Overview of Transformative AI Misuse Risks: What Could Go Wrong Beyond Misalignment

This  post provides an overview of this report. Discussions of the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence have largely focused on the challenge of alignment - ensuring that advanced AI systems pursue human-compatible goals. However, even if we solve alignment, humanity could still face catastrophic outcomes from how humans choose to use transformative AI technologies. A new analysis examines these "misuse risks" - scenarios where human decisions about AI deployment, rather than AI systems acting against human interests, lead to existential catastrophe. This includes both intentional harmful uses (like developing AI-enabled weapons) and reckless deployment without adequate safeguards. The analysis maps out how such human-directed applications of AI, even when technically aligned, could lead to permanent loss of human potential. […]

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When is intent alignment sufficient or necessary to reduce AGI conflict?

In this post, we look at conditions under which Intent Alignment isn't Sufficient or Intent Alignment isn't Necessary for interventions on AGI systems to reduce the risks of (unendorsed) conflict to be effective. We then conclude this sequence by listing what we currently think are relatively promising directions for technical research and intervention to reduce AGI conflict. Intent alignment is not sufficient to prevent unendorsed conflict In the previous post, we outlined possible causes of conflict and directions for intervening on those causes. Many of the causes of conflict seem like they would be addressed by successful AI alignment. For example: if AIs acquire conflict-prone preferences from their training data when we didn’t want them to, that is a clear case of misalignment. […]

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When would AGIs engage in conflict?

Here we will look at two of the claims introduced in the previous post: AGIs might not avoid conflict that is costly by their lights (Capabilities aren’t Sufficient) and conflict that is costly by our lights might not be costly by the AGIs’ (Conflict isn’t Costly).  Explaining costly conflict First we’ll focus on conflict that is costly by the AGIs’ lights. We’ll define “costly conflict” as (ex post) inefficiency: There is an outcome that all of the agents involved in the interaction prefer to the one that obtains. This raises the inefficiency puzzle of war: Why would intelligent, rational actors behave in a way that leaves them all worse off than they could be?  We’ll operationalize “rational and intelligent” actors […]

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When does technical work to reduce AGI conflict make a difference?: Introduction

This is a pared-down version of a longer draft report. We went with a more concise version to get it out faster, so it ended up being more of an overview of definitions and concepts, and is thin on concrete examples and details. Hopefully subsequent work will help fill those gaps. Sequence Summary Some researchers are focused on reducing the risks of conflict between AGIs. In this sequence, we’ll present several necessary conditions for technical work on AGI conflict reduction to be effective, and survey circumstances under which these conditions hold. We’ll also present some tentative thoughts on promising directions for research and intervention to prevent AGI conflict. This post We give a breakdown of necessary conditions for technical work […]

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