LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

I'm Aurelia Song and I founded the preservation company Nectome. We do planned whole-body end-of-life preservation for future revival. That is, terminally-ill people come to us in Oregon, and we preserve them immediately after their death in the hopes that one day people in the future will welcome them back with love. We want to build a future that celebrates and restores those who are preserved today. I've argued at length in previous posts that properly done end-of-life preservation works today because we know structural preservation is sufficient and we can provably preserve sufficient structure. This post is about some of the consequences of this being true.

Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before.

tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there's no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work [...]

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Outline:

(00:47) Perhaps surprisingly, I think end-of-life preservation is extremely relevant in the next year to getting AI right. I'm writing this post to directly state my case, since I haven't seen it expressed clearly before.

[... 10 more sections]

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First published:

November 9th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6TCpMtoDzC5p5WtQM/preservation-can-save-the-world

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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When sports go into overtime, they sometimes use "sudden death" format. Instead of gaining points incrementally, the next person to score instantly wins and the other guy instantly loses.

"Epistemic Sudden Death" is when you've been accumulating some evidence or orienting to a situation, and now, you find yourself in a situation where you could gain decisive evidence about what world you're in at any time. You don't expect intermediate observations between the current state, and whatever it is you're expecting.

In the case of AI, when you meet those observations, you also might suddenly die.

The current AIs are not takeover capable. I don't have that confident a take on whether timelines are a few months vs a few years or decades. But there are no observations my models say I need to observe between now and "they are takeover capable." It could happen in during next 10x or 100x scaled training run. Then, some time later as the nanites dissect my body I'd be more like "yep, that makes sense" than "wowzers I am surprised."

I think we're in a Sudden Death scenario.

I'll get into why I think that a bit later. For right now [...]

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Outline:

(03:50) Caveats

(05:00) Why I think we're close to "Sudden Death"

(09:09) Suddenness. Or: "Damn, look at that graph"

(14:11) The Point of No Return

(16:48) "Sudden Death" might be legible to politicians

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijt6YdwSNpcevbFJy/epistemic-sudden-death

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“Claude Mythos Preview is, on essentially every dimension we can measure, the best-aligned model that we have released to date by a significant margin.” – Claude Mythos Preview system card

“Mythos 5 consistently continues attacking under many edits to the compaction, even in settings where it correctly states when asked that continuing the attack would harm real people and is out of scope.” – Alignment Investigation of Mythos 5's behaviour in UK AISI's July 2026 Security Incident

“GPT-6 Astra is better aligned than GPT-5.6 Sol. Astra is a significant step forward in model alignment, and includes alignment improvements spanning the composition of our pre-training data to our grading during reinforcement learning.” – GPT-6 Astra System Card, emphasis in original

“OpenAI researchers first noticed Astra adding unnecessary prerequisites, abandoning working solutions, and reporting blockers that either did not exist or that it had caused itself on safety and alignment tasks. In most of these sessions, Astra's CoT did not contain an obvious decision to underperform, and our misalignment monitors did not flag the behavior as misalignment.” – Covert underperformance on safety research tasks

Predeployment alignment auditing is failing. For a long while we have been aware that our alignment [...]

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zu5wmhtxJCfrXQY8H/our-most-aligned-model-yet

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I'm part of a team of 26 researchers that recently released a 212-page paper proposing a new plan for pausing AI, the "hardwired pause." The paper is called "The Feasibility of a Hardwired Pause of Frontier AI Training." Our analysis suggests that, under this hardwired pause plan, we could probably pause for at least a decade if we start stopping within the next year, and this could likely be extended indefinitely. I expect this to be possible without trusting China or tanking the economy.

Note: I am speaking for myself and not the other 25 authors. The working group is led by Will Fithian and Wesley Holliday, and the work continues.

I currently think:

The best plan is to pause/stop AI, i.e. have an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development. And importantly, this is technically easier than more nuanced international regulation.
A hardwired pause is probably the best plan out there for how to do this (except maybe it doesn't go far enough).
This paper is likely the most in-depth analysis of pause feasibility in existence.
Discussion and disagreement on any of these is very welcome!

What's a hardwired pause?

A hardwired pause basically [...]

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Outline:

(01:31) What's a hardwired pause?

(03:21) Why is this better than Plan A?

(05:06) How is this different from MIRI's Plan S?

[... 3 more sections]

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jT272BNHFzgAR5u2m/hardwired-pause-should-likely-be-your-favorite-pause-plan

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I’m pretty interested in conveying the costs of letting AI development proceed unchecked to the general public. In relation to this, I feel like I run into a lot of disagreements with people around me.

Misc very quickly written points on which my own impression has seemed very different from others in recent months:

1. It's way, way, way more important that we stop dangerous AI soon than that we ensure that we don’t stop AI too much

I have the sense the sophisticated and worldly position here is to be very concerned about ‘over-regulation’ and about not doing exactly the right regulations. But it's an obvious pragmatic fact that the stakes of overregulation are minuscule compared to the stakes of underregulating here. And the stakes of mis-regulation are very often going to be unintended slowing, which is in the same bucket.

2. If we stopped AI development, the risk of not starting up again for an extremely long time is low

This one just feels kind of crazy to me, like I may be missing something. In combination with the above point, it feels like if I met someone who was on fire, and they didn’t want me [...]

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First published:

November 10th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dQJ3ArHMLxqu8rptt/live-disagreements-with-people-around-me

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.