The declining birth rates aren’t the main savior, it was the food production and transportation improvements.
So the analogy to AI would be: Alignment research makes enough progress fast enough (perhaps at AI companies partially motivated by mundane alignment concerns like trying to tamp down on sycophancy and reward hacking) that Claude Mythos 3 is aligned enough to trust with alignment research, and so when Anthropic hands off everything to Claude Mythos 3, it’s able to quickly solve the rest of the problems and align its successor, and so on to ASI. In retrospect there are some heroes like Borlaug, but also just a lot of normal science research that happened to go fast enough to work.
The declining birth rates aren’t the main savior, it was the food production and transportation improvements.
So the analogy to AI would be: Alignment research makes enough progress fast enough (perhaps at AI companies partially motivated by mundane alignment concerns like trying to tamp down on sycophancy and reward hacking) that Claude Mythos 3 is aligned enough to trust with alignment research, and so when Anthropic hands off everything to Claude Mythos 3, it’s able to quickly solve the rest of the problems and align its successor, and so on to ASI. In retrospect there are some heroes like Borlaug, but also just a lot of normal science research that happened to go fast enough to work.