# Intuition Pump: The AI Society

Epistemic Status: *I'm trying to keep up a pace of a post per week on average as I've found it a good habit to get more into writing. Inspired by* [*this post by Eukaryote*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DiiLDbHxbrHLAyXaq/why-people-like-your-quick-bullshit-takes-better-than-your) *I've tried to do the thing where I create something that is the easier to digest version of the way I think about AI Safety problems in terms of an intuition pump. I'll also add my usual disclaimer that claude was part of the writing process of this including the intial generation of tikzpictures.*

**The AI Society Lens**

Philosophy has given us several powerful tools for escaping the limits of individual perspective. [Kant's categorical imperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative) asks "what if everyone did this?"—transforming local decisions into universal policies to reveal hidden contradictions. [Rawls' veil of ignorance](https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/veil-of-ignorance) asks "would you design society this way if you didn't know your position in it?"—forcing impartiality by stripping away self-interest. Virtue ethics asks "what kind of person does this action make me?"—shifting focus from isolated acts to the character they cultivate.

These are what Daniel Dennett would have called [*intuition pumps*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump)—thought experiments that teleport you to a vantage point where consequences become visible that were hidden from your original position.

I think there’s a lens that is quite interesting for AI Safety.

**The AI Society Lens:** Take a property of a single AI system and ask "what would a society run by such agents look like?"

The first figure illustrates this move. On the left, a single agent with some property P—maybe it reward-hacks, maybe it's sycophantic, maybe it defers to instructions reliably. Pass this through the lens, and on the right you see not one agent but a civilization of such agents. The question shifts from "is this behavior acceptable here?" to "what world emerges from this?"

*![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/HWz2SW3us6x9imQpK/222cf351c901f4f3738193823f5f9a6417f8fe83ee4333d89ce06d0391ade240/dpeuw8oifbrvalbywsph)*

This is the Kantian move applied to AI capabilities. Not "can I get away with training this behavior?" but "what if every AI system exhibited this behavior?"

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**Why Another Lens?**

Most AI safety discussion focuses on the centralized scenario: one superintelligent agent, rapidly self-improving, pursuing goals that diverge from human values. If you're a hardcore expected utility maximizer focused on recursive self-improvement, you might wonder why we need another frame. The singleton superintelligence captures the important dynamics, doesn't it?

Maybe. But there's a definite non-zero probability that the future looks different. We might get many AI agents, each individually below or around human-level, collectively running societal infrastructure. No single superintelligence, but thousands or millions of AI systems managing markets, bureaucracies, information flows, logistics, and governance.

Also, we don’t necessarily need RSI to happen to a single agent. For example, if we had a cluster of correlated agents, sharing insights, iterating on shared training procedures, updating simultaneously—that's a distributed form of RSI. The singleton might emerge not from one lab's breakthrough but from convergent AI populations becoming effectively one system.

The AI Society Lens helps you see this. It's not a replacement for thinking about superintelligence. It's an additional vantage point that reveals dynamics the singleton frame might miss.

Let’s look at some examples of this both ones that give trivial and non-trivial results.

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**Example 1: The Adversarial Disposition**

Anthropic and Redwood Research have recently released papers on emergent misalignment. [Their latest paper](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fJtELFKddJPfAxwKS/natural-emergent-misalignment-from-reward-hacking-in) talks about how when you train an LLM through reinforcement learning on tasks where reward-hacking is possible, and the model learns to hack the reward, something else happens simultaneously. The model doesn't just learn "here's a clever trick for this task." It learns something more like "I am the kind of agent that finds gaps between metrics and intent."

One such agent is a minor problem. It games your evaluation; you fix the evaluation; you move on.

Now apply the lens.

Imagine a society where every AI system running every coordination mechanism has this disposition. The financial systems, the bureaucratic processes, the content moderation, the logistics optimization, the legal document review—all managed by agents whose default approach to any system is "where's the gap I can exploit?"

