LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Very simple idea, but I thought it'd be worth making a reference post on this. Some people are saying AI will make all goods cheaper, so you'll be able to afford a nice life by working. Without any redistribution, just by market mechanisms. These people are wrong. AI will lower the price of goods you need to survive, and also the price of your labor. The question is which will get cheaper faster. Let's use energy cost as a proxy. A day's worth of labor equivalent to yours can be done by ...

Much of the civilization-scale risk we are seeing in AI in 2026 comes from the following combination: we created a single institution (the "Frontier AI Company") that has two properties: A. It is set up to create very powerful and/or self-replicating entities that may exceed the capabilities of the entirety of the rest of civilization and come with extraordinary risks B. It gets to own an unbounded financial claim on the resulting surplus All the technical stuff about AI, AI alignment,...

All views are my own and do not represent my employer. In the wake of the recent wave of misalignment incidents, both OpenAI and Anthropic have reported slowing down RL training to improve safety. These incidents, combined with an apparent acceleration in the already-blistering pace of AI progress, have led a number of researchers and leaders in the industry to believe that the risk that humanity loses control of AI is now urgent enough to warrant slowing down the pace of AI development so...

Written as part of the MATS 9.1 extension program, mentored by Richard Ngo. Additional thanks to Andrew Wu, Maria Kostylew, and Lennie Wells for helpful draft feedback and editing. This post reflects on the tortured distinction between "safety" and "capabilities" in AI research. Richard Ngo has written about why the alignment vs. capabilities ontology is conceptually fraught, and is currently arguing that key strategic decision-makers in and around "AI safety" have brought about the AI ...

This is a link post. Advanced AI is basically the embodiment of immigration as envisioned in the conservative nightmare: We are letting a bunch of new agents into our societyThey don’t clearly share our values and we suspect a society full of them would be awful by our lightsBut we expect them to provide very cheap laborWhich will undercut local wages and leave locals unemployedThey will probably gain power and influence over time—in the economy, politics and culture—and end up controlling ...