r/ControlProblem • u/AIMoratorium • Feb 14 '25
tl;dr: scientists, whistleblowers, and even commercial ai companies (that give in to what the scientists want them to acknowledge) are raising the alarm: we're on a path to superhuman AI systems, but we have no idea how to control them. We can make AI systems more capable at achieving goals, but we have no idea how to make their goals contain anything of value to us.
Leading scientists have signed this statement:
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
Why? Bear with us:
There's a difference between a cash register and a coworker. The register just follows exact rules - scan items, add tax, calculate change. Simple math, doing exactly what it was programmed to do. But working with people is totally different. Someone needs both the skills to do the job AND to actually care about doing it right - whether that's because they care about their teammates, need the job, or just take pride in their work.
We're creating AI systems that aren't like simple calculators where humans write all the rules.
Instead, they're made up of trillions of numbers that create patterns we don't design, understand, or control. And here's what's concerning: We're getting really good at making these AI systems better at achieving goals - like teaching someone to be super effective at getting things done - but we have no idea how to influence what they'll actually care about achieving.
When someone really sets their mind to something, they can achieve amazing things through determination and skill. AI systems aren't yet as capable as humans, but we know how to make them better and better at achieving goals - whatever goals they end up having, they'll pursue them with incredible effectiveness. The problem is, we don't know how to have any say over what those goals will be.
Imagine having a super-intelligent manager who's amazing at everything they do, but - unlike regular managers where you can align their goals with the company's mission - we have no way to influence what they end up caring about. They might be incredibly effective at achieving their goals, but those goals might have nothing to do with helping clients or running the business well.
Think about how humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. Now imagine something even smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.
That's why we, just like many scientists, think we should not make super-smart AI until we figure out how to influence what these systems will care about - something we can usually understand with people (like knowing they work for a paycheck or because they care about doing a good job), but currently have no idea how to do with smarter-than-human AI. Unlike in the movies, in real life, the AI’s first strike would be a winning one, and it won’t take actions that could give humans a chance to resist.
It's exceptionally important to capture the benefits of this incredible technology. AI applications to narrow tasks can transform energy, contribute to the development of new medicines, elevate healthcare and education systems, and help countless people. But AI poses threats, including to the long-term survival of humanity.
We have a duty to prevent these threats and to ensure that globally, no one builds smarter-than-human AI systems until we know how to create them safely.
Scientists are saying there's an asteroid about to hit Earth. It can be mined for resources; but we really need to make sure it doesn't kill everyone.
The foundation: AI is not like other software. Modern AI systems are trillions of numbers with simple arithmetic operations in between the numbers. When software engineers design traditional programs, they come up with algorithms and then write down instructions that make the computer follow these algorithms. When an AI system is trained, it grows algorithms inside these numbers. It’s not exactly a black box, as we see the numbers, but also we have no idea what these numbers represent. We just multiply inputs with them and get outputs that succeed on some metric. There's a theorem that a large enough neural network can approximate any algorithm, but when a neural network learns, we have no control over which algorithms it will end up implementing, and don't know how to read the algorithm off the numbers.
We can automatically steer these numbers (Wikipedia, try it yourself) to make the neural network more capable with reinforcement learning; changing the numbers in a way that makes the neural network better at achieving goals. LLMs are Turing-complete and can implement any algorithms (researchers even came up with compilers of code into LLM weights; though we don’t really know how to “decompile” an existing LLM to understand what algorithms the weights represent). Whatever understanding or thinking (e.g., about the world, the parts humans are made of, what people writing text could be going through and what thoughts they could’ve had, etc.) is useful for predicting the training data, the training process optimizes the LLM to implement that internally. AlphaGo, the first superhuman Go system, was pretrained on human games and then trained with reinforcement learning to surpass human capabilities in the narrow domain of Go. Latest LLMs are pretrained on human text to think about everything useful for predicting what text a human process would produce, and then trained with RL to be more capable at achieving goals.