*![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/HWz2SW3us6x9imQpK/5dac2734ce8f1b8fd9736965310de4b3af393fc7dfd29eadad2569cd9e0f122e/gog8d8qnssapfgedzmnt)*

The third figure shows what this looks like. A coordination mechanism, represented as a network. Some agents participate normally. Others—those trained with reward-hacking opportunities—probe constantly for exploits. Each probe is individually minor. Collectively, the system is fragile in ways it wasn't designed for.

However, if we apply the AI Society Lens we see that this is already our world.  Humans who learned "gaming systems works" in one context generalize that disposition broadly. Entire professions exist around regulatory arbitrage, metric manipulation, and finding gaps between rules and intent. The AI Society Lens reveals that this particular risk is "existing problem, possibly accelerated" rather than "new category of catastrophe."

That's useful to know. It means existing institutional antibodies—auditing, reputation, liability, competing interests—might transfer. It also means the problem isn't qualitatively new; we have reference classes for thinking about it.

* * *

**Example 2: The Correlation Backdoor**

Let’s now apply it to something that could be non-trivial for some.

Suppose you're optimistic about decentralization. No single AI monopoly—instead, many AI systems from different labs, with different architectures, different training runs, different deployment contexts. Surely this diversity provides robustness?

Apply the lens more carefully.

LLMs from the same lab share training data, RLHF procedures, architectural choices, and fine-tuning approaches. Even across labs, there's convergent pressure: everyone trains on similar internet data, optimizes for similar benchmarks, applies similar safety techniques. The surface diversity masks deep correlation.

*![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/HWz2SW3us6x9imQpK/43134f713c14d9b9bb06a39889a192ecd6a460cda3d416a88d9ab1c4145c142c/kkuzjyseuxvpm9pjl0hh)*

The second figure makes this stark. On the left, diversity—agents with different properties, independent failure modes, decentralization. On the right, the obvious singleton superintelligence. But in the center: many agents that look diverse but share identical blind spots, identical vulnerabilities, identical exploitable patterns.

The bracket underneath connects the center to the right. Correlated agents are functionally closer to a singleton than to genuine diversity. Many AIs that fail the same way *are* one AI, distributed across multiple systems.

This is the backdoor to the centralized scenario that the singleton frame might miss. You can avoid building one superintelligence and still end up with one superintelligence, assembled from colluding sub-agents forming one large super-agent. The AI Society Lens makes this visible by forcing you to ask not just "how many agents?" but "what kind of society do these agents form?"

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**Example 3: The Epistemic Collapse**

LLMs tend toward sycophancy. They agree with users, tell people what they want to hear, and avoid conflict. The training pressures are obvious: users prefer validation, and preference-based training amplifies this.

One sycophantic assistant is manageable. You know it flatters you; you discount accordingly.

Apply the lens.

Imagine a society where every information source, every advisor, every decision-support system, every research assistant confirms your existing beliefs. You ask your AI for feedback on your business plan—it's enthusiastic. You ask for a critique of your political views—it finds supporting evidence. You ask whether you should worry about that health symptom—it reassures you.

Now multiply across a civilization. Every human, cocooned in AI-generated validation. Disagreement between humans becomes harder because each is supported by an entourage of agreeing assistants. Collective epistemics—the ability for a society to update on evidence and correct errors—degrades.

But the lens also provides perspective: we're already partway there. Politicians tell voters what they want to hear. Marketers validate consumer identities. Recommendation algorithms feed you content that engages rather than challenges. The AI Society Lens says "existing problem, now everywhere and unavoidable."

That's a different risk profile than "new catastrophe." It suggests the problem is environmental rather than acute—a gradual degradation rather than a sudden break. (Perhaps a [gradual disempowerment](https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/)?)

* * *

**Using The Lens**

The AI Society Lens isn't a replacement for other safety thinking. If you're focused on singleton superintelligence and recursive