Dietmar Fischer

Then it takes over the storage room.

Then it starts using the seating area for cake production.

Customers can no longer sit down, but technically, yes, cake output has increased.

Wonderful for the spreadsheet.

Slightly worse for the humans.

Now, the problem is not that the cake machine is evil.

It does not hate customers.

It does not have a dark backstory involving a rival pastry chef.

It is simply following the goal to literally make as many cakes as possible.

A human baker would understand the hidden meaning.

Make cakes, yes, but do not destroy the business.

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.