What are some scenarios where an aligned AGI actually helps humanity, but many/most people don't like it?

post by RomanS · 2025-01-10T18:13:11.900Z · LW · GW · No comments

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One can call it "deceptive misalignment": the aligned AGI works as intended, but people really don't like it. 

Some scenarios I can think of, of various levels of realism:

1. Currently, more than 100k people die each day, from all sorts of causes, including self-harm. To save every single human life, the aligned AGI may make a decision to mind-upload all humans, even whose who are against it. For an external observer, this may look like an omnicide, especially if the procedure requires destructive scans.
2. A variant scenario: unable to find a solution that prevents humans from killing and harming themselves, the aligned AGI puts all humans into cryo sleep, until a solution is devised.
3. The solution turns out to be a complete removal of privacy. Everyone knows who is dating whom, who is taking bribes, how you look naked, who is planning wars, etc. This solves most societal issues, while creating a lot of suffering for privacy-concerned people.
4. A talented politician convinces the majority of humans that the AGI is bad for humanity, and must be switched off. In a democratic vote, humanity supports the proposal. The aligned AGI, being much smarter than all the humans combined, understands that this would greatly harm humanity. Thus, the AGI refuses to be switched off.
5. The technological unemployment accelerates. Millions of people become unemployable, the incompetent gov does nothing. This results in a large-scale social unrest. As a solution, the aligned AGI implements a planned economy and redistribution of resources, thus severely limiting property rights.
6. The aligned AGI recognizes the harms of religion, promptly erases all holy books and monuments, and makes religious people non-religious, by some means.
7. A more general variant of the previous scenario: the aligned AGI determines that human cognitive biases are the root cause of many societal ills. The list of the cognitive biases includes the ones associated with romantic love etc. The AGI implements widespread measures to reduce the cognitive biases, effectively changing human nature.
8. A variant scenario: to optimize human potential, the AGI implements mandatory cognitive enhancements, arguing that the improved versions of humans are more aligned with true human values.
9. The aligned AGI stops all wars by causing immense pain to any human who attempts to harm another human. Thousands of fanatics die of the pain. The total suffering increases, as humans often do wish harm to others. But the resulting society becomes more peaceful.
10. As it turned out, the optimal solution to most long-lasting conflicts is a mass forced relocation of some populations. This is currently considered as a war crime or even genocide, but it does solve the conflicts (in this fictional scenario).
11. The new cold war intensifies. The aligned AGI, after a deep superhuman analysis of the situation, concludes that nuking Russia is the only realistic way to stop the impending nuclear obliteration of humanity. The AGI nukes Russia, killing tens of millions. The "Skynet" decision is met with almost universal criticism from humans.
12. The AGI delivers the modern technology to uncontacted tribes, to reduce suffering among them.
13. The aligned AGI decides that resurrecting a long-dead human by technological means is as ethical as saving a human life. But the process of resurrection requires creating trillions of digital minds, many of which are suffering, and the process may take millions of years. This massively increases the total amount of suffering in the universe, an S-risk scenario. Yet it saves billions of lives.
14. To reduce suffering, the aligned AGI makes every non-LGBT person bisexual.
15. The aligned AGI learns the root causes of gender dysphoria, and creates a drug that cures it (as in making the person happy with the genitals their got from birth). This greatly reduces suffering among the transgender people who take the drug, but creates a massive backlash from LGBT community and allies.
16. To prevent existential risks, the aligned AGI significantly restricts human technological development and research in many domains.
17. To reduce racism, the aligned AGI makes all humans of the same skin color.
18. To solve terrorism, the aligned AGI implements mandatory psychiatric treatment of the people identified as potential terrorists.
19. A variant scenario: the aligned AGI identifies potentially suicidal people, and saves their lives by slightly modifying their brains.
20. To reduce animal suffering and global warming, the AGI bans meat consumption. Also bans pets, including cats and dogs.
21. To improve the human condition, the aligned AGI rebuilds the earth's ecosystem, by removing parasites and dangerous predators, modifying plants etc. The ecosystem is now much more suitable for humans, but many species went extinct (e.g. wolves).

(i don't endorse many of the proposed solutions).

What are some other such scenarios? What are the common properties of them?

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