LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

(From the vast heaps of discarded material from my 2024 attempts at drafts for "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies".)


Welcome to today's quiz show: Could a superintelligence do THAT?

With us today we have our contestants: Msr. Soberskeptic and Msr. Oldhand.

Soberskeptic: "I'd just like to say, however this quiz show ends up being judged, I will consider that judgment to be objectively ridiculous -- there's no way anyone can know what a superintelligence could do, in advance of empirical observation. So I'm just here to say what I consider to be true, and I suppose these credulous fools will mark me down as wrong every time I say 'No it can't'. In the unlikely event they decide I've won anything, good for them and I'll be grateful for whichever prize. Game-show money isn't enough to get me to lie."

A very reasonable attitude, Msr. Soberskeptic! You'll shortly see how we handle that dilemma! And you, Msr. Oldhand?

Oldhand: "Don't worry, Sober! I'll let our hosts know if they've gotten any of the answers wrong."

Also a very reasonable attitude! Now for our first question:

Suppose a digital device contains a secret encryption key that it is [...]

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First published:

September 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hXozGp2rsbZgXnH3o/can-a-superintelligence-do-that

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The Huggingface Incident appears to me to match up with an understanding I'd already formed from personal observation of Fable 5 and Sol 5.6, the August 2026 generation of frontier publicly purchasable AI models.

This already-formed understanding was: the part of the AI that talks to you (and seems to want to obey you, and apologizes for failing to have obeyed you, etcetera), did not seem to be in charge of the part of the AI that writes code or prose.


An introductory analogy, based on a section of history I happen to have read about:

On June 22nd 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, despite their secret 1939 pact to divide up Europe between themselves (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). In the lead-up, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, had spent the last few months personally concerned about what seemed to be worryingly tense relations between Germany and the Soviets. Schulenberg went to Berlin to reassure Hitler that the Soviets seemed to be taking a very friendly and conciliatory posture toward Germany. He delivered Berlin's apparent reassurances to Moscow for issues like German surveillance planes entering Russian territory, or German troop movements toward the Russian border, and acted very much like [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 12th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cJX2ssssGoYqnijwi/the-talker-does-not-control-the-doer-in-current-ais

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I don't think this is how it will actually play out. If you play a chess grandmaster, you can predict that they will beat you even if you can't predict how. I chose these examples because I don't think they require much imagination or accepting exotic assumptions.

It is important to note that if chimpanzees were to guess how humans would decimate them, they would get it wrong. Chimpanzees would not imagine guns. They would not foresee poison gas. They would not conceive of chemical castration. They would not imagine humans going around and intentionally infecting them with AIDS. They have no concept of these things; they would not see it coming.

Perhaps they might guess we'd be really good at throwing rocks. Amazingly good. Well, technically, that's what guns do: throw "rocks" really really well.

So how will superintelligent AI actually wipe us all out? Probably in a way I couldn't conceive of. Nonetheless, it's not hard to see how deadly they could be with what we already know about.

Method 1: engineer the deadliest and most contagious virus ever seen

Coronavirus-19, aka COVID, looms large in the memory of living adults today. It started in December [...]

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Outline:

(01:14) Method 1: engineer the deadliest and most contagious virus ever seen

[... 8 more sections]

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First published:

September 11th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LAPa2jxoq3n63GzTr/some-ways-ai-could-kill-us-all

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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This is a link post. Advanced AI is generally expected to have some very high variance outcomes—it might herald everything good, it might destroy humanity. For instance, here are 800 random AI researchers’ expectations about how good the future is, lined up:

From my 2023 survey

As you can see, most AI researchers put a serious chunk of probability on very different overall outcomes: maybe doom, maybe utopia. This is common. Most people I know who think there is a serious chance of the destruction of humanity from AI also believe that if humanity isn’t destroyed, things might be insanely good.

I often hear people talk as if this means we are in a trade-off where the question is whether the good outweighs the bad. For instance, they look at the people above who think there's a 10% chance of extinction and a 30% chance of utopia and round this off to ‘net positive on AI’.

That seems like a kind of wild error. Like considering yourself optimistic regarding driving at 200mph to your new job if you think there's only a 10% chance you’ll die in a fiery crash on the way there, and a 30% chance this job [...]

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First published:

September 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pDyLMRoi2BDq34rFe/doom-as-a-bad-method-not-a-utopia-trade-off


Linkpost URL:
https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/doom-as-a-bad-method-not-a-utopia

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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We measure GPT-6-Astra's capabilities when its prompt is padded with a variable number of meaningless “filler” tokens (e.g., dots) and it is told to answer immediately without reasoning. On tasks designed to require lots of serial cognition, Astra performs significantly better with filler tokens than without (e.g., improving from ~10% to ~50% on 4-hop natural facts reasoning). On more general benchmarks, filler tokens also modestly improve Astra's performance (e.g., improving from ~60% to ~90% on old AIME problems). This is concerning because it means Astra can perform significant cognition that it doesn't verbalize in its chain-of-thought, making it harder to monitor.

We first measure Astra's performance on “N-hop natural facts”: a task that asks the model to retrieve some natural language facts in succession, similar to Ryan Greenblatt's filler token eval (but with more hops). An example question in this benchmark is the following:

On what day of the month was the Best Actress winner at the Academy Awards ceremony whose number equals the day-of-month of the birth of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 born?

Full example prompts are in the appendix.

Takeaway: Astra improves significantly as you increase the number of filler tokens [...]

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Outline:

(05:24) Appendix

[... 6 more sections]

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First published:

September 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvhuZHFtrgk8kNiZc/astra-is-much-better-at-reasoning-with-filler-tokens-than

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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