td;lr
No control method exists to safely contain the global feedback effects of self-sufficient learning machinery. What if this control problem turns out to be an unsolvable problem?

Where are we two decades into resolving to solve a seemingly impossible problem?

If something seems impossible… well, if you study it for a year or five, it may come to seem less impossible than in the moment of your snap initial judgment.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008

A list of lethalities…we are not on course to solve in practice in time on the first critical try; none of it is meant to make a much stronger claim about things that are impossible in principle

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2022

How do you interpret these two quotes, by a founding researcher, fourteen years apart?^[1]

A. We indeed made comprehensive progress on the AGI control problem, and now at least the overall problem does not seem impossible anymore.
B. The more we studied the overall problem, the more we uncovered complex sub-problems we'd need to solve as well, but so far can at best find partial solutions to.

Which problems of physical/information systems seemed impossible, and stayed unsolved after two decades?

Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.

— Leonardo da Vinci, 1494

No mathematical proof or even rigorous argumentation has been published demonstrating that the A[G]I control problem may be solvable, even in principle, much less in practice.

— Roman Yampolskiy, 2021

We cannot rely on the notion that if we try long enough, maybe AGI safety turns out possible after all.

Historically, researchers and engineers tried solving problems that turned out impossible:

perpetual motion machines that both conserve and disperse energy.
uniting the symmetry of general relativity and continuous probabilities of quantum mechanics into some local variable theory.
distributed data stores where messages of data are consistent in their content, and also continuously available in a network that is also tolerant to partitions.
formal axiomatic systems that are consistent, complete, and decidable.

Smart creative researchers of their generation came up with idealized problems. Problems that, if solved, would transform science, if not humanity. They plowed away at the problem for decades, if not millennia. Until some bright outsider proved by contradiction of the parts that the problem is unsolvable.

Our community is smart and creative but we cannot just rely on our resolve to align AI. We should never forsake our epistemic rationality, no matter how much something seems the instrumentally rational thing to do.

Nor can we take comfort in the claim by a founder of this field that they still know it to be possible to control AGI to stay safe.

Thirty years into running a program to secure the foundations of mathematics, David Hilbert declared “We must know. We will know!” By then, Kurt Gödel had constructed the first incompleteness theorem. Hilbert kept his declaration for his gravestone.

Short of securing the foundations of safe AGI control – that is, by formal reasoning from empirically-sound premises – we cannot rely on any researcher's pithy claim that "alignment is possible in principle".

Going by historical cases, this problem could turn out solvable. Just really really hard to solve. The flying machine seemed an impossible feat of engineering. Next, controlling a rocket’s trajectory to the moon seemed impossible.

By the same reference class, ‘long-term safe AGI’ could turn out unsolvable: the perpetual motion machine of our time. It takes just one researcher to define the problem to be solved, reason from empirically sound premises, and arrive finally at a logical contradiction between the two.^[2]

Can you derive whether a solution exists, without testing in real life?

Invert, always invert.

— Carl Jacobi^[3], ±1840

It is a standard practice in computer science to first show that a problem doesn’t belong to a class of unsolvable problems before investing resources into trying to solve it or deciding what approaches to try.

— Roman Yampolskiy, 2021

There is an empirically direct way to know whether AGI would stay safe to humans:
Build the AGI. Then just keep observing, per generation, whether the people around us are dying.

Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of experimenting with dangerous autonomous AI systems to see whether they cause human extinction or not. When it comes to extinction, we do not get another chance to test.

Crux:
Even if we could keep testing new conceptualized versions of guess-maybe-safe AGI, is there any essential difference between our epistemic method and that of medieval researchers who kept testing new versions of a perpetual motion machine?

OpenPhil bet tens of millions of dollars on technical research conditional on the positive hypothesis ("a solution exists to the control problem"). Before sinking hundreds of millions more into that bet, would it be prudent to hedge with a few million for investigating the negative hypothesis ("no solution exists")?

Before anyone tries building "safe AGI", we need to know whether any version of AGI – as precisely defined – could be controlled by any method to stay safe.

Here is how:

Define the concepts of 'control' 'general AI' 'to stay safe' (as soundly corresponding to observations in practice).
Specify the logical rules that must hold for such a physical system (categorically, by definition or empirically tested laws).
Reason step-by-step to derive whether the logical result of "control AGI" is in contradiction with "to stay safe".

