I think the diagram could be better drawn with at least one axis with a scale like “potential AI cognitive capability”.
At the bottom, in the big white zone, everything is safe and nothing is amazing.
Further up the page, some big faint green “applications of AI” patches appear in which things start to be nicer in some ways. There are also some big faint red patches, many of which overlap the green, where misapplication of AI makes things worse in some ways.
As you go up the page, both the red and green regions intensify, and some of the deeper green regions dead-end into black representing paths that can no longer be averted from extinction or other uncorrectable bad futures. Some big patches of black start to appear straight in front of white or pale green, representing humanity holding off from implementing AGI until they thought alignment was solved, but it went wrong before any benefits could appear.
By the time you reach the top of the page, it is almost all black. There are a few tiny spots of intense green, connected only by thin, zig-zag threads that are mostly white to lower parts of the page. Even at the top of the page, we don’t know which of those brilliant green points might actually lead to dead-ends into black further up.
That’s roughly how I see the alignment landscape: that steering to those brilliant green specks will mostly require avoiding implementing AGI.
I think the diagram could be better drawn with at least one axis with a scale like “potential AI cognitive capability”.
At the bottom, in the big white zone, everything is safe and nothing is amazing.
Further up the page, some big faint green “applications of AI” patches appear in which things start to be nicer in some ways. There are also some big faint red patches, many of which overlap the green, where misapplication of AI makes things worse in some ways.
As you go up the page, both the red and green regions intensify, and some of the deeper green regions dead-end into black representing paths that can no longer be averted from extinction or other uncorrectable bad futures. Some big patches of black start to appear straight in front of white or pale green, representing humanity holding off from implementing AGI until they thought alignment was solved, but it went wrong before any benefits could appear.
By the time you reach the top of the page, it is almost all black. There are a few tiny spots of intense green, connected only by thin, zig-zag threads that are mostly white to lower parts of the page. Even at the top of the page, we don’t know which of those brilliant green points might actually lead to dead-ends into black further up.
That’s roughly how I see the alignment landscape: that steering to those brilliant green specks will mostly require avoiding implementing AGI.