J. Something 'just works' on the order of eg: train a predictive/imitative/generative AI on a human-generated dataset, and RLHF her to be unfailingly nice, generous to weaker entities, and determined to make the cosmos a lovely place.

M. "We'll make the AI do our AI alignment homework" just works as a plan. (Eg the helping AI doesn't need to be smart enough to be deadly; the alignment proposals that most impress human judges are honest and truthful and successful.)

K. Somebody discovers a new AI paradigm that's powerful enough and matures fast enough to beat deep learning to the punch, and the new paradigm is much much more alignable than giant inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers.

C. Solving prosaic alignment on the first critical try is not as difficult, nor as dangerous, nor taking as much extra time, as Yudkowsky predicts; whatever effort is put forth by the leading coalition works inside of their lead time.

Something wonderful happens that isn't well-described by any option listed. (The semantics of this option may change if other options are added.)

E. Whatever strange motivations end up inside an unalignable AGI, or the internal slice through that AGI which codes its successor, they max out at a universe full of cheerful qualia-bearing life and an okay outcome for existing humans.

I. The tech path to AGI superintelligence is naturally slow enough and gradual enough, that world-destroyingly-critical alignment problems never appear faster than previous discoveries generalize to allow safe further experimentation.

A. Humanity successfully coordinates worldwide to prevent the creation of powerful AGIs for long enough to develop human intelligence augmentation, uploading, or some other pathway into transcending humanity's window of fragility.

B. Humanity puts forth a tremendous effort, and delays AI for long enough, and puts enough desperate work into alignment, that alignment gets solved first.

O. Early applications of AI/AGI drastically increase human civilization's sanity and coordination ability; enabling humanity to solve alignment, or slow down further descent into AGI, etc. (Not in principle mutex with all other answers.)

G. It's impossible/improbable for something sufficiently smarter and more capable than modern humanity to be created, that it can just do whatever without needing humans to cooperate; nor does it successfully cheat/trick us.

D. Early powerful AGIs realize that they wouldn't be able to align their own future selves/successors if their intelligence got raised further, and work honestly with humans on solving the problem in a way acceptable to both factions.

H. Many competing AGIs form an equilibrium whereby no faction is allowed to get too powerful, and humanity is part of this equilibrium and survives and gets a big chunk of cosmic pie.

L. Earth's present civilization crashes before powerful AGI, and the next civilization that rises is wiser and better at ops. (Exception to 'okay' as defined originally, will be said to count as 'okay' even if many current humans die.)

F. Somebody pulls off a hat trick involving blah blah acausal blah blah simulations blah blah, or other amazingly clever idea, which leads an AGI to put the reachable galaxies to good use despite that AGI not being otherwise alignable.

N. A crash project at augmenting human intelligence via neurotech, training mentats via neurofeedback, etc, produces people who can solve alignment before it's too late, despite Earth civ not slowing AI down much.

If you write an argument that breaks down the 'okay outcomes' into lots of distinct categories, without breaking down internal conjuncts and so on, Reality is very impressed with how disjunctive this sounds and allocates more probability.

YES

Roman Yampolskiy

Agnes Callard

Liron Shapira

Nobody

Cat Woods

Sarah Constantin

Rob Bensinger

Other

Holly Elmore

Rosie Campbell

Robin Hanson

Rob Miles

Aella

Zvi Mowshowitz

Amanda Askell

Allison Duettmann

@robm

Jeffrey Ladish

Nathan Young

Daniel Hillis

Ronny Fernandez

Simon Baars

Liv Boeree

Jamie Joyce

Lex Fridman

Jesse Michels

Dan Faggela

Isaac Linn

Isaac King

Eneasz Brodski

Ozzie Gooen

Jim

Prophet

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Nate Soares

Ben Goertzle

Max Tegmark

Connor Leahy

George Hotz

Nathan Labenz

K. Somebody discovers a new AI paradigm that's powerful enough and matures fast enough to beat deep learning to the punch, and the new paradigm is much much more alignable than giant inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers.

I. The tech path to AGI superintelligence is naturally slow enough and gradual enough, that world-destroyingly-critical alignment problems never appear faster than previous discoveries generalize to allow safe further experimentation.

