Interesting! AI 2027 was likely one of the seeds of the idea (aside from actual world happenings and the discourse here).
I haven’t looked into the methodology of AI 2027 in detail before, it makes sense it is a sort of wargame—thanks for the link!
Bohemian
Karma: 14
Bohemian’s Shortform
Rough concept idea for a board game: each player represents an AI lab and attempts to develop ASI. The actions involve raising money / hiring talent / building data centers, as well as interacting with other players in competitive manner. The idea lends itself well to the typical “snowball” style of board games (starting small, growing, later stages of the game actually concerning world events).
Game mechanics twist is that the game can only be won if the developed ASI is aligned, i.e. developing a misaligned ASI would lead to all players losing. Ideas how to achieve alignment would probably involve the need for cooperation among players (multi-lateral actions) as well as spending own resources.
If designed well, the game could be both fun and “educational”.
On the topic of sycophancy: lately I have been basically exclusively using the “thinking” ChatGPT models, o3 and o4-mini-high, and, although the resulting outputs are of higher quality, I noticed that sometimes I feel a sting of missing the “Great idea!” / “What a great question” / … responses of 4o. The “coldness” of the response is especially visible when reading the CoT summaries, including sentences like “the user is aiming to… ” / “it sounds like the user wants...”.
I am reminded of the quote by Adm. Rickover, the “Father of the [American] Nuclear Navy”:
“Responsibility is a unique concept… You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you… If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
Rickover is famous for his focus on responsibility, accountability, and quality. Here is e.g. his essay on “Doing a Job”.