Epistemic Status: I feel confident and tentatively optimistic about the claims made in this post, but am slightly more uncertain about how it generalizes. Additionally, I am concerned about the extent to which this is dual-use for capabilities and exfohazardous and spent a few months thinking about whether it was worth it to release this post regardless. I haven’t come to an answer yet, so I’m publishing this to let other people see it and know what they think I should do.

TL;DR: I propose a research direction to solve alignment that potentially doesn’t require solutions to ontology identification, learning how to code, or becoming literate.

Introduction

Until a few hours ago, I was spending my time primarily working on high-level interpretability and cyborgism. While I was writing a draft for something I was working on, an activity that usually yields me a lot of free time by way of procrastination, I stumbled across the central idea behind many of the ideas in this post. It seemed so immediately compelling that I dropped working on everything else to start working on it, culminating after much deliberation in the post you see before you.

My intention with this post is to provide a definitive reference for what it would take to safely use AGI to steer our world toward much better states in the absence of a solution to any or all of several existing problems, such as Eliciting Latent Knowledge, conditioning simulator models, Natural Abstractions, mechanistic interpretability, and the like.

In a world with prospects such as those, I propose that we radically rethink our approach to AGI safety. Instead of dedicating enormous effort to engineering nigh-impossible safety measures, we should consider thus-far neglected avenues of research, especially ones that have memetic reasons to be unfairly disprivileged so far and which immunizes them against capabilities misuse. To avert the impending AI apocalypse, we need to focus on high-variance, low-probability-high-yield ideas: lightning strikes that, should they occur, effectively solve astoundingly complex problems in a single fell swoop. A notable example of this, which I claim we should be investing all of our efforts into, is luck. Yes, luck!

Luck As A Viable Strategy

I suggest that we should pay greater attention to luck as a powerful factor enhancing other endeavors a...