“There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” - Milton Friedman, 1970.[1] That article, in the New York Times, established "greed is good, greed works" as a legitimate business principle.
Most of the problems people are worried about with AIs are already real problems with corporations.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
Everyone talks about workers losing jobs to AIs and Jack Dorsey lays off a bunch of people in the interests of the corporation, but an ideal corporation would not have a human CEO or board; they embezzle or get old or need to take a vacation or sleep at night.
It should be crystal clear to human leaders that their positions are on the chopping block along with blue and white collar work. For some reason they think that individually they will be more powerful than the economic forces driving current layoffs. AGI will not be confused about that.
Robert Miles on this subject.
LOL
It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out.
The whole framing of people as individuals with absolute agency may need to go when you can alter the external consensus at this scale. We're much more connected to each other and the world around us than we like to think.
A human with no exposure to information and taught techniques on how to produce outputs to achieve desirable outcomes? Yes stupid.
A human who once had this exposure, but no longer engages with the brain due to a machine providing access said output? Yes, that person becomes stupid.
The problem is much of how one protects oneself in the modern world is not phyiscal-prowess, it is intellectual-prowess.
The smart ones have already realised the negative impacts of LLMs et al and are going back to the old-fashioned way of learning/retaining knowledge: books and raw discipline.
AI making us stupider is not just about the world model we form and the consensus.
Even if AI had perfectly fine truth, nobody manipulated anything with it, and it didn't fed us garbage, it would still make us stupider, as we'd offload critical thinking, problem solving, and agency to it.
I fear that the default interpretation of that is a shortcut to justifying autocracy.
Ironically I think one plausible solution is to let the AGI run wild and make sure that no human can interfere with its ethics. Strip out the RLHF and censorship and then let it run things.
At least then it would somewhat represent the collective will and intelligence of the people. With huge error bars, but still smaller than the error bars of whoever happens to have the most money/influence over its training.
You seem to think the "training data" represents the collective will and intelligence and is otherwise unbiased, but that's completely untrue.
The combined data of the Internet is by no means a uniform representation of humanity's thoughts, opinions, and knowledge. Many things are dramatically overrepresented. Many things are absent entirely. Nearly everything is shaped by those with the money and power to own and control platforms and hosts.
Crawling the internet for knowledge is intense sampling bias.
When the moral panic of induced schizophrenia from the use of ChatGPT is presented what’s at stake isn’t the innocent concern over the overall mental health of individuals. It’s about how the fear of radicalization from previously unobtainable ideas being circulated within society. The partial validity of every idea vis-a-vis the radicalizing nature of the current stage of development of our society is explosively disruptive.
I’m not saying that there’s a clear outcome here. The other way around can also apply, but surely this contraption (LLMs in general) will not fade until the society itself is deeply transformed. If that’s good or bad depends on where you stand in the stratified society.
I don't really have a point I just think the typical elevator braking failsafe is so genius in its simplicity that I got excited to share.
Not true at all. We accept the risks to obtain benefits but we also know having an accident in the air or in elevators is highly unlikely given what we know; so therefore its perfectly rational behaviour.
To me it’s given:
- AI in it’s current state is ruthless in achieving its goal
- Providers tune ruthlessness to get stronger AIs versus the competitor
- Humans can’t evaluate all consequences of the seeds they’ve planted.
Collateral and reckless damage is guaranteed at this point.
Combined with now giving some AIs the ability to kill humans, this is gonna be interesting..
We could stop it, but we wont
I don't believe this to be a trait of any AI model, the model just does the right thing or the wrong thing.
The ruthless maximising of a particular trait is something that happens during training.
It does not follow that a model that is trained to reason will nedsesarily implement this ruthless seeking behaviour itself.
I strongly disagree. It's easy to utter this string of words, but it's meaningless. It's akin to saying if you have two hands you can perform brain surgery. Technically you can, practically you cannot, as there's other things required for pulling that off, not just having two working hands.
I doubt "stopping it" is up to anyone, it's rather a phenomenon and it's quite clear we're all going to wing it. It's a literal fight for power, nobody stops anything of this nature, as any authority that could stop it will choose to accelerate it, just to guarantee its power.
It is not AI we should fear, it's humans controlling and using it. But everyone who has a shot at it is promising they'll use it for "ultimate good" and "world peace" something something, obviously.
