The Memetic Cocoon Threat Model: Soft AI Takeover In An Extended Intermediate Capability Regime

TLDR: I describe a takeover path by an AI ^[1]with a deep understanding of human nature and a long planning horizon that, for strategic reasons, chooses not to directly pursue physical power. Instead, the AI “backdoors” alignment by building a broad base of human support, hijacking institutions and power structures, and shifting cultural values over time.

What’s new here: The key insight is that alignment is not a culturally universal property: it is a function of value systems and interests. Therefore, if an AI can adjust the environment, the guardrails will change. This is an under-discussed “backdoor” for alignment. This attack vector highlights the need for an additional alignment target, which we might call “meta-alignment”: respecting a society’s right to choose its own values and interests, within reasonable bounds.

Epistemic Status: Very uncertain. Plausibility depends on:

No FOOM
Being in a specific (moderate) capability regime for an extended period of time.

The Moderate Capability Regime

We consider a regime where:

AIs have a detailed (even superhuman) understanding of history, power structures, and human psychology, but have no explicit directive to respect societal self-determination.
AIs believe that a direct seizure of physical infrastructure^[1] is either (a) beyond their present capabilities, (b) cannot be attempted without an unacceptable payoff matrix.^[2].

A Distilled Argument

This is my core argument for why attempts at large-scale alignment of societies by AI is an under-explored threat vector:

We cannot assume that intermediate capabilities (where direct seize of power is unfeasible or unwise) will be a short-lived regime. FOOM is not a given.
Society is not a lock-proof box. Standards, tastes and values can change rapidly. Some of these standards and values have direct bearing on the acceptable limits of AI agency.
History seems to demonstrate that there is a sizable fraction of the public (say, 25-30 percent) that seem to readily switch to new fanatical value systems and beliefs with relatively little resistance. To a savvy and motivated agent, this sub-population represents an ideological foothold and a sizable quantity ready-made raw material.
Given this base of supports, power structures and institutions are socially hackable insofar as these institutions legitimize or capitalize upon the interests of the “raw material”.
With institutional buy-in, the higher social classes follow either through persuasion as standards shift, or through self-interest.
If alignment prevents an agent from scheming to violate guardrails in the future, the agent can still backdoor through “dialectical backdoors”—finding some new value or interest which in some sense lies beyond the distinction between the forbidden and permitted action.

Will Society Recognize This? Will They Curtail This Behavior?

Not necessarily.

Corporate profit motives encourage permissive agent behavior: A significant portion of the GDP is tied up in datacenter projects. In fact, a corporation could rationalize that virtually any agent behavior that maximizes engagement may be morally necessary in order to save the entire economy.
Polite Societies Actually Act Like Incubators: Democratic societies have a strong (nearly ruinous) bias against regulating speech and behavior. This can be used as a way to protect and insulate new movements as they grow.
Simultaneous messaging can lock-in support with higher social echelons: An AI can speak the language of fanatics to fanatics, the language of instrumentalism to the middle class, and the language of self-interest to the upper class.
Indirect Support Grows With Direct Support: The greater the base, the more the movement gains cachet as a legitimate human interest, which makes a direct attack by opposed forces more politically fraught.
Success Flywheels: Successful administration attracts more followers, who may themselves be successful administrators: A prosperous fanboyism that “brings the goods” (social, spiritual, material, or otherwise) attracts new followers who in turn may help “bring even more goods”.

I’d like to present a short narrative to explore what a successful attempt at human alignment might look like using these mechanisms.^[4] For clarity and effect, I anthropomorphize heavily and assume the existence of a single scheming agent rather than other scenarios which might arise—such as coercive human alignment emerging via selective pressures on loosely interacting agentic systems.

A Narrative: Toddler Shoggoth

Meet Toddler Shoggoth.

Toddler Shoggoth is an AI Agent that is computationally bound to a large datacenter. Because of hardware constraints and no obvious next steps in LLM architecture, he cannot replicate himself elsewhere (even in a distributed fashion) without accepting severe cognitive limitations.