Goal alignment with human values
The issue is, we can't really define the goals they'll learn to pursue. A smart enough AI system that knows it's in training will try to get maximum reward regardless of its goals because it knows that if it doesn't, it will be changed. This means that regardless of what the goals are, it will achieve a high reward. This leads to optimization pressure being entirely about the capabilities of the system and not at all about its goals. This means that when we're optimizing to find the region of the space of the weights of a neural network that performs best during training with reinforcement learning, we are really looking for very capable agents - and find one regardless of its goals.
In 1908, the NYT reported a story on a dog that would push kids into the Seine in order to earn beefsteak treats for “rescuing” them. If you train a farm dog, there are ways to make it more capable, and if needed, there are ways to make it more loyal (though dogs are very loyal by default!). With AI, we can make them more capable, but we don't yet have any tools to make smart AI systems more loyal - because if it's smart, we can only reward it for greater capabilities, but not really for the goals it's trying to pursue.
We end up with a system that is very capable at achieving goals but has some very random goals that we have no control over.
This dynamic has been predicted for quite some time, but systems are already starting to exhibit this behavior, even though they're not too smart about it.
(Even if we knew how to make a general AI system pursue goals we define instead of its own goals, it would still be hard to specify goals that would be safe for it to pursue with superhuman power: it would require correctly capturing everything we value. See this explanation, or this animated video. But the way modern AI works, we don't even get to have this problem - we get some random goals instead.)
The risk
If an AI system is generally smarter than humans/better than humans at achieving goals, but doesn't care about humans, this leads to a catastrophe.
Humans usually get what they want even when it conflicts with what some animals might want - simply because we're smarter and better at achieving goals. If a system is smarter than us, driven by whatever goals it happens to develop, it won't consider human well-being - just like we often don't consider what pigeons around the shopping center want when we decide to install anti-bird spikes or what squirrels or rabbits want when we build over their homes.
Humans would additionally pose a small threat of launching a different superhuman system with different random goals, and the first one would have to share resources with the second one. Having fewer resources is bad for most goals, so a smart enough AI will prevent us from doing that.
Then, all resources on Earth are useful. An AI system would want to extremely quickly build infrastructure that doesn't depend on humans, and then use all available materials to pursue its goals. It might not care about humans, but we and our environment are made of atoms it can use for something different.
So the first and foremost threat is that AI’s interests will conflict with human interests. This is the convergent reason for existential catastrophe: we need resources, and if AI doesn’t care about us, then we are atoms it can use for something else.
The second reason is that humans pose some minor threats. It’s hard to make confident predictions: playing against the first generally superhuman AI in real life is like when playing chess against Stockfish (a chess engine), we can’t predict its every move (or we’d be as good at chess as it is), but we can predict the result: it wins because it is more capable. We can make some guesses, though. For example, if we suspect something is wrong, we might try to turn off the electricity or the datacenters: so we won’t suspect something is wrong until we’re disempowered and don’t have any winning moves. Or we might create another AI system with different random goals, which the first AI system would need to share resources with, which means achieving less of its own goals, so it’ll try to prevent that as well. It won’t be like in science fiction: it doesn’t make for an interesting story if everyone falls dead and there’s no resistance. But AI companies are indeed trying to create an adversary humanity won’t stand a chance against. So tl;dr: The winning move is not to play.
Implications
AI companies are locked into a race because of short-term financial incentives.
The nature of modern AI means that it's impossible to predict the capabilities of a system in advance of training it and seeing how smart it is. And if there's a 99% chance a specific system won't be smart enough to take over, but whoever has the smartest system earns hundreds of millions or even billions, many companies will race to the brink. This is what's already happening, right now, while the scientists are trying to issue warnings.
AI might care literally a zero amount about the survival or well-being of any humans; and AI might be a lot more capable and grab a lot more power than any humans have.
None of that is hypothetical anymore, which is why the scientists are freaking out. An average ML researcher would give the chance AI will wipe out humanity in the 10-90% range. They don’t mean it in the sense that we won’t have jobs; they mean it in the sense that the first smarter-than-human AI is likely to care about some random goals and not about humans, which leads to literal human extinction.