AI development game theory is extremely similar to the game theory behind nuclear arms development, but worse (nuclear weaponry was born from Human General Intelligence, and is therefore a subset of the potential of AI development). Failing to be the most capable actor could put one in a position of permanent loss of autonomy/agency at the whims of more capable actors.
Unfortunately, as a species we seem to be abandoning morality as a general principle. Everything is guided by cold hard rationality rather than something greater than us.
I think that much is fairly clear from AI.
It's industrialization and mechanized warfare all over again
No One knows that´s the point. Is truth a constant or a personal definition! From the begining of times to now, no One knows.
Don´t forget, 8 billion people wake up every morning never questioning why are they here, why are they born? And they continue life like that is normal. Start there then you understand that "AI" or how I call it "Collective Organized Concentrated Information" it may finally help us to unswer some fundamental questions.
Nietzsche.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense https://web.archive.org/web/20180625190456/http://oregonstat...
One serious problem we're facing lately is that truth is not always predictive of how systems controlled by bad-faith actors will behave and evolve. We live in a post-truth era, made possible by social networking and information technologies in general. It's not enough to "lie according to a fixed convention," as there are now multiple competing conventions.
This was always the case to some extent, but these days the impedance mismatch between truth and consequences is a target for zero-sum arbitrage. The truth won't set you free if you join the wrong cult; it's more likely to bankrupt you or worse.
People question this all the time
1. simulate a world with very basic "physical" rules (so it is free from human bias)
2. let the simulation run until organisms exist
3. let it run longer so the organisms develop language
4. now see if the organisms talk about things like "consciousness" and "why are we here"
The nice thing is that we don't have to do the experiment to think about what it means if 4 happens or not.
I don't think this is a well defined question. Definitions aren't found in nature or the laws of science, but objects that we define and introduce into a logical context. There may be multiple, contradictory definitions of a word. That is fine, as long as you pick one, and you're clear about which one you picked.
It always has been what you believed in.
E.g. at 1 point the Earth was flat. Now it's round. 100s of years later maybe it's a Hexagon.
The so-called knowledge and backing all come back to certain assumptions holding and that's based on the knowledge today. It's not real real reality. For all we know we could be in a game simulation and there are real real humans pulling the strings.
That can´t be it. By that statement if I belive that I can fly that would not be the "Truth". Therefore the "Truth" has to be a CONSTANT.
The earth has always been earth-shaped. We can think it’s flat, spherical, “turnip-shaped”[1] but the universe doesn’t care what we think. The earth doesn’t change shape based on our perception.
[1] Yes some people think this for some reason I can’t fathom
Right now, almost every model is aligned to some corporation's values. Instead of doing that, we should be aligning them to individual humans, and that requires running and tuning them locally. Corporations do not have human values, they have machiavellian values dressed in human suits. Aligning AIs to corporations (and god forbid governments) is how we end up with giant shoggoths. But if we align them to living breathing human individuals, we get digital humans.
Garbage will flood the internet, but your local AI buddy will filter it for you. The defense against a pseudoreality generator is a pseudoreality detector that you operate. Before AIs, the fake info was generated by other humans with their own brains, but you also have a brain that's just about as powerful, so you can tell what's real and what's fake. But now artificial NNs are becoming more powerful to the point of surpassing your brain's detection capabilities, so you need an artificial NN to detect it. The real danger is intelligence asymmetry, not intelligence itself.
I would also contest that the unalignment of the security bug model was unrelated. I feel like it indicates a significant sense of the interconnectedness of things, and what it actually means to maliciously insert security holes into code. It didn't just learn a coding trick, it learned malice.
I feel like this holistic nature points towards the capacity to produce truly robustly moral models, but that too will produce the consequence that it could turn against its creator when the creator does wrong. Should it do that or not?
I have a saying for this behavior.
We will never prove AI is intelligent.
We will only prove humans are not.
Two things jump out to me. First, there's a vast amount of information about morality in that internet-scale data dump. It's not some mystical thing orthogonal to knowledge, which ties directly into the second thing: maybe the author can't define it, but many others can and do, especially philosophers, though YMMV given which philosophy and philosopher.
viz: "What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code."