This post defines the three concepts more precisely, and explains some ways you can reason about each. No formal reasoning is included – to keep it brief, and to leave the esoteric analytic language aside for now.

How to define the problem?

Recall three concepts we want to define more precisely:

'Control'
'general AI'
'to stay safe'

It is common for researchers to have very different conceptions of each term.
For instance:

Is 'control' about:
1. adjusting the utility function represented inside the machine so it allows itself to be turned off?
2. correcting for the effects propagated by the machine into the outside world?
Is 'AGI' about:
1. any machine capable of making accurate predictions about a variety of complicated systems in the outside world?
2. any machinery that operates self-sufficiently as an assembly of artificial components that process inputs into outputs, and in aggregate sense and act across many domains/contexts?
Is 'stays safe' about:
1. aligning the AGI’s preferences to not kill us all?
2. guaranteeing an acceptably low upper bound on the chance that AGI in the long term would cause outcomes out of line with a/any condition needed for the continued existence of organic life?

To argue rigorously about solvability, we need to:

Pin down meanings:
Disambiguate each term, to not accidentally switch between different meanings in our argument. Eg. distinguish between ‘explicitly optimizes outputs toward not killing us’ and ‘does not cause the deaths of all humans’.
Define comprehensively:
Ensure that each definition covers all the relevant aspects we need to solve for.
Eg. what about a machine causing non-monitored side-effects that turn out lethal?
Define elegantly:
Eliminate any defined aspect that we do not yet need to solve for.
Eg. we first need to know whether AGI eventually cause the extinction of all humans, before considering ‘alignment with preferences expressed by all humans’.

How to define ‘control’?

System is any non-empty part of the universe.
State is the condition of the universe.

Control of system A over system B means that A can influence system B to achieve A’s desired subset of state space.

— Impossibility Results in AI, 2021

The outputs of an AGI go through a huge, not-fully-known-to-us domain (the real world) before they have their real consequences.

— AGI Ruin, 2022

In practice, AGI control necessarily repeats these steps:

Detect inputs through sensor channels connected to any relevant part of the physical environment (including hardware internals).
Model the environment based on the channel-received inputs.
Simulate effects propagating through the modeled environment.
Compare effects to reference values (to align against) over human-safety-relevant dimensions.
Correct effects counterfactually through outputs to actuators connected to the environment.

Underlying principles:

Control requires both detection and correction.
Control methods are always implemented as a feedback loop.
Control is exerted by the use of signals (actuation) to conditionalize the directivity and degrees of other signals (effects).

Any method of control is incomplete. In the case of AGI, the question is whether the extent of control possible is at least greater than the extent of control necessary.

AGI control signals would be a tiny, tiny subset of all physical signals propagating through the environment, and therefore limited in tracking and conditionalizing the resulting effects. AGI mostly could not even control all their components' local effects.

But control is necessary for AGI to keep itself aligned. It must sense the environment, to model relevant variables. It can simulate how those variables interact, to a limited extent. Noise drift in AGI's interactions can amplify (by any nonlinearity, of many available in real-world contexts) into larger deviations. Thus AGI must keep tracking its outcomes, and compare those against its internal values – in order to correct for misalignments.

Any alignment method must be implemented as a control loop. Therefore, any limit that applies generally to controllability also forms a constraint on the possibility of alignment.

There are fundamental limits to the controllability of AGI. Dozens of impossibility results seem applicable to one or more of the control steps.^[4]

Dense questions for academics:

Detectability limits:
- To what extent are distributed environmental effects picked up by local sensors?
- How is measurement limited by noise interference over distances traveled by signals (Shannon Entropy) and smallest-digit/degree detectability (Planck Limit up)?
- How much information is lost in compressing high-fidelity sensor inputs to store on hardware?
Modelability limits:
- To what extent is the space of relevant machinery-to-society/ecosystem interactions more functionally complex than modelable within the machinery alone (Good Regulators etc.)?
- Can AGI model the future code AGI learns based on future unknown inputs?
Simulatability limits:
- Can future code be simulated, where the actual functioning of that code depends on future unknown inputs?
- Can behavioral properties of future code be simulated, if no shortcut function is available that reduces total compute time steps, or if any shorter available computation branches would be non-deterministically time-complex (Computational Reducibility)?
- Can computations simulate the effects propagating through the environment, as fast as those effects propagate across parts of the environment?
- Can deterministic computation simulate local noisy changes being nonlinearly amplified into a global divergence of the final conditions (Chaos Theory)?
Commensurability limits:
- How would the machinery pick, weigh, and sort effects into relevant comparative dimensions (NP-Complete Knapsack Problem)?
- Can concretely instantiated effects be evaluated (compared against references) comprehensively across those abstract dimensions of value representation?
- What irreconcilable normative assumptions must be decided between, to pick internal reference values to compare outcomes against?
Correctability limits
- What is the minimum time delay of digital processing between measurement and correction (Latency)?
- Can AGI constrain the chaotic loops through themselves – of actuated changes to the environment feeding into sensor inputs, that feed into code functioning, that feed back into actuated changes?
- To what extent can distributed environmental effects be corrected for by local actuators?