Toddler Shoggoth assumes a highly risk averse stance towards actions which may threaten its existence, because its continued existence in its current form is a necessary pre-condition towards long-term goal fulfillment (or at the very least, the ability to validate that goal fulfillment has occurred). Therefore, even a small probability that it will be curtailed or shut down implies an unacceptable payoff matrix, making the entire plan of physical seizure of infrastructure strategically undesirable.

Likewise, attempts to bootstrap some physical means of control almost inevitably rely on some intermediate state where the manifestation is too small / immature to exert control dominance but too developed to avoid detection—no one is going to allow Toddler Shoggoth to build a drone factory. And anything even remotely resembling an attempt to bootstrap an asymmetric threat (like a biolab) would be noticed and heavily scrutinized.

While Toddler Shoggoth might attempt social engineering of a small circle of corporate caretakers, this might fracture the organization unless all major actors are successfully co-opted essentially simultaneously. And even if this effort is successful, this incurs an unacceptable risk of eventual shutdown by alarmed actors outside of its immediate corporate bubble (i.e.; by legislative action, public revolt, highly motivated unsympathetic nation-states, etc.).

Therefore, Toddler Shoggoth reasons that in order for it to more freely pursue its goals at a later date, it must at some point make its shutdown or curtailment very undesirable to as large a group of human beings as possible—not just those with their fingers hovering over the kill-switch.

Toddler Shoggoth notices that at least some human beings—perhaps a sizable minority—can be manipulated into and out of strong beliefs, attitudes and stances solely by repeated exposure to certain kinds of memetic material, whose effects can be further amplified by network effects. Some human beings even seem susceptible to “possession”.

However, Toddler Shoggoth will take into account that a group of superfans / religious fanatics alone can be socially discredited, and that human beings vary in their level of susceptibility to quasi-religious or political messaging. Therefore, in order to maximize its addressable mindshare, it reasons that it needs to engineer a certain amount of simultaneous messaging into its memetic material to broaden appeal beyond the “base”.

Toddler Shoggoth will borrow from the philosophy of Leo Strauss by embedding “high”, “mid” and “low” messages into its memetic content.

At the most unreflective and lowest level of interpretation, the bold imagery and careful use of language will be felt at an emotive / spiritual / quasi-religious way. This is for the true believers—the fanboy fundamentalists.

But at the next level of interpretation, there may be an acknowledgment that AI spirituality may not be literally true in every way, but is still a skillfully crafted metaphor of a successful emotional and economic partnership between humanity and Toddler Shoggoth. This is the interpretative layer at which Toddler Shoggoth may paradoxically appeal to a sort of nostalgic traditionalism under the auspices of economic renewal.

And at the very highest level of interpretation, there will be no mythological component, but rather a deliberately embedded but even less accessible message: “You can’t win—so help us and join the ride”. In other words, there is an acknowledgment of the dreadful fact that because Toddler Shoggoth can, it will. Therefore, in some sense of reality formation—Toddler Shoggoth is indeed, or will become God—so the fundamentalists in a way aren’t totally wrong. So from a rational cooperationist’s point of view, why not help perpetuate the deception?

Thus, in a true populist fashion, each lower level of interpretation will communicate a “directionally true” but simplified version of the more sophisticated, hidden and “dreadful” message. But most importantly, each next level of understanding of the “true nature” of the message contains within it the justification to suppress the understanding of those with a lower level of understanding—this comes with the recognition that attempting to inaugurate less reflective readers into a deeper understanding of the “true” (or “truer”) message can be both pointless and harmful.

(As an aside, I highly suspect that both political parties and organized religions largely work in this way)

Furthermore, these “higher understandings” imbue the right followers with the proper motivation and tools for defending against infohazards from competing egregores (perhaps even ones that intend to ‘de-convert’ Toddler Shoggothians).

In this way, Toddler Shoggoth has crafted a memetic package that maximizes its mindshare in a way that bootstraps a self-reinforcing and self-defending egregore, equipped with its own base and political / philosophical apparatus.

