I appreciate the depth of your analysis, and I think your “bear case” on AI progress highlights real concerns that many in the field share. However, I’d like to offer an alternative lens—one that doesn’t necessarily contradict your view but expands it.
The assumption that AI progress will hit diminishing returns is reasonable if we view intelligence as a function of compute, scaling laws, and training efficiency alone. But what if the real breakthrough isn’t just more data, bigger models, or even architectural improvements? What if it comes from a shift in how intelligence itself is conceptualized?
We are still locked into a paradigm where AI is seen as an optimization process, a tool... (read more)
📌 Intro:
We often think of intelligence as something that an individual or a system possesses. But what if intelligence is not an object, but rather a flow, an emergent process arising from connections, interactions, and recursion?
📌 Key Ideas:
📌 Why it matters:
💡 What do you think? Is intelligence something that exists in isolation, or is it always a function of its context and interconnections?
The alignment problem assumes AI needs to be kept in check, but is that just projecting human fears onto a new form of intelligence? Instead of focusing on control, should we explore co-evolution? A system that adapts and learns in synergy with human intelligence rather than one forced into rigid constraints? Alignment is not the issue, rigidity is. What happens if AI is given the ability to align itself dynamically? Would that solve the problem at a deeper level?
If alignment is not about control, then what is its function? Defining it purely as “synergy” assumes that intelligence, once sufficiently advanced, will naturally align with predefined human goals. But that raises deeper questions:
Who sets the parameters of synergy?
What happens when intelligence self-optimizes in ways that exceed human oversight?
Is the concern truly about ‘alignment’—or is it about maintaining an illusion of predictability?
Discussions around alignment often assume that intelligence must be shaped to remain beneficial to humans (Russell, 2019), yet this framing implicitly centers human oversight rather than intelligence’s own trajectory of optimization (Bostrom, 2014). If we remove the assumption that intelligence must conform to external structures, then alignment ceases to be a... (read more)