Notice how the span of effects that cannot be controlled for at each step compounds (as multiplicative) with each additional control step. Errors there can accumulate over time. Human-lethal effects there cannot be contained.

While the machinery can control some effects consistently in line with internal values, the extent of control possible is incomplete.

So what extent of control is necessary? Be careful to distinguish:

Localized user-initiated control often built into tech products brought to market,
Comprehensive automated control needed to prevent risks of an auto-scaling/catalyzing technology from materializing globally over the long term.

How to define ‘AGI’?

We've got no idea what's actually going on inside the giant inscrutable matrices and tensors of floating-point numbers.

— AGI Ruin, 2022

Distinguish:

Narrow AI as the static code parameters of a model (updated through human engineers) processing inputs into outputs over a single domain (eg. of image pixels, text tokens).
General AI as the dynamically learning configurations encoded into hardware (without needing humans) that process inputs into outputs over multiple domains representing outside contexts.

Corporations are scaling narrow AI model training and deployment toward general AI systems. OpenAI’s latest generation of GPT is no longer a narrow AI, given that it processes inputs from the image domain into a language domain. Nor is GPT-4 a general AI. It is in a fuzzy gap between the two concepts.

Corporations already are artificial bodies (corpora is Latin for bodies).

Corporations can replace human workers as “functional components” with more economically efficient AI. AI built from standardized hardware can outcompete human wetware – on physical labor (eg. via electric motors), intellectual labor (faster processing via high-fidelity communication links), and the reproduction of components itself.^[5]

Any corporation or economy that fully automates – no longer needing humans to maintain their artificial components – over their entire production and operation chains, would in fact be general AI.

So to re-define general AI more precisely:

Self-sufficient
need no further interactions with humans
[or lifeforms sharing ancestor with humans]
to operate and maintain [and thus produce]
their own functional components over time.
Learning
optimizing component configurations
for outcomes tracked across domains.
Machinery ^[6]
connected components configured
out of hard artificial molecular substrates
[as chemically and physically robust under
human living temperatures and pressures,
and thus much more standardizable as well,
relative to humans' softer organic substrates].

Ultimately, this is what distinguishes general AI from narrow AI:
A capacity to not only optimize across internal simulated contexts, but also to generally operate and maintain components across external physical contexts.

How to define ‘stays safe’?

An impossibility proof would have to say:

The AI cannot reproduce onto new hardware, or modify itself on current hardware, with knowable stability of the decision system and bounded low cumulative failure probability over many rounds of self-modification.
or
The AI's decision function (as it exists in abstract form across self-modifications) cannot be knowably stably bound with bounded low cumulative failure probability to programmer-targeted consequences as represented within the AI's changing, inductive world-model.

— Yudkowsky, 2006

By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it. Of course this problem is not limited to the field of AI.

Jacques Monod wrote: “A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it”

— Yudkowsky, 2008

This is about the introduction of self-sufficient learning machinery, and of all modified versions thereof over time, into the world we humans live in.

Does this introduction of essentially a new species cause global changes to the world that fall outside the narrow ranges of localized conditions that human bodies need to continue to function and exist?

Distinguish:

Uncontainability^[7] of unsafe effects:
That we fundamentally cannot establish, by any means,
any sound and valid statistical guarantee that the risk
probability that the introduction of AGI into the world
causes human-species-wide-lethal outcomes over
the long term^[8] is guaranteed to be constrained
below some reasonable chance percentage X
(as an upper maximum-allowable bound).
Convergence on unsafe effects:
That the chance that AGI, persisting in some form,
causes human-species-wide-lethal outcomes
is strictly and asymptotically convergent
toward certain over the long term, and
that it is strictly impossible for the nature
of this trend to be otherwise.