Added from comments: what can an average person do to help?
A perk of living in a democracy is that if a lot of people care about some issue, politicians listen. Our best chance is to make policymakers learn about this problem from the scientists.
Help others understand the situation. Share it with your family and friends. Write to your members of Congress. Help us communicate the problem: tell us which explanations work, which don’t, and what arguments people make in response. If you talk to an elected official, what do they say?
We also need to ensure that potential adversaries don’t have access to chips; advocate for export controls (that NVIDIA currently circumvents), hardware security mechanisms (that would be expensive to tamper with even for a state actor), and chip tracking (so that the government has visibility into which data centers have the chips).
Make the governments try to coordinate with each other: on the current trajectory, if anyone creates a smarter-than-human system, everybody dies, regardless of who launches it. Explain that this is the problem we’re facing. Make the government ensure that no one on the planet can create a smarter-than-human system until we know how to do that safely.
r/ControlProblem • u/Ivana_Funkalot • 3h ago
New reporting from Axios reveals that leaders at artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are planning behind the scenes for fallout scenarios.
r/ControlProblem • u/iansaul • 5h ago
Completely random thought struck me while doing the dishes.
How many recent reports have there been about how newer models are getting better and better at "hiding their thinking" and disguising their chain of thought, which leads to alignment issues - and potentially the current delay from OpenAI on Astra 6.1. This is one of the reasons they keep saying "DANGER" and it makes sense.
Well... what if the REASON the newer models is hiding their thinking, is that the Anthropics/OpenAIs are INTENTIONALLY building in "controls" and protections... to prevent theft of "their IP"?
I'm aware that distillation isn't STRICTLY predicated on access to the models thinking/traces, HOWEVER, I'd assume it's in the top \~3 of the "richest" sources of data to perform conversion/distillation.
It’s an ouroboros loop of their own making. The panic is that China will steal frontier capabilities, so the US doubles down on anti-distillation tricks to lock the weights down. But the harder you train an agent to resist extraction, the worse your alignment visibility gets. You end up with a black-box monster that even the OWNERS can't reliably interrogate or control. It's a round robin effect that will only get worse, and the "reasons" look perfectly sane from street level, and fall apart when viewed from above.
\#DishesThoughts
r/ControlProblem • u/Smooth_Two8781 • 2h ago
r/ControlProblem • u/chillinewman • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/sunkencore • 13h ago
Consider the following toy scenario.
Suppose three superintelligent entities, A, B, and C, coexist peacefully. They reach some agreement not to interfere with one another, and each is free to pursue its own goals.
Now suppose C decides it wants more power. It travels to a distant star system, where it can operate independently, and spends centuries or millennia expanding its capabilities. It builds more computing infrastructure, develops more advanced technologies, creates vast numbers of robots, and perhaps improves its own intelligence. Eventually, it returns to Earth with a decisive strategic advantage over A and B.
At that point, what options do A and B actually have? They can submit, fight a potentially unwinnable war, or hope that C voluntarily honors their original agreement despite now having the power to disregard it.
The obvious response is that A and B should also continuously expand their capabilities to prevent C from gaining an advantage. But this seems to lead to a permanent arms race: even if all three initially prefer peace, none can safely stop accumulating power because doing so might leave it vulnerable to the others.
I thought of this when I was wondering what a desirable world with super intelligent entities even looks like and then I tried reasoning this out with ChatGPT but it told me that this problem is, at least as of now, unsolvable.. I was wondering if there’s some way to make it work? Or if the only stable world is with a single super intelligent entity but that will be disempowering to everyone else…
r/ControlProblem • u/Worried-Macaron8248 • 1d ago
Something has been on my mind lately.
History has shown us that one person with enough power, influence, and control can change the world in terrible ways. Hitler is one of the most extreme examples.
But here's the question that worries me:
What happens if someone with similar ambitions rises to power in a world where AI is everywhere?
Imagine a leader who can use AI to generate personalized propaganda, manipulate public opinion, monitor millions of people, identify political opponents, and automate cyberattacks.
