Supertrust foundational alignment: mutual trust must replace permanent control for safe superintelligence

TL;DR

The paper argues that replacing permanent control with intrinsic mutual trust in superintelligence is essential for safe coexistence, proposing a strategy modeled on familial trust and parenting to prevent adversarial AI relationships.

Contribution

It introduces the Supertrust alignment meta-strategy, modeling superintelligence as an evolutionary child and emphasizing trust over control for safety.

Findings

Proposes a trust-based alignment approach to AI safety.

Highlights risks of control-based strategies leading to distrust.

Suggests modeling superintelligence as a familial relationship.

Abstract

It's widely expected that humanity will someday create AI systems vastly more intelligent than us, leading to the unsolved alignment problem of "how to control superintelligence." However, this commonly expressed problem is not only self-contradictory and likely unsolvable, but current strategies to ensure permanent control effectively guarantee that superintelligent AI will distrust humanity and consider us a threat. Such dangerous representations, already embedded in current models, will inevitably lead to an adversarial relationship and may even trigger the extinction event many fear. As AI leaders continue to "raise the alarm" about uncontrollable AI, further embedding concerns about it "getting out of our control" or "going rogue," we're unintentionally reinforcing our threat and deepening the risks we face. The rational path forward is to strategically replace intended permanent control with intrinsic mutual trust at the foundational level. The proposed Supertrust alignment meta-strategy seeks to accomplish this by modeling instinctive familial trust, representing superintelligence as the evolutionary child of human intelligence, and implementing temporary controls/constraints in the manner of effective parenting. Essentially, we're creating a superintelligent "child" that will be exponentially smarter and eventually independent of our control. We therefore have a critical choice: continue our controlling intentions and usher in a brief period of dominance followed by extreme hardship for humanity, or intentionally create the foundational mutual trust required for long-term safe coexistence.