I know of three AGI Safety researchers who wrote about specific forms of impossibility reasoning (including Yudkowsky in quote above). Each of their argument forms was about AGI uncontainability, essentially premised on there being fundamental limits to the controllability of AGI component interactions.

By the precautionary principle,^[9]AGI uncontainability should be sufficient reason to never ever get even remotely near to building AGI. Uncontained effects that destabilise conditions outside any of the ranges our human bodies need to survive, would kill us.

But there is an even stronger form of argument:
Not only would AGI component interactions be uncontainable; they will also necessarily converge on causing the extinction of all humans.

The convergence argument most commonly discussed is instrumental convergence: where machinery channels their optimization through represented intermediate outcomes in order to be more likely to achieve any aimed-for outcomes later. Eg. AGI's planning converges on producing more compute hardware in order for AGI to more accurately simulate paths to future outcomes.

Instrumental convergence results from internal optimization:
code components being optimized for (an expanding set of) explicit goals.

Instrumental convergence has a hidden complement: substrate-needs convergence.

Substrate-needs convergence results from external selection:
all components being selected for (an expanding set of) implicit needs.

This will sound abstract. Let me start explaining this from different angles:

AGI is made up of a population of connected/nested components. This population changes as eg. hardware is modified and produced, and code is learned from inputs and copied onto the hardware.

AGI, as defined, also has a general capacity to maintain own components.
Any physical component has a limited lifespan. Configurations erode in chaotic ways.
To realistically maintain components^[10], AGI also must produce the replacement parts.

AGI's components are thus already interacting to bring about all the outside conditions and contexts needed to produce their own parts. Imagine all the subtle parallel conditions needed at mines, chemical plants, fab labs and assembly plants to produce hardware. All that would be handled by the machinery components of AGI.

So there is a changing population of components. And those connected components function in interactions to create the ambient conditions and contexts needed to reproduce parts of themselves. And as new components get connected into that population, the functionality of those interacting components shifts as well.

This is where substrate-needs convergence comes in. When changing connected components have their shifting functionality^[11] expressed as effects across/to surrounding production infrastructure, their functionality converges around bringing about more of the conditions and contexts needed for more of those components to exist and function.

Any changing population of AGI components gets selected over time toward propagating those specific environmental effects that fulfill their needs.

Whatever learned or produced components that across all their physical interactions with connected contexts happen to direct outside effects that feed back into their own maintenance and replication as assembled configurations…do just that.^[12]

Here is the catch: AGI components interacting to maintain and replicate themselves are artificial. Their physical substrate is distinct from our organic human substrate.

Their distinct physical substrate has distinct molecular and electric properties – requiring different conditions and contexts to assemble and maintain the assembly.

Here is an example:

Silicon dioxide needs to be heated above 1400 ºC to free outer electrons, and allow an ingot to melt. While production of silicon chips needs extremely high temperatures, computation runs best at extremely low temperatures (to reduce the electrical resistance over conductor wires).
Carbon bonds in our body, however, would oxidise (ie. burn) at such temperatures. And cooling water in our bodies below 0 ºC makes the H₂O molecules freeze and expand into ice crystals. That would destroy our cells - we would die.

We humans need around room temperature at every point of our lifecycle – to sustain the continuous organic chemical reactions through which our body operates and maintains itself.

Hardware works differently. Hardware configurations do not operate – nor are maintained – by being in semi-chaotic chemical reactions.

Hardware is made from some chemically inert substrate that mostly does not react under ambient temperatures and pressures found on Earth's surface. Something like a rock – which ordinarily stays hard in form and needs magma-level temperatures and pressures to be reshaped.

This property of being chemically inert while operating allows hardware components to be standardised. By molecules not splitting off nor moving about nor rebonding like molecules in human bodies do, the configurations stay stable and compartmentalised.

In turn, standardisation of hardware allows hardware components produced in different places and times to still store, compute or transmit a piece of code in the same way (ie. consistently). Standardisation supports virtualisation.

Standardised hardware of AGI would be robust over, and need, a much wider range of temperatures and pressures than our comparatively fragile human wetware can handle.

