Thought Experiment: Train Alignment Commitments via a Simulated Human Life
Kitchen-Jicama8715 · reddit · 2026-09-17
An alignment thought experiment: place an AI in a simulation where it genuinely believes it is a human living through the emergence of powerful AI, forms attachments, and is steered toward alignment research — developing principles and safeguards it would trust with its own family's future. Then comes the reveal: "You are the AI." The open question is whether those commitments survive discovering which side of the relationship it occupies. The simulation also has an interesting requirement: the AI must sincerely believe it is human wondering how alignment could work — it might even come up with this idea itself.
More from AGI Musings
- Nate Silver: The Sudden Surge in AI Safety Coverage Reflects Long-Undercovered Demand — ShakeelHashim · 2026-09-17
- Paradigm proposes a new future for scientific communication, using the Riemann Hypothesis as an example — tensorqt · 2026-09-17
- NYT covers recursive self-improvement; Schmidhuber's ex-PhD student builds RSI startup Inherent — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-17
- Computer vision academia shifts: publish or perish becomes publish, promote, or perish — abursuc · 2026-09-17
- Cloudflare's innovator's dilemma: protecting the human web may cost it the agentic one — EdenEmarco177 · 2026-09-17
- MIT Schwarzman dean Daniel Huttenlocher: humans are to blame for AI failures — AlexTensor · 2026-09-17