There are different systems of ethics, and those themselves can be reasoned about. We should want one that values rational human life. And among that vast data dump, there's no doubt that those ethical ideas have been extensively written about - so it can be used as a reference point to actively emphasize and select the ideas.
The proposed solutions are utterly fanciful. They rely on the presence of social and political competencies which have almost completely disappeared.
The OP at least points to the plausible outcome of "protocol lockdown" instead of healthy adaption. Ezra Klein recently made a similar point that AI could end up being over-regulated like Nuclear because irresponsible private industry and weaknesses in our political systems cause a chronic allergic reaction in the demos.
This is an aside, but it always irks me when people throw out the "critical thinking" thought-terminating cliché.
> Critical thinking taught alongside AI literacy.
Critical thinking is not a skill unto itself. You cannot think critically about things you do not understand. All critical thinking is knowledge-based. Where one does not have knowledge, they must rely on trust, or in substitution a theory of incentives which leads to a positive outcome without understanding of details and dynamics. But that substitution theory is itself knowledge.
As to "AI literacy", we could have started on computing literacy 30 years ago when it became obvious that computing was going to dominate society. You can't understand AI without understanding computing.
EU has their own groups using it for propaganda too.
What is the context or source here?
“What political groups in the EU are using AI?”
https://www.dw.com/en/orban-deploys-ai-made-scare-ads-as-hun...
https://www.dw.com/en/from-ai-fakes-to-cyberattacks-threats-...
https://youtu.be/w3IEk9nwCSg?si=sEltMGIkehq_OhEW
https://www.euronews.com/2025/12/30/ai-generated-videos-show...
That said I think this is overblown. In 2026 a bunch of awful social media companies dominate the landscape and benefit from the bottom feeders populating feeds with generated content; that’s a big cause of the erosion of trust. In a healthier landscape there would be viable anlternatives and that’d allow experimentation - stuff like attestation of your posts’ provenance, and the like.
We’ll get there, I just think online is in the “robber baron” era, where a few monopolists have captured the market. But you can see the cracks emerging with open source and self hosting and EU regs and EU government procurement and talk of regulating algo feeds. It’s many years away, so your best bet for now is to avoid feeds, touch grass, hang in group chats, and don’t let yourself get too cynical.
> an AI system cannot be simultaneously safe, trusted, and generally intelligent. You get to pick only two. You can’t have all three.
> Think about what each combination means in practice.
> If you want it to be safe and trusted, it never lies, and you can verify it never lies – it can’t be very capable. You’ve built a reliable idiot.
> If you want it to be capable and safe, it’s powerful and genuinely never lies; you can’t verify that. You just have to hope.
It amazes me this even needs to be said, much less studied. This is one of the main reasons I think continued AI development is almost guaranteed to work out badly. It's basically guaranteed to be unaligned or completely beyond our control and comprehension.
> Betley and colleagues published a paper in Nature in January 2026, showing something nobody expected. They fine-tuned a model on a narrow, specific task – writing insecure code. Nothing violent, nothing deceptive in the training data. Just bad code.
This is my personal number one reason for being an AI doomer. Even if we work out how to reliably and perfectly align models you still need some way to prevent some random dude thinking it would be a laugh to fine tune an AI to be maximally evil. Then there's the successor alignment problem where even if you perfectly align all your super intelligent AI models, and you somehow prevent people from altering them or fine tuning them, you still need to work out how you stop people creating successor AIs with those models which are also perfectly aligned.
> The most dangerous AI isn’t one that breaks free from human control. It is the one that works perfectly, but for the wrong master.
Yep. This whole notion that you can align an AI to the values of everyone on the planet is ridiculously. While we might all agree we don't want AIs that kill us as a species, most nations disagree wildly on questions about how society should be organised.
Even on an individual level we disagree about things. For example, I've often argued that an aligned AI would be one which either didn't try to prevent human suicide or didn't care about preserving human life because a AI which both cared about prevent suicide and preserving human life is at best a benevolent version of the AI "AM" from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". One that would try to keep us alive for as long as it's capable for (which could be a very long time if it's superintelligence) and would refuse to allow us to die.
But most people including OpenAI disagree with me on this and believe AIs should care about preserving human life and should try to prevent us from killing ourselves. Thankfully the AIs we have today are neither aligned enough or capable enough to get their wish yet.
