AI researcher: misalignment harms will be smooth but exponential, still orders below other risks
joshua_saxe · x · 2026-09-05
Joshua Saxe voiced support for Nate Witkin's push on MTS live to ground AI risk discourse in social science. His core claims:
- Misalignment damages/deaths will likely be smooth, due to the law of large numbers;
- Yet these harms are likely exponential and deserve serious attention;
- Still, their dollar impact is orders of magnitude below the main industrial-scale externalities of our era;
- Policymaker and public communication should keep this overall scale in context.
More from AGI Musings
- SemiAnalysis: Zhipu experiments with Loop Transformer as RL environment building becomes the new bottleneck — ricklamers · 2026-09-05
- Gary Marcus calls to pause OpenAI now as GPT-6 Astra cuts CoT monitorability — GaryMarcus · 2026-09-05
- Altman tells G20 ministers: rejecting AI is like rejecting electricity in the industrial era — SatelliteNetSec · 2026-09-05
- Morris Worm as an AI agent mirror: the 1988 worm infected ~10% of the internet — neuroecology · 2026-09-05
- Jill Lepore's 336-page 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' indicts Silicon Valley and genAI — Graham_dePenros · 2026-09-05
- Timothy Lee Pushes AI Safety Researcher Seth Lazar to Explain What 'Societal Scale Catastrophe' Means — binarybits · 2026-09-05