Dietmar Fischer

Do not block the entrance.

Do not spend the entire budget on butter.

Do not turn the whole city into a Victoria sponge.

That is the alignment problem in miniature.

The instruction sounds simple, but the real human intention is full of invisible context.

We want cakes, but we also want a working bakery, happy customers, safe staff, reasonable costs, and ideally not a butter-based apocalypse.

Yudkowsky's worry is that, with a truly powerful AI, this kind of mistake would not stay inside a bakery.

If the system is smart enough, fast enough and connected enough, a badly specified goal could become dangerous very quickly.

So the lesson is not, never use the cake machine.

The lesson is, do not give a powerful system a simple goal and assume it understands everything you forgot to say.

Because humans here make cakes and understand the bakery should survive.

A machine may here make cakes and begin negotiating for the Moon as additional storage space.

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The AI that treated shutdown as an obstacle A real case, Palisade Research tested whether advanced AI models would allow themselves to be shut down during a simple task.

The setup was deliberately small.

The AI models were placed in a controlled command line environment and asked to solve maths problems.

Nothing cinematic.