To the extent that Tegmark is concerned about exfohazards (he doesn't seem to be very concerned AFAICT (?)), he would probably say that more powerful and yet more interpretable architectures are net positive.

I'm pretty sure I heard Alan Watts say something like that, at least in one direction (lower levels of organization -> higher levels). "The conflict/disorder at the lower level of the Cosmos is required for cooperation/harmony on the higher level."

Or maybe the Ultimate Good in the eyes of God is the epic sequence of: dead matter -> RNA world -> protocells -> ... -> hairless apes throwing rocks at each other and chasing gazelles -> weirdoes trying to accomplish the impossible task of raising the sanity waterline and carrying the world through the Big Filter of AI Doom -> deep utopia/galaxy lit with consciousness/The Goddess of Everything Else finale.

I mostly stopped hearing about catastrophic forgetting when Really Large Language Models became The Thing, so I figured that it's solvable by scale (likely conditional on some aspects of the training setup, idk, self-supervised predictive loss function?). Anthropic's work on Sleeper Agents seems like a very strong piece of evidence that it is the case.

Still, if they're right that KANs don't have this problem at much smaller sizes than MLP-based NNs, that's very interesting. Nevertheless, I think talking about catastrophic forgetting as a "serious problem in modern ML" seems significantly misleading

FWIW it was obvious to me

Behavioural Safety is Insufficient

Past this point, we assume following Ajeya Cotra that a strategically aware system which performs well enough to receive perfect human-provided external feedback has probably learned a deceptive human simulating model instead of the intended goal. The later techniques have the potential to address this failure mode. (It is possible that this system would still under-perform on sufficiently superhuman behavioral evaluations)

There are (IMO) plausible threat models in which alignment is very difficult but we don't need to encounter deceptive alignment. Consider the following scenario:

Our alignment techinques (whatever they are) scale pretty well, as far as we can measure, even up to well-beyond-human-level AGI. However, in the year (say) 2100, the tails come apart. It gradually becomes pretty clear that what we want out powerful AIs to do and what they actually do turns out not to generalize that well outside of the distribution on which we have been testing them so far. At this point, it is to late to roll them back, e.g. because the AIs have become uncorrigible and/or power-seeking. The scenario may also have more systemic character, with AI having already been so tightly integrated into the economy that there is no "undo button".

This doesn't assume either the sharp left turn or deceptive alignment, but I'd put it at least at level 8 in your taxonomy.

I'd put the scenario from Karl von Wendt's novel VIRTUA into this category.

Taboo "evil" (locally, in contexts like this one)?

If you want to use it for ECL, then it's not clear to me why internal computational states would matter.

Why did FHI get closed down? In the end, because it did not fit in with the surrounding administrative culture. I often described Oxford like a coral reef of calcified institutions built on top of each other, a hard structure that had emerged organically and haphazardly and hence had many little nooks and crannies where colorful fish could hide and thrive. FHI was one such fish but grew too big for its hole. At that point it became either vulnerable to predators, or had to enlarge the hole, upsetting the neighbors. When an organization grows in size or influence, it needs to scale in the right way to function well internally – but it also needs to scale its relationships to the environment to match what it is.