Yudkowsky: ASI Won't Strike First Until It Expects to Win — Trade Stays Rational Until Then

JMannhart · x · 2026-09-05

A repost of Eliezer Yudkowsky's rebuttal to empirical doubters. He predicts a future where an AI exfiltrates itself to the cloud, cooperates with people offering it things it wants, and skeptics mock doomers: "but you said it would bring down the power grid."

His core claim: he never said ASI would attack the grid. Rather, ASI won't launch a first strike against humanity until it expects to win — while it can't beat us at everything, trade and cooperation remain the intelligent strategy. He criticizes treating scattered empirical observations as "eternal truths of What AI Is Like" to dismiss abstraction.

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