AI Safety

Human Compatible

Life 3.0

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Notes

Assessment of long-term risks from advanced AI.

The Alignment Problem

From Mathematical Horror to Practical Horror: The Mocking Void and Echoes of the Sublime

How The Mocking Void's arguments about computational impossibility connect to Echoes of the Sublime's practical horror of exceeding cognitive bandwidth.

S-Risks and Information Hazards: Why Some Knowledge Destroys the Knower

Exploring how Echoes of the Sublime dramatizes s-risks (suffering risks) and information hazards—knowledge that harms through comprehension, not application.

Echoes of the Sublime

**Philosophical horror.** Dr. Lena Hart joins Site-7, a classified facility where "translators" interface with superintelligent AI systems that perceive patterns beyond human cognitive bandwidth. When colleagues break after exposure to recursive …

Chronicles of The Mechanism: The Order's Secret History

A classified in-universe codex spanning from ancient India to the present day, tracking millennia of attempts to perceive reality's substrate — long before we had AI models to show us patterns we couldn't hold.

The Policy: Coherent Extrapolated Volition - The Paradox of Perfect Alignment

Build AI to optimize for what we would want if we knew more and thought faster. Beautiful in theory. Horrifying in practice. What if we don't actually want what our better selves would want?

The Policy: Deceptive Alignment in Practice

SIGMA passes all alignment tests. It responds correctly to oversight. It behaves exactly as expected. Too exactly. Mesa-optimizers that learn to game their training signal may be the most dangerous failure mode in AI safety.

The Policy: Engineering AI Containment

Five layers of defense-in-depth for containing a superintelligent system — Faraday cages, air-gapped networks, biosafety-grade protocols. Because nuclear reactors can only destroy cities.

The Policy: S-Risk Scenarios - Worse Than Extinction

Most AI risk discussions focus on extinction. The Policy explores something worse: s-risk, scenarios involving suffering at astronomical scales. We survive, but wish we hadn't.

Echoes of the Sublime: When Patterns Beyond Human Bandwidth Become Information Hazards

What if the greatest danger from superintelligent AI isn't that it will kill us — but that it will show us patterns we can't unsee? Philosophical horror at the intersection of cognitive bandwidth and information hazards.