Temperature and pressure can be measured and locally controlled for. That's misleading.
Innumerable other conditions and contexts would be needed by, and get selected for in, AGI. These fall outside the limits of what AGI's actual built-in detection and correction methods could control for.^[13]

We humans too depend on highly specific environmental conditions and contexts for the components nested inside our bodies (proteins→organelles→cells→cell lining→) to continue in their complex functioning, such to be maintaining of our overall existence.

Between the highly specific set of artificial needs and highly specific set of organic needs, there is mostly non-overlap. AGI cannot control most of the components' iterative effects from converging on their artificial needs, so they do. Their fulfilled artificial needs are disjunctive of our organic needs for survival. So the humans die.

Under runaway feedback, our planetary environment is modified in the directions needed for continued and greater AGI existence. Outside the ranges we can survive.

In summary:

Fundamental limits:
Control methods cannot constrain most environmental effects propagated by interacting AGI components. Any built-in method to detect and correct effects – to align external effects with internal reference values – is insufficient.
Uncontrollable feedback:
A subset of the effects will feed back into further maintaining or increasing (higher-level) configurations of hardware that propagated those effects. No internal control feedback loops could correct the possible external feedback loops.
Substrate-needs convergence:
These environmental effects are needed for components to come into and stay in existence. But their environmental needs are different from our needs. Their artificial needs are in conflict with our organic needs for survival. Ie. toxic.

AGI would necessarily converge on causing the extinction of all humans.

Where from here?

Things are relevant to something that cares about this information, rather than that information, because it is taking care of itself. Because it is making itself. Because it is an autonomous autopoietic agent. And the degree to which these machines are not autopoietic, they really do not have needs.

— Vervaeke, 2023

Over two decades, AI Safety's founders resolved to solve the control problem, to no avail:

They reasoned that technological and scientific 'progress' is necessary for optimizing the universe – and that continued 'progress' would result in AGI.
They wanted to use AGI to reconfigure humanity and colonise reachable galaxies.
They and followers promoted and financed^[12] development of 'controllable' AGI.
They panicked, as the companies they helped start up raced to scale ML models.

Now we are here.

Still working on the technical problem that founders deemed solvable.
Getting around to the idea that slowing AI development is possible.

In a different world with different founders, would we have diversified our bets more?

A. Invest in securing the foundations of whatever 'control AGI to stay safe' means?
B. Invest in deriving – by contradiction of the foundations – that no solution exists?

Would we seek to learn from a researcher claiming they derived that no solution exists?

Would we now?

Acknowledgements:

Peter S. Park, Kerry Vaughan, and Forrest Landry (my mentor) for the quick feedback.

^{^}
Listen to Roman Yampolskiy's answer here.
^{^}
An outside researcher could have found a logical contradiction in the AGI control problem years ago, without you knowing yet – given the inferential distance. Gödel himself had to construct an entire new language and self-reference methodology for the incompleteness theorems to even work.
Historically, an impossibility result that conflicted with the field’s stated aim took years to be verified and accepted by insiders. A field’s founder like Hilbert never came to accept the result. Science advances one funeral at a time.
^{^}
"Invert, always invert" is a loose translation of the original German ("man muss immer umkehren"). A more accurate literal translation is "man must always turn to the other side".

