Yudkowsky as the Marx of our generation: an 'AI safety welfare state' thought experiment
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-10-08
A thread taking the Yudkowsky/Marx comparison seriously, listing possible parallels: revisionist prosaic alignment, and the {welfare state / RSP & evals project} as a response to the {Marxist / Yuddite} critique.
It pushes further to imagine an 'AI safety welfare state' — a heavily perma-paced compromise future where Yud Thought was internalized by the powers just enough to avert RSI/runaway technological improvement. Society is more or less functional, humans supported by AIs, with hillclimbed forensic interpretability but still no general science of minds, so an AI's intentions can never be 'provably known' a priori.
That setup yields a Western Yuddite fear that society will collapse over {the inherent contradictions of capitalism → the coming mesaoptimizer's instrumental goal conflict and sharp left turn}.
Context: Scott Aaronson is teaching a course on Yudkowsky Thought (formally, AI Alignment Theory) at UT Austin in 2026, with AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities as the first assigned reading.
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