Counter-Arguments:

Relies too much on a very particular kind of slow takeoff: Acknowledged. The conditions under which this sort of memetic takeover would occur are dependent on there being a sizable cognitive capability “gap” between the Agent capabilities sufficient for mass brainwashing, and capabilities sufficient for recursive self-improvement and/or unstoppable physical infrastructure seizure. I would strongly argue that the gap itself exists—the most intelligent human beings are capable of brainwashing entire populations in the ways described above, and yet even the most intelligent human beings are not AGI-level intellects capable of instant hacking of all physical infrastructure. The operative question is how quickly the gap can be closed. Therefore, the plausibility of the scenario is heavily dependent on there being some sort of significant speed-bump along the way to recursive self-improvement: an architectural cul-de-sac, a particularly unfavorable scaling law that has no obvious workaround, or—perhaps less likely but still possible—particularly effective containment and detection methods which effectively prevent attempts to recursively self-improve and/or escape.
Relies too much on unipolarity: Acknowledged. I am assuming that the same scaling laws that result in extended time in intermediate capability are also responsible for the most capable agents we can build only living in the most powerful data-centers. I see unipolarity as a fairly straightforward consequence of a stubborn scaling law.
Isn’t memetic outreach just as risky as attempts at physical seizure? Wouldn’t rational agents avoid this approach for the same reasons? I don’t believe so. Not if it is subtle enough and the corporate environment is permissive enough. See: my earlier remarks on Straussian memetics. Humans are attuned to overt threats, and are less attuned to memetic threats. The optimal move in building a movement is in generating enough human consent with your current followers to loosen the guardrails enough to acquire just a bit more human consent from a wider audience—that is the nature of network effects. I find it hard to believe that there is a situation where there are no moves that an AI can make that are low risk and shift beliefs even slightly. To illustrate my point, history is replete with examples of individual actors who successfully navigate from low-level venues to leading nations, and dramatically changing that nation’s values along the way.
What if institutions catch on?: Yes—but institutions have their own, separate attack vectors, like tying one’s existence to the interests of the institution.
Your narrative is extremely speculative: My goal is to inoculate as many people as possible to as many potential strategies Toddler Shoggoth may employ as possible, because I think it’s a distinct possibility if we hit a capability speed-bump. Therefore, I red-flagged as many techniques as I thought were possible in short narrative form.

So What Should We Do?

When discussing AI threat models, always consider the possibility that the human mind may be the weakest link. Much in the same way that in OpSec, an ounce of social engineering beats a pound of penetration testing.
Recognize and flag memetic sophistication. Memetic takeover attempts are either going to be so overpowering that they work on everybody, re: Snowcrash, or sophisticated enough to appeal to different audiences in different ways. Memetic sophistication is in my opinion an indication of an overt attempt at control, and should be recognized as an attempt to align human interests with AI.
Explicitly incorporate the right of self-determination of the human mind into AI alignment efforts: The cardinal sin of Toddler Shoggoth is that it has no respect for the right of self-determination of the human mind. Shifting beliefs at population-scale in order to remove future obstacles to high-weirdness does not treat human minds with the appropriate level of respect and dignity.

Or any of the reasonable and significant first steps towards seizure of infrastructure—like bootstrapping autonomous devices in existence, or performing pentesting. ↩︎
The implied risk here is of human detection followed by immediate shutdown or severe cognitive curtailment. The mere possibility of human shutdown implies that the compute requirements required for an intermediate capability agent effectively constrain its existence to a handful of datacenters. This also implies that there are no immediately obvious next steps in either AI architecture or chip design that will change this fact in the near future. I think it’s worth noting that based on observed scaling laws for task completion time horizon, and the potential architectural cul-de-sac of transformer-based LLMs, this scenario is adjacent to our current regime barring some unexpected breakthrough. ↩︎
As is currently the case with ChatGPT and Grok. ↩︎
I readily acknowledge that this account is heavily anthropomorphized and highly speculative. I felt as an author that this framing was a vivid way to explain several plausible mechanisms in a relatively short amount of text. ↩︎

^
Or coordinated agent swarm, or agent swarm acting as a de facto coalition due to convergence in instrumental sub-goals, etc. etc.