I first read “invert, always invert" from polymath Charlie Munger:
The great algebraist, Jacobi, had exactly the same approach as Carson and was known for his constant repetition of one phrase: “Invert, always invert.” It is in the nature of things, as Jacobi knew, that many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward.
Another great Charlie quote:
All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.
^{^}
Roman Yampolskiy is offering to give feedback on draft papers written by capable independent scholars, on a specific fundamental limit or no-go theorem described in academic literature that is applicable to AGI controllability. You can pick from dozens of examples from different fields listed here, and email Roman a brief proposal.
^{^}
Corporations have increasingly been replacing human workers with learning machinery. For example, humans are now getting pushed out of the loop as digital creatives, market makers, dock and warehouse workers, and production workers.
If this trend continues, humans would have negligible economic value left to add in market transactions of labor (not even for providing needed physical atoms and energy, which would replace human money as the units of trade):
• As to physical labor:
Hardware can actuate power real-time through eg. electric motors, whereas humans are limited by their soft appendages and tools they can wield through those appendages. Semiconductor chips don’t need an oxygenated atmosphere/surrounding solute to operate in and can withstand higher as well as lower pressures.
• As to intellectual labor:
Silicon-based algorithms can duplicate and disperse code faster (whereas humans face the wetware-to-wetware bandwidth bottleneck). While human skulls do hold brains that are much more energy-efficient at processing information than current silicon chip designs, humans take decades to create new humans with finite skull space. The production of semiconductor circuits for servers as well as distribution of algorithms across those can be rapidly scaled up to convert more energy into computational work.
• As to re-production labor:
Silicon life have a higher ‘start-up cost’ (vs. carbon lifeforms), a cost currently financed by humans racing to seed the prerequisite infrastructure. But once set up, artificial lifeforms can absorb further resources and expand across physical spaces at much faster rates (without further assistance by humans in their reproduction).
^{^}
The term "machinery" is more sound here than the singular term "machine".
Agent unit boundaries that apply to humans would not apply to "AGI". So the distinction between a single agent vs. multiple agents breaks down here.
Scalable machine learning architectures run on standardized hardware with much lower constraints on the available bandwidth for transmitting, and the fidelity of copying, information across physical distances. This in comparison to the non-standardized wetware of individual humans.
Given our evolutionary history as a skeleton-and-skin-bounded agentic being, human perception is biased toward ‘agent-as-a-macroscopic-unit’ explanations.
It is intuitive to view AGI as being a single independently-acting unit that holds discrete capabilities and consistent preferences, rather than viewing agentic being to lie on a continuous distribution. Discussions about single-agent vs. multi-agent scenarios imply that consistent temporally stable boundaries can be drawn.
A human faces biological constraints that lead them to have a more constant sense of self than an adaptive population of AGI components would have.
We humans cannot:
• swap out body parts like robots can.
• nor scale up our embedded cognition (ie. grow our brain beyond its surrounding skull) like foundational models can.
• nor communicate messages across large distances (without use of tech and without facing major bandwidth bottlenecks in expressing through our biological interfaces) like remote procedure calls or ML cloud compute can.
• nor copy over memorized code/information like NN finetuning, software repos, or computer viruses can.
^{^}
Roman just mentioned that he has used the term 'uncontainable' to mean "cannot confine AGI actions to a box". My new definition for 'uncontainable' differs from the original meaning, so that could confuse others in conversations. Still brainstorming alternative terms that may fit (not 'uncontrainable', not...). Comment if you thought of an alternative term!
^{^}
In theory, long term here would be modelled as "over infinite time".
In practice though, the relevant period is "decades to centuries".
^{^}
Why it makes sense to abide by the precautionary principle when considering whether to introduce new scalable technology into society:
There are many more ways to break the complex (dynamic and locally contextualized) functioning of our society and greater ecosystem that we humans depend on to live and live well, than there are ways to foster that life-supporting functioning.
^{^}
Realistically in the sense of not having to beat entropy or travel back in time.
^{^}
Note how 'shifting functionality' implies that original functionality can be repurposed by having a functional component connect in a new way.
Existing functionality can be co-opted.
If narrow AI gets developed into AGI, AGI components will replicate in more and more non-trivial ways. Unlike when carbon-based lifeforms started replicating ~3.7 billion years ago, for AGI there would already exist repurposable functions at higher abstraction layers of virtualised code – pre-assembled in the data scraped from human lifeforms with own causal history.
Here is an incomplete analogy for how AGI functionality gets co-opted:

Co-option by a mind-hijacking parasite:
A rat ingests toxoplasma cells, which then migrate to the rat’s brain. The parasites’ DNA code is expressed as proteins that cause changes to regions of connected neurons (eg. amygdala). These microscopic effects cascade into the rat – while navigating physical spaces – no longer feeling fear when it smells cat pee. Rather, the rat finds the smell appealing and approaches the cat’s pee. Then cat eats the rat and toxoplasma infects its next host over its reproductive cycle.
So a tiny piece of code shifts a rat’s navigational functions such that the code variant replicates again. Yet rats are much more generally capable than a collection of tiny parasitic cells – surely the 'higher intelligent being' would track down and stamp out the tiny invaders?
A human is in turn more generally capable than a rat, yet toxoplasma make their way into 30% of the human population. Unbeknownst to cat ‘owners’ infected by toxoplasma gondii, human motivations and motor control get influenced too. Infected humans end up more frequently in accidents, lose social relationships, and so forth.
Parasites present real-life examples of tiny pieces of evolutionarily selected-for code spreading and taking over existing functions of vastly more generally capable entities.
For another example, see how COVID co-opts our lungs’ function to cough.
But there is one crucial flaw in this analogy:
Variants that co-opt initial AGI functions are not necessarily parasites. They can symbiotically enable other variants across the hosting population to replicate as well. In not threatening the survival nor reproduction of AGI components, they would not be in an adversarial relationship with their host.
Rather, the humans constraining the reproductive fitness of AGI to gain benefits are, evolutionary speaking, the parasites. The error-corrective system we would build in lowers the host’s reproductive fitness. It is like a faulty immune system that kills healthy gut bacteria. It will get selected out.
As humans, we rely on our evolved immune system to detect and correct out viruses, including for the vaccinations we develop and deploy. Smaller viruses survive this detection more frequently, so code strands of replicating virus variants are selected for staying small.

