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Analysis

Recent evidence, sources and high-relevance stories in this PDOOM topic.

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Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

The US Government may find it difficult to seize control during takeoff

via LessWrong AI [4] — I'm not trying to advance any claims about whether this is good or bad, or what to do about it (if anything).I sometimes see concern about loss of most future value as a result of e.g. the US government[1] taking control of the future by seizing control of…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

The Human Substitution Test as a Sanity Check for AI Evaluations

via LessWrong AI [4] — TL;DR: We suggest a sanity check for proposed evaluation or AI oversight schemes: Imagine the AI was replaced by a competent, strategic human — someone who knows they might get evaluated and has their own agenda. Would the evaluation still work?When we…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A

via Substack Zvi [999] — Introducing Plan A

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Freeing Thucydides

via LessWrong AI [4] — Prompted by discussion with Buck Shlegeris and others at the Forethought retreat. The idea that AI could bring an end to Thucydides traps is Buck’s. Speculative. I think it's plausible that we will not see sustained competition between actors for control…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Plan A's problem with dry tinder

via LessWrong AI [4] — A group is worried about an approaching fire spreading rapidly through their city. They manage to halt the fire outside the city gates. Meanwhile they build massive physical structures to help them study and guide the fire safely. But these structures are…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

The easiest pathway to control is through executive power

via LessWrong AI [13] — When people in the AI safety community outline loss-of-control scenarios, they often spend a lot of time on relatively elaborate mechanisms — scheming AIs developing nanotech, labs leveraging superintelligence into hard power like drone armies, or…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

AI #176 Part 2: Plan B

via Substack Zvi [999] — This is part 2 of the weekly, broadly covering speculation, rhetoric and policy, along with alignment research.

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

AI Safety Policy Needs to train Legal Practitioners

via LessWrong AI [5] — I completed my law degree at a working-class London university. In my first year, I was 18 years old, and I was often the youngest person in the room: almost everyone else was a paralegal, clerk or caseworker with years of live files behind them, studying…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Debate with Self-Play Best-of-N Optimization

via LessWrong AI [4] — Context: This is the first research output from Arcadia Alignment’s scalable oversight team, carried out in collaboration with external researchers and mentors. We aim to do rigorous empirical work on debate - bridging the gap from theory to the alignment…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

AI 2040: Plan A

via LessWrong AI [4] — For the past year, we at the AI Futures Project have been sinking most of our time into our next big scenario. Now it’s done! It’s called AI 2040: Plan A.It’s called Plan A because it’s a recommendation, not a prediction. It’s what we think should happen,…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

AI #176 Part 1: Doing It Live

via Substack Zvi [999] — Enough things added up that this week is getting split into two parts.

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

How much slower does takeoff go with 10× less compute?

via LessWrong AI [7] — About 6x slower in the median case, with an 80% CI of 3.5x to 8x. SetupDefine the "R&D compute" (in, say, H100-equivalents) of an AGI company at a given time to be the total compute in use across the following categories:Compute used to run experiments,…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Find funding, fast

via LessWrong AI [10] — Some AI safety funders can take months to decide; others confirm in days. I’ve been on both sides of the grant application and know how crucial an early “yes” can be; “funding projects fast” has always been a core tenet of Manifund.Four new opportunities…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens

via Substack Zvi [999] — We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

AI Safety Can't Afford a Second Cause

via LessWrong AI [9] — Imagine an astronomer who discovers an asteroid with a 50% chance of hitting Earth in 2035. She goes on TV. She testifies before Congress. She founds the Asteroid Deflection Institute and starts doing fundraising rounds. And then, in between appearances,…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Superhuman Articulacy as an LLM Safety Target

via LessWrong AI [6] — TL;DR: Current LLMs are bad communicators relative to their agentic capabilities. I claim that articulacy is useful (and perhaps necessary) for AI safety and suggest a path for improving articulacy.Briefly: a theory for articulacyFrequently, LLM agents…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

No Space Like J-Space

via Substack Zvi [999] — There is a new very cool Anthropic paper: Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models. You can read the blog post verison here.

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Current views on large-scale longtermist philanthropy

via LessWrong AI [5] — This post summarizes some of my views. It states uncertain things boldly in part to [surface disagreements / help readers point out things that seem wrong or missing]. Note that many things are uncertain and many claims are not justified here.One tl;dr:…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want

via LessWrong AI [4] — When John told me (Gretta) his practice of “visioning,” I was skeptical at first. I gave it a try, a little bit out of spite, to show him I was capable of it.It blew me away.Here’s what I told him about it a few days later, edited for brevity and…

Zac Boring 3 months ago Analysis

SFF is very suboptimal

via LessWrong AI [5] — I recently served as a recommender in SFF's annual funding round (grants will be decided and announced in September). I'm deeply grateful for SFF's funders, and I hope more AI safety donors appear in the future.Unfortunately, the SFF experience is bad for…

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AI-risk positions

Historical statements with original sources. A qualitative position is not a numeric probability. Dates refer to the cited statement, not a current estimate. Reviewed September 10, 2026.

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