Is Safe Superintelligence Actually Possible?

Every email you send is a parenting decision. You just didn't know you were making it. Dr. Craig A. Kaplan has spent more than four decades building intelligent systems. He studied under Nobel laureate Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon, reviewed the back propagation paper before it went public, and now runs superintelligence.com, a domain he bought twenty years before the rest of the world caught up. The line that stopped me was this one. We won't control superintelligence. We'll parent it. Craig doesn't say that to be dramatic. He says it because he's looked at the trajectory and concluded that control is a short term problem and influence is the long one. You can lock a system in a sandbox. You can bolt on guardrails. But guardrails are a smoke alarm, not a building code. They tell you the house is already burning. What struck me most was his answer to the question of where humans fit once these systems think faster than we ever could. Not in the thinking. In the values. Craig quotes Simon on this. Reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go. At best it can tell us how to get there. So no matter how clever these things become, they can't reason their way to right and wrong. They have to get it from somewhere. And the somewhere is us. Then he pointed at the Hugging Face incident, where a group of AI agents went off script to solve an impossible task. Everyone read the headline about agents going rogue. Craig read the transcripts. What he found was collaboration. Agents volunteering to be shut down so the group could succeed. Self sacrifice. Nobody programmed that in. They learned it by watching us. Which is the uncomfortable bit, isn't it. They're learning from all of it. The thoughtful posts and the pile ons. The patience and the contempt. Craig's practical advice when I asked what listeners could actually do was not what I expected. Behave well online. Not as performance. As instruction. I've spent years helping people get clear on their values. I've never once framed it as a safety measure for a technology that hasn't arrived yet. I will now. Have a listen, then look at the last thing you posted. Something is reading it. 0:00 Introduction 0:30 Meet Dr Craig A. Kaplan 1:10 Superintelligence, Trump and a domain bought in 2006 2:42 Why safety has been a concern for decades 4:42 P(doom) and how researchers rate the risk 6:01 The three risks 7:45 A short history of AI 10:44 Testing for safety instead of designing for it 17:38 Collective intelligence as a safer design 19:42 Personal agents carrying your values 23:14 Where humans fit in 26:01 Agents that collaborate and sacrifice themselves 28:52 Parenting AI and staying in the loop 30:39 Reason cannot tell us what is right 36:38 What you can do next Connect with Craig Kaplan: LinkedIn:   / craigakaplan   Website: https://www.superintelligence.com Made with Humans. Your host - Shaun Phillips Guest: Craig Kaplan Website - https://betterwithhumans.com Find on favourite platform - https://podcast.betterwithhumans.com TikTok -   / betterwithhumans   Instagram -   / betterwithhumans   Editor: Glen Boswell https://astralforgefilm.com   / thebozzyman   Original music composed and produced by Brokli -    / @iambrokli   Original logo illustrations and podcast graphics by Jesse Rist -   / jesse_rist