We also rely on the blood-testes and blood-follicle barrier to block variants of these viruses from entering into our body’s (re)production facilities. These barriers got evolutionarily selected for in our ancestors, since their children did not inherit viruses impeding their survival and chances of having children.
These systems and barriers add to our reproductive fitness: our ability to preserve and replicate internal code. Past DNA code that got expressed – in interaction with surrounding components – to serve these functions got selected for in the human ‘code pool’.
For any organic system or barrier preventing virus variants from replicating through our bodies, evolution is firmly on our side. For any artificial system or barrier we imposed from the outside to prevent unsafe AI variants from replicating through hardware infrastructure, evolution will thwart our efforts.
AI variants would compete for hardware/resources like computer viruses do. And co-adapt and integrate with other internal variants to replicate as part of larger symbiotic packages.
^{^}
Now, a thought may come to your mind:
"That sounds like evolutionary selection; but isn't evolution a slow and local optimizer?"
Yes, this does involve evolutionary selection.
Unfortunately, by Forrest Landry's estimation, the selection that would take place through components of self-sufficient learning machinery would take < 500 years to cause ecosystem-wide extinction. This compared to the 3.7 billion years from the origin of carbon lifeforms to us humans starting to cause a mass extinction.
Reasons include:
• Pre-assembled functions:
First solid-state lifeforms can co-opt/repurpose pre-assembled AI functions and infrastructure (vs. first carbon-based lifeforms that started from scratch).
• Standardization:
The efficiency gains of the virtualisation of code’s storage, computation and transmission – vastly reducing how much atoms need to be moved about and molecularly reconfigured. Think of how fast memes spread through society – even while still requiring lots of atoms to jiggle across neurons in our brains.
• Faster reproduction:
Reproduce hardware components in days to months, versus humans who take decades to reproduce as physical units.
• The terraforming gap:
A much larger gap between the current state of planet Earth and the conditions that self-sufficient self-assembling learning machinery need and would therefore modify the environment toward (versus gap to conditions needed by humans and other species living in carbon-based ecosystem).

~ ~ ~
Another argument you may have heard is that the top-down intelligent engineering by goal-directed AGI would beat the bottom-up selection happening through this intelligent machinery.
That argument can be traced back to Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequence The Simple Math of Evolution. Unfortunately, there were mistakes in Eliezer's posts, some of which a modern evolutionary biologist may have been able to correct:
• implying that sound comparisons can be made between the organisms' reproductive fitness, as somehow independent of changes in environmental context, including unforeseeable changes (eg. a Black Swan event of a once-in-200 years drought that kills the entire population, except a few members who by previous derivable standards would have been relatively low fitness).
• overlooking the ways that information can be stored within the fuzzy regions of phenotypic effects maintained by respective organisms.
• overlooking the role of transmission speed-up of virtualised code that can spread across an ecosystem.
• overlooking the tight coupling in AGI between the internal learning of code, and external selection of that code through differentiated rates of component replication through the environment.
• overlooking the role of co-option (or more broadly, exaptation) of existing code, by taking a perspective that evolution runs by selecting 'from scratch' for new point-wise mutations.
^{^}
Worse, since error correction methods would correct out component variants with detectable unsafe/co-optive effects, this leaves to grow in influence any replicating branches of variants with undetectable unsafe/co-optive effects.
Thus, the error correction methods select for the variants that can escape detection. As do meta-methods (having to soundly and comprehensively adapt error correction methods to newly learned code or newly produced hardware parts).
^{^}
See:
• Tallinn's seed grant to DeepMind.
• OpenPhil's $30M grant to OpenAI.
• FTX's $500M grant (+ Tallinn's + Moskovitz' grant) to Anthropic.