C. Solving prosaic alignment on the first critical try is not as difficult, nor as dangerous, nor taking as much extra time, as Yudkowsky predicts; whatever effort is put forth by the leading coalition works inside of their lead time.

B. Humanity puts forth a tremendous effort, and delays AI for long enough, and puts enough desperate work into alignment, that alignment gets solved first.

Something wonderful happens that isn't well-described by any option listed. (The semantics of this option may change if other options are added.)

M. "We'll make the AI do our AI alignment homework" just works as a plan. (Eg the helping AI doesn't need to be smart enough to be deadly; the alignment proposals that most impress human judges are honest and truthful and successful.)

A. Humanity successfully coordinates worldwide to prevent the creation of powerful AGIs for long enough to develop human intelligence augmentation, uploading, or some other pathway into transcending humanity's window of fragility.

E. Whatever strange motivations end up inside an unalignable AGI, or the internal slice through that AGI which codes its successor, they max out at a universe full of cheerful qualia-bearing life and an okay outcome for existing humans.

J. Something 'just works' on the order of eg: train a predictive/imitative/generative AI on a human-generated dataset, and RLHF her to be unfailingly nice, generous to weaker entities, and determined to make the cosmos a lovely place.

O. Early applications of AI/AGI drastically increase human civilization's sanity and coordination ability; enabling humanity to solve alignment, or slow down further descent into AGI, etc. (Not in principle mutex with all other answers.)

D. Early powerful AGIs realize that they wouldn't be able to align their own future selves/successors if their intelligence got raised further, and work honestly with humans on solving the problem in a way acceptable to both factions.

F. Somebody pulls off a hat trick involving blah blah acausal blah blah simulations blah blah, or other amazingly clever idea, which leads an AGI to put the reachable galaxies to good use despite that AGI not being otherwise alignable.

L. Earth's present civilization crashes before powerful AGI, and the next civilization that rises is wiser and better at ops. (Exception to 'okay' as defined originally, will be said to count as 'okay' even if many current humans die.)

G. It's impossible/improbable for something sufficiently smarter and more capable than modern humanity to be created, that it can just do whatever without needing humans to cooperate; nor does it successfully cheat/trick us.

H. Many competing AGIs form an equilibrium whereby no faction is allowed to get too powerful, and humanity is part of this equilibrium and survives and gets a big chunk of cosmic pie.

N. A crash project at augmenting human intelligence via neurotech, training mentats via neurofeedback, etc, produces people who can solve alignment before it's too late, despite Earth civ not slowing AI down much.

You are fooled by at least one option on this list, which out of many tries, ends up sufficiently well-aimed at your personal ideals / prejudices / the parts you understand less well / your own personal indulgences in wishful thinking.

1

0

2

Jamie Joyce (@JustJamieJoyce)

Daniel Hillis

Robin Hanson

Daniel Sheehan (@danielsheehan45)

Danny Jones

@prophet (Metadao)

Roman Yampolskiy

Other

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Ben Goertzle

Max Tegmark

Balaji Srinivasan

Curt Jaimungal

Rob Bensinger

Matthew Pines

Eric Weinstein

@TheAllMemeingEye

Jack Dorsey

Aella

Jesse Michels

Nate Soares

Allison Duettmann

Rob Miles

Amanda Askell

Liv Boeree

Lex Fridman

Sarah Constantin

Rosie Campbell

Dan Faggela

Adam M. Curry

Nick Bostrom

David Chalmers

Stuart Russell

Connor Leahy

Tim Ferris

Nathan Labenz

Brian Armstrong

YES

Milwaukee Brewers (+159 as of 8/14/2025)

Los Angeles Dodgers (+80 as of 8/14/2025)

Chicago Cubs (+115 as of 8/14/2025)

Other

New York Yankees (+90 as of 8/14/2025)

Boston Red Sox (+93 as of 8/14/2025)

Detroit Tigers (+77 as of 8/14/2025)

New York Mets (+32 as of 8/14/2025)

San Diego Padres (+52 as of 8/14/2025)