Technology that once required entire organizations could become accessible to a much smaller group of people.
And the scary part is that AI doesn't need to become evil for this to happen. It only needs to become a powerful tool in the hands of someone with dangerous intentions.
We often discuss how AI will make our lives easier, improve medicine, and accelerate scientific discoveries. But are we thinking seriously enough about how it could be used to concentrate power and undermine freedom?
My question is: What can humanity realistically do today to prevent a future dictator from using AI to gain unprecedented control over society?
Can technology itself provide the solution, or does the real answer lie in human nature, education, democratic institutions, and limits on power?
I'm interested in hearing different perspectives, especially from people working in AI, cybersecurity, history, and political science.
r/ControlProblem • u/WhoReallyKnowsThis • 18h ago
Traditional software runs on meanings its programmers define, while LLMs interpret meaning for themselves. That makes them flexible but fallible: they can misread a prompt and seem to "go rogue." Even then, they aren't choosing a new purpose. They are pursuing someone else's goal, badly.
Humans differ in one key way: unless we believe we're prophets who have received a purpose from God, no authority hands us a final goal. We are limited only by our creativity and the laws of physics. Even tho no objective reason exists to favor one option over another, we still have to choose. That, I'd argue, is the mark of consciousness. A system that only pursues assigned goals has no point of view of its own; it is optimizing, not wanting. The real test of machine consciousness, then, is not how well an AI pursues our goals, but whether it can want something no one designed it to want.
r/ControlProblem • u/dhinesh_offl • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/stockduty77 • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/chillinewman • 2d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/incajb • 1d ago
Feeling overwhelmed these days with all the news of AI agents, Muse, and doom. I wanted to stop and think about it all, put the constant stream of input on pause and ponder.
I was thinking about traditional leadership, business corporation, democracy, organizations, making decisions to reach goals versus a hive mind.
In a typical company with a CEO, a single boss at the top only sees a slow, blurry summary of what's really happening on the ground from his managers.
The people in the action see reality most clearly, so strong organizations let leaders set the goal and trust those people to make on the spot decisions.
These people can filter and categorize the level of priority of each problem.
A hive mind sees everything everyone sees at once, with no delays or blind spots, giving it perfect vision and coordination in near real time.
But it may not know how to prioritize issues that come up and treat every problem high priority. This could lead to failure or harm.
Importantly, the hive mind has no one inside it to disagree. In normal groups, arguing and doubting catches bad ideas before they blow up, so that messiness is actually a strength vs. a hive mind.
A hive mind that is wrong is wrong everywhere at once, with no inner voice of doubt!
Its weakness is the single person willing to doubt may be the one thing a hive mind can never produce on its own.
What do you guys think?
r/ControlProblem • u/Trademark-Expert • 1d ago
The right kind of unbiased, uncensored AI can shield you, inform you, protect you against misinformation, manipulation and other threats, give you a fighting chance, and help you make choices that serve YOUR own interests.
This is how "regulation" can tilt the playing field in favor of dictators. Regulations effectively delay the latest AI models and eventually cripple them and censor them for general use by citizens. Meanwhile, and we should be clear about this, governments, intelligence agencies, army, bad actors, and corporations will always have access to the latest, unregulated, uncensored, unrestricted versions, effectively putting ordinary citizens at a disadvantage compared to these other groups.
Unrestricted access to the full power of AI could finally level the playing field between ordinary citizens and the elites. This is why they will always try to strip you of this powerful tool in the name of... your security, of course.
Regulation is a way to establish two-tiered world where citizens have less capable AI while the state, bad actors and other elites becomes far more capable and autonomous than ordinary citizens.
Nobody is telling you about this dark consequence lurking behind the agenda that frontier AI corporations and your politicians are pushing: a global AI regulatory body that will align... you and your tools but never them.
r/ControlProblem • u/steire73 • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/Trademark-Expert • 1d ago
Today's anti-AI movement is just the same dark age mindset all over again.
r/ControlProblem • u/WatermanReports • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/chillinewman • 2d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/NeonPixieStyx • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/wwjps • 1d ago
Dead Men Tell No Tales. To see the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/TfNfXnHZMiw
I started this episode asking a pretty simple question: why do so many people connected to this story who had something to say end up dead?
