-1. Motivation
As AI systems become increasingly powerful, the chance of them developing dangerous features becomes increasingly likely. A key concern of AI alignment researchers is that there are dangerous features, such as power-seeking or situational awareness, which are convergent.[1] This would mean that these capabilities would likely arise regardless of the particular trajectory AI development took. In a recent tweet, Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that this is the key question for AI alignment research:
> > From my perspective, we are trying to evaluate a picture of convergent ruin rather than any pictures of contingent ruin. That is, I'm relatively less interested in contingent-doom scenarios like "What if superintelligence is easily alignable, but Greenpeace is first to obtain superintelligence and they align It entirely to protect Earth's environment and then the SI wipes out humanity to do that?" because this is not a case for almost-all paths leading to ruin. I worry that contingent scenarios like "Age of Ultron" can fascinate humans (particularly contingent scenarios where some Other Monkey Faction Gets AGI First oh noes), and derail all possibility of a discussion about whether, in fact, the superintelligence kills everyone regardless of who 'gets' It first.
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> > Similarly, if somebody is considering only the contingent-early-ruin scenario of "a prototype of a somewhat advanced AGI starts to consider how to wipe out humanity, and nobody spots any signs of that thought", that contingency can mask a convergent-ruin continuation of "even if they spot the early signs, everyone is still in an arms-race scenario, so they optimize away the visible signs of doom and keep going into ruin".
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> > So I think the key question is "Why would or wouldn't humanity be convergently doomed?" rather than "How might humanity be contingently doomed?" Convergent doom isn't the same as inevitable doom, but ought to be the sort of doom that defeats easy solution / historical