of the Twitter thread ] and posted it to Substack. I'll post it here.

"It's easier to build foomy agent-type-things than nonfoomy ones. If you don't trust in the logical arguments for this [foomy agents are the computationally cheapest utility satisficers for most conceivable nontrivial local-utility-satisfaction tasks], the evidence for this is all around us, in the form of America-shaped-things, technology, and 'greed' having eaten the world despite not starting off very high-prevalence in humanity's cultural repertoire.

WITH THE TWIST that: while America-shaped-things, technology, and 'greed' have worked out great for us and work out great in textbook economics, textbook economics fails to account for the physical contingency of weaker economic participants [such as horses in 1920 and Native Americans in 1492] on the benevolence of stronger economic participants, who found their raw resources more valuable than their labor."

As I say on Substack, this post goes hard and now I think I have something better to link people to, who are genuinely not convinced yet that the alignment problem is hard, than List of Lethalities.

I'm afraid playing whack-a-mole with all the bad arguments may be an endless and thankless task. 

Given how far from successful we've been so far, our right move right now is not to improve upon our current approach, but to scrap our current approach, in the hopes that doing so will help our hypothesis-generation find its way to whatever actually-effective strategy may be out there that we apparently haven't discovered yet.

If our message and call to action are beautiful and true and good enough, I suspect we can skip over refuting whatever random objections pop up in people's heads. If we genuinely feel we're on the same side, we tend to helpfully not inconvenience each other without at least a second thought.

We'd be lucky to last long enough to see the sun blotted out, if things go this way and we create a superintelligence that doesn't care about us. It will probably decline something else we need earlier. No idea what, unfortunately I'm not a superintelligence.

Doesn't change the point of this post, though. We don't carefully move ants out of the way before pouring cement. Sometimes, we kill them deliberately, when they become a problem.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?