I’ve come up with a new thought experiment to approach ASI, and it challenges the very notions of alignment and containment

About this article

I’ve written an essay exploring what I’m calling the Super-Intelligent Octopus Problem—a thought experiment designed to surface a paradox I believe is underappreciated in alignment discourse. The claim: alignment and containment aren’t separate problems with separate solutions. They’re locked in mutual contradiction, and the contradiction is philosophical. The argument uses Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), which deductively derives that any agent must recognize rights to free...