Working on alignment is great, but it is not the future we should be prepping for. Do you have a plan?

I do not, because a future where an unaligned superintelligence takes over is precisely as survivable as a future in which the sun spontaneously implodes.

Any apocalypse that you can plan for isn't really an apocalypse.

But it only spends 0.000001 percent of it’s time (less than 32 s/yr) interacting with us. Because it’s bored and has better things to do.

What if one of those "better things" is disassembling Earth's biosphere in order to access more resources?

The Firefox problem on Claude was fixed after I sent them an e-mail about it.

The link 404s. I think the correct link is: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/231-misconceptions-about-china-and-artificial-intelligence-helen-toner/

Just going by the standard that you set forth:

The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded,

The program expanded in response to Amazon wanting to collect data about more retailers, not because Amazon was viewing this program as a profit center.

it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing

But that doesn't seem to have occurred. Until the Wall Street Journal leak, few if any people outside Amazon were aware of this program. It's not as if any of the retailers that WSJ spoke to said, "Oh yeah, we quickly grew suspicious of Big River Inc, and shut down their account after we smelled something fishy." On the contrary many of them were surprised that Amazon was accessing their seller marketplace through a shell corporation.

I didn't see any examples mentioned in the WSJ article of Amazon employees cutting corners or making simple mistakes that might have compromised operations. Instead, they seemed to be pretty careful and conscientious, making sure to not communicate with outside partners with their Amazon.com addresses, being careful to maintain their cover identities at trade conferences, only communicating with fellow Amazon executives with paper documents (and numbered paper documents, at that), etc.

I would argue that the practices used by Amazon to conceal the link between itself and Big River Inc. were at least as good as the operational security practices of the GRU agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal.

The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded, it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing.

That's not the impression I got. From the article, it says that many of the retailers that the Wall Street Journal had contacted regarding Big River had no idea that the entity was affiliated with Amazon (even despite the rather-obvious-in-hindsight naming, LinkedIn references, company registration data pointing to Seattle, etc). It seems like their operational security was unusually good, good enough that no one at the other retailers bothered looking beyond the surface. Yes, eventually someone talked to the press, but even then, Amazon had a plan in place to handle the program coming to light in a public forum.

In general, it seems like Amazon did this pretty competently from start to finish, and the leaders were pretty well in control of the operation all throughout.

(with an all-in-one solution they just buy one thing and are done)

That's a very common misconception regarding all-in-one tools. In practice, all-in-one tools always need a significant degree of setup, configuration and customization before they are useful for the customer. Salesforce, for example, requires so much customization, you can make a career out of just doing Salesforce customization. Sharepoint is similar.

Thus the trade-off isn't between a narrowly focused tool that does one job extremely well versus an all-in-one tool that does a bunch of things somewhat well. The tradeoff is between a narrowly focused tool that does one job extremely well immediately, with little or no setup versus an all-in-one-tool that does many things somewhat well after extensive setup and customization, which itself might require hiring a specialized professional.

To use the Anrok example, is it possible to do VAT calculations in the existing tools that the business already has, such as ERP systems or CRM software? Yes, of course. But that software would need to be customized to handle the specific tax situation for the business, which is something that Anrok might handle out-of-the-box with little setup required.

I also have a “Done” column, which is arguably pointless as I just delete everything off the “Done” column every couple weeks,

Having a "Done" column (or an archive board) can be very useful if you want to see when was the last time you completed a recurring task. It helps prevent tasks with long recurrences (quarterly, biennially, etc) from falling through the cracks. For example: dentist appointments. They're supposed to happen once a year. And, ideally, you'd create a task to schedule the next one immediately when you get back from the previous one. But let's say that doesn't happen. You got distracted, there was some kind of scheduling issue, life got in the way. Then, months later, you wonder, "Wait, how long has it been since I've been to the dentist?" Archiving completed tasks instead of deleting them lets you answer that question immediately.

The last answer is especially gross:

He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It’s just obvious what his name is.

Can we apply the same logic to doors? "It took me less than five minutes to pick the lock so..."

Or people's dress choices? "She chose to wear a tight top and a miniskirt so..."

Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander's real name in order to critique his ideas.

The second wheelbarrow example has a protagonist who knows the true value of the wheelbarrow, but still loses out:

At the town fair, a wheelbarrow is up for auction. You think the fair price of the wheelbarrow is around $120 (with some uncertainty), so you submit a bid for $108. You find out that you didn’t win—the winning bidder ends up being some schmuck who bid $180. You don’t exchange any money or wheelbarrows. When you get home, you check online out of curiosity, and indeed the item retails for $120. Your estimate was great, your bid was reasonable, and you exchanged nothing as a result, reaping a profit of zero dollars and zero cents.

But, in my example, Burry wasn't outbid by "some schmuck" who thought that Avant! was worth vastly more than it ended up being worth. Burry was able to guess not just the true value of Avant!, but also the value that other market participants placed on Avant!, enabling him to buy up shares at a discount compared to what the company ended up selling for.

The implied question in my post was, "How do you know if you're Michael Burry, or the trader selling Avant! shares for $2?"