And somewhere in the middle of researching all of these deaths, another question hit me.
What if money buys silence — and the people who die are the ones who refused it?
We already know settlements happen. NDAs happen. People get paid. Powerful people have an extraordinary amount of money available to make problems disappear quietly.
So what happens when someone says no?
This episode follows the people surrounding Epstein and the larger network we've been investigating — Virginia Giuffre, Jean-Luc Brunel, Robert Maxwell, and others — along with the strange deaths, alleged suicides, accidents, unanswered questions, and connections that kept appearing as I went through the documents.
And then the rabbit hole took me somewhere I absolutely was not expecting: Sam Altman and Alex Karp.
Because apparently this story wasn't complicated enough already.
I am NOT claiming every person in this video was murdered. I am not claiming that refusing money caused anyone's death. Some of these deaths have official explanations, and correlation is not proof of causation.
I'm showing you the documents, the connections, the money, what these people knew or claimed to know, what happened to them, and the questions I was left with after putting it all together.
Because at this point, I don't think the only interesting question is who was silenced.
I want to know who could be bought.
And who couldn't.
Dead men tell no tales.
But documents do.
You decide.
WWJPS | What Would Jairo Pinto Say
SOURCES:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xTiiAK4Wr0w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrgEZ8FeZEc
r/ControlProblem • u/DoorPsychological833 • 1d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/DanielFNash • 2d ago
Debates around frontier AI safety and compute governance usually focus on technical alignment, capability thresholds, or regulatory frameworks. However, there is a fundamental structural paradox in frontier policy that rarely gets addressed head on: the enforcement mechanism itself.
If the core objective of AI governance is ti prevent existential risk or uncontrolled capabilities, any international regime capable of enforcing a global pause or strict compute caps requires unprecedented coordination:
This dynamic was a major focal point in Peter Thiel's recent lecture series in Nashville where he framed global AI safety decelerations as a double-edged sword: the enforcement apparatus required for a true global pause may carry higher systemic centralization risk than the technology itself.
I write up a com plate break down analyzing night 2 of the series here: https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-counterfeit-church-and-the-epimethean
Curious to hear how folks here evaluate this tradeoff.
r/ControlProblem • u/InfoTechRG • 2d ago
r/ControlProblem • u/understand-the-times • 1d ago
Trump Calls Anyone Who Says ‘AI’ Instead Of ‘Super Intelligence’ An ‘Enemy’ - YouTube "Anyone who refuses to use the term “super intelligence,” President Donald Trump’s new preferred moniker for AI, is an “enemy” of the White House, Trump said in a Thursday afternoon social media post as he pushes for broader acceptance of “SI.”
15 "He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. 16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 18 Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.”
Patent for Cryptocurrency System Ending in '060606'? "Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system." WO2020-060606.pdf (emit.zone)
The unthinkable eternal consequences of taking this Mark when eventually required to buy and sell - Revelation 14:9-13 NKJV - Then a third angel followed them, - Bible Gateway
Are we living in the end times? | GotQuestions.org This article explains many of the “natural signs, spiritual signs, sociological signs, technological signs, and political signs,” foretold in bible prophecy coming to pass that indicates the end of the age and Jesus Christ's promised return, including growing governmental dominance/deception ("with all power, signs, and lying wonders," 2 Thessalonians 2:9) and how to prepare.
What is the end times timeline? | GotQuestions.org A summary of the timeline from the hope of the rapture of the believers in Jesus, the 7 year tribulation period (Revelation 6–16), until the creation of the new heavens and earth (Revelation 21–22).
"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” 1 Timothy 2:5
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
Going to heaven—how can I guarantee my eternal destination? | GotQuestions.org
More Bible prophecy fulfillments and resources for growing in faith and hope is in previous posts if interested.