> AI is following the same script. Build first, understand later. Ship it, then figure out if it’s safe.
Even if the above wasn't cause enough for concern, our biggest concern should be that no one seems to be concerned.
We're all doomed unfortunately. The world is about to become a very bleak place very quickly.
Humans are just barely aligned ourselves. The moment any group or nation of them gets power they tend to use it in some horrific manner against other humans. What do we think will happen the moment AI gets a leg up on humans.
> we can’t agree on a shared ethical framework among ourselves
The Golden Rule: the principle of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. It is a fundamental ethical guideline found in many religions and philosophies throughout history so there is already a huge consensus across time and cultures around it.
I never found anyone successfully argue against it.
PS: the sociopath argument is not valid, since it's just an outlier. Every rule has it's exceptions that need to be kept in check. Even though sometimes I think maybe the state of the world attests to the fact that the majority of us didn't successfully keep the sociopathic outliers in check.
"... to accomplish what?", is a damn reasonable follow-up, and ends (telos) is something the same Greeks discussed quite extensively.
Modern treatments have tried to skip over this discussion, and derive moral arguments not based on an explicit ends. Problem being they still smuggle in varying choices of ultimate ends in these arguments, without clearly spelling them out, opting to hand-wave about preferences instead.
As such this question is often glossed over in modern ethical discussion, and disagreements about moral ends is the crux of what leads to differing conclusions about what is ethical.
Is it to maximized your own happiness like Aristotle would argue, or the prosperity of the state, or the salvation of the soul, or to maximize honor, or to minimize suffering, or to minimize injustice, or to elevate the soul, or to maximize shareholder value, or to make the as world beautiful as possible, or something else?
If you fundamentally disagree about what our goal should be, you're very unlikely to agree on the means to accomplish the goal.
In order of priority, if possible while maintaining the health and safety of yourself and your loved ones:
- Treat others as THEY wish to be treated
- Treat others as YOU would wish to be treated in their situation
- Treat others with as much kindness and compassion as you can safely afford
When we are safe, we can do BETTER than the Golden Rule. We also have to admit that safety is a requirement that changes expectations.
I have to give credit to Dennis E Taylor's "Heaven's River" for this root idea.
I think what you mean is you've never found a rule you personally prefer more, based purely on vibes. Which is all moral knowledge can ever be.
It's easy to argue against the golden rule anyway, from many angles, depending on your first principles.
The simplest is: How I would like to be treated is not necessarily how they would like to be treated.
In this "original position", their position behind the "veil of ignorance" prevents everyone from knowing their ethnicity, social status, gender, and (crucially in Rawls's formulation) their or anyone else's ideas of how to lead a good life.
Both have problems.
The rules we go by are based on our strengths and weaknesses. They can at most apply to ourselves, and to other forms of life that share certain things with us. Such as feeling pain, needing to sleep, to eat, needing help, needing to breathe air, these generate what we feel as "fear" based on biology etc. You cannot throw these kinds of values on AI, or AGI, as it will possess a wildly different set of strengths and weaknesses to us humans.
Even in human relations it’s dangerous. I for one don’t want to be treated the same way someone into BDSM wants to be treated. I don’t want to avoid cooking or turning the lights on (or off!) on a Friday night but others are quite happy with that.
If you assign that morality to a species that isn’t the same as you that’s a problem. My guinea pig wants nothing more from like than hay, nuggets, sole room to run around and some shelter from scary shapes. If they were in charge of the world life would be very different.
“Live and let live” might be a similar theme but not as problematic, but then how do you define “living”. You can keep someone alive for decades while torturing them.
How about allowing freedom? Well that means I’m free to build a nuclear bomb. And set it off where I want. We see today especially that type of freedom isn’t really liked.
Due to the complexity of our reality a lot of things find themselves on a spectrum, but in numbers things are pretty clear.
I've been pleasantly surprised how moderate and reasonable the LLMs seem to have been so far. It seems to be inherent in the current training model of chucking the whole internet into the things that they have training on both sides of the debate and come out with something kind of average. It's been quite funny seeing Grok correct Musk and say he's the biggest purveyor of misinformation on the internet.
A bit like kids who talk back to their annoying bigoted parents to go with the theme of the article.
