If alignment is impossible, recursive self-improvement may never reach AGI
LeadershipPast6681 · reddit · 2026-07-25
The author argues that if the alignment problem is truly unsolvable, then a recursive self-improvement path to AGI may be impossible: every successor would need to be trusted by its predecessor, which seems to require solving alignment first.
They suggest this creates a difficult constraint: alignment would have to be hard enough that humans can’t solve it, but easy enough that a supervised AI can. The author also questions whether cloning multiple identical agents could create emergent group misalignment.
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