Worlds where we solve AI alignment on purpose don't look like the world we live in
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MichaelDickens
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3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
An EA Forum essay using counterfactual reasoning to critique the adequacy of current AI alignment efforts, relevant to discussions of AI governance and strategic prioritization in the safety community.
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69
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9
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eaforum
Forum Tags
AI safetyBuilding effective altruismExistential riskAI alignmentAI governanceAI raceCriticism of effective altruism
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Importance: 62/100commentary
Summary
This EA Forum post argues that if humanity were genuinely on track to solve AI alignment deliberately, the world would look very different from our current one—with far more coordination, resources, and urgency devoted to the problem. The author uses this contrast to highlight how underprepared and disorganized current efforts are relative to the scale of the challenge.
Key Points
- •A world seriously working to solve alignment would have vastly more researchers, funding, and institutional coordination than currently exists.
- •The gap between current efforts and what a 'solved on purpose' world looks like suggests we are not on a good trajectory.
- •Current AI safety work may be more ad hoc and insufficient than practitioners acknowledge.
- •The argument functions as a wake-up call about the inadequacy of present governance and technical safety efforts.
- •The post encourages readers to think counterfactually about what adequate preparation for transformative AI would actually require.
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# Worlds where we solve AI alignment on purpose don't look like the world we live in
By MichaelDickens
Published: 2026-03-20
*(Or: Why I don't see how the probability of extinction could be less than 25% on the current trajectory)*
*Cross-posted from [my website](https://mdickens.me/2026/03/20/worlds_where_we_solve_alignment_on_purpose/).*
AI developers are trying to build superintelligent AI. If they succeed, there's a high risk that the AI will [kill everyone](https://intelligence.org/briefing/). The AI companies know this; they believe they can figure out how to align the AI so that it doesn't kill us.
Maybe we solve the alignment problem before superintelligent AI kills everyone. But if we do, it will happen because we got lucky, not because we as a civilization treated the problem with the gravity it deserves—unless we start taking the alignment problem dramatically more seriously than we currently do.
Think about what it looks like when a hard problem gets solved. Think about the Apollo program: engineers working out minute details; running simulations after simulations; planning for remote possibilities.
Think about what it looks like when a hard problem *doesn't* get solved. Consider the world's response to COVID.
When I look at civilization's response to the AI alignment problem, I do not see something resembling Apollo. When I visualize what it looks like for civilization to buckle down and make a serious effort to solve alignment, that visualization does not resemble the world we live in.
This is the world we live in:
- AI Lab Watch has [evaluations of AI companies' behavior on AI safety](https://ailabwatch.org/). Every company has failing grades in almost every category.
- AI capabilities gets more than 100 times as much investment as AI safety.
- People keep saying "nobody would be so stupid as to X", and then the people in charge proceed to do X. (Where X = "give AI direct access to the internet", "hand over autonomous control of important systems", etc.)
- There is widespread disagreement about how hard it will be to solve AI alignment, and about the difficulty of various sub-problems. AI safety researchers and frontier companies [behave as if problems are not hard](https://anthropic.ml/#section-2) with ~100% confidence, and do little work to publicly justify this stance or resolve disagreements with more pessimistic parties. When public discussion does occur, it happens between skeptics and random employees, not skeptics and official company representatives.
- Every frontier AI company (that has an alignment plan at all) wants to use AI to solve AI alignment. This is a [horrifyingly bad plan](https://mdickens.me/2025/11/27/alignment_bootstrapping_is_dangerous/)—they are admitting that the problem is so hard that they don't think humans can solve it in time, and then proposing to use an unknown method with unknown reliability to solve the problem. Meanwhile, senior alignment researchers at AI companies describe this as ["a
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