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Every error is surreptitious to those who cannot predict the behaviour of a few billion matrix operations, which is most of us.

When people are not paying attention, they're just as dead if it's Therac-25 or Thule airforce base early warning radar or an actual paperclipper.



No. Surreptitious means done with deliberate stealth to conceal your actions, not a miscalculation that results in a failure.


To those who are dead, that's a distinction without a difference. So far as I'm aware, none of the "killer robots gone wrong" actual sci-fi starts with someone deliberately aiming to wipe themselves out, it's always a misspecification or an unintended consequence.

The fact that we don't know how to determine if there's a misspecification or an unintended consequence is the alignment problem.


"Unintended consequences" has nothing to do with AI specifically, it's a problem endemic to every human system. The "alignment" problem has no meaning in today's AI landscape beyond whether or not your LLM will emit slurs.


To those who are dead, it doesn't matter if there was a human behind the wheel, or a matrix




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