Last year I wrote the CAST agenda, arguing that aiming for Corrigibility As Singular Target was the least-doomed way to make an AGI. (Though it is almost certainly wiser to hold off on building it until we have more skill at alignment, as a species.)

I still basically believe that CAST is right. Corrigibility still seems like a promising target compared to full alignment with human values, since there's a better story for how a near-miss when aiming towards corrigibility might be recoverable, but a near-miss when aiming for goodness could result is a catastrophe, due to the fragility of value. On top of this, corrigibility is significantly simpler and less philosophically fraught than human values, decreasing the amount of information that needs to be perfectly transmitted to the machine. Any spec, constitution, or whatever that attempts to balance corrigibility with other goals runs the risk of the convergent instrumental drives towards those other goals washing out the corrigibility. My most recent novel is intended to be an introduction to corrigibility that's accessible to laypeople, featuring a CAST AGI as a main character, and I feel good about what I wrote there.

But I'm starting to feel like certain [...]

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Outline:

(02:42) 1. Oops I Ruined the Universe

(06:12) Is There an Obvious Fix?

(08:20) 2. Attractor Basin Masks Brittleness

(11:32) 3. Feedback Loops Quickly Disappear by Default

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 19th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qgBFJ72tahLo5hzqy/serious-flaws-in-cast

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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“Serious Flaws in CAST” by Max Harms

LessWrong (30+ Karma)