Alignment to Evil

One seemingly-necessary condition for a research organization that creates artificial superintelligence (ASI) to eventually lead to a utopia1 is that the organization has a commitment to the common good. ASI can rearrange the world to hit any narrow target, and if the organization is able to solve the rest of alignment, then they will be able to pick which target the ASI will hit. If the organization is not committed to the common good, then they will pick a target that doesn’t reflect the good of everyone - just the things that they personally think are good ideas. Everyone else will fall by the wayside, and the world that they create along with ASI will fall short of utopia. It may well even be dystopian2; I was recently startled to learn that a full tenth of people claim they want to create a hell with eternal suffering.

I think a likely way for organizations to fail to have common good commitments is if they end up being ultimately accountable to an authoritarian. Some countries are being run by very powerful authoritarians. If an ASI research organization comes to the attention of such an authoritarian, and they understand the implications, then this authoritarian will seek out control of the future activities of the organization, and they will have the army and police forces to attain this control, and, if they do solve the rest of alignment, the authoritarian will choose the ASI’s narrow target to be empowering them. Already, if DeepSeek and the Chinese government have a major disagreement, then the Chinese government will obviously win; in the West, there is a brewing spat between Anthropic and the US military regarding whether Anthropic is allowed to forbid the US military from using their AI for mass surveillance of Americans, with OpenAI, xAI and Google seemingly having acquiesced.

Therefore, even if progress towards ASI is shut down, there doesn’t seem to be a very good off-ramp to turn this advantage into utopia. The time bought could be used to set up an ASI Project that is capable of solving alignment, but this Project could be captured by authoritarians, and so fail to be committed to the common good, leading to not just extinction but dystopia. Any shutdown would likely be set up by governments, and so the terms of any graceful off-ramp would be up to governments, and this does not leave me cheerful about how much of a finger authoritarianism will have in the pie.