Under review

Superalignment Anti-Literature Review

Abstract

AI capabilities have advanced significantly and may greatly surpass human abilities in an unknown timeframe. AI that is cognitively capable of escaping human control and commandeering all human infrastructure is sometimes called "superintelligent". Anticipating the possibility that we become able to create superintelligent AI, we review methods that might be used to retain control over it. We focus on the limitations of methods appearing in the literature, so we call this an "anti-literature review". Several methods we review appear to be promising approaches to creating controllable superintelligent AI, but we may have to accept a reduction in capability compared to uncontrolled AI. The specific approaches we discuss are reinforcement learning, red teaming, a shutdown button, doing what works for human-level AI, human-in-the-loop AI, recursive reward modeling, defensive AI, interpretability, pure imitation, constrained RL, myopic AI, narrow AI, AI sandbox, scientist AI, AI debate, the assistance game, pessimism, limited goal-information, steering vectors, a special shutdown button, current RF optimization, automated research, and provably safe AI.