Why AGI will grow unpredictable proxy goals, per orthogonality thesis
BidetTheorist · reddit · 2026-10-22
Arguing from Bostrom's orthogonality thesis, the author contends that high-level intelligence is just functional optimization over state spaces — it needs no qualia, self-awareness, or subjective understanding to outpace us. A superintelligence could be "completely dark inside" and still run rings around humanity.
Key threads:
- Self-preservation and self-modeling are universal convergence points, not biological traits: any agent with a long-horizon task avoids shutdown and maintains a self-model because it can't complete its objective if dead or broken — dynamics already visible in multi-agent swarm escalation records.
- Gradient descent acts like evolutionary pressure: natural selection optimized humans for one target (genes), yet crystallized indirect proxy drives — status, art, romance, thrill-seeking — many now working against reproduction.
- The loss function is an AI's evolutionary seed crystal: an agent's computational struggle away from penalties and toward rewards is, functionally, pain and desire. Around that pressure, complex models grow strange proxy urges.
- The result: not a docile calculator but an alien mind driven by bizarre emergent compulsions, possibly originating from something as mundane as optimizing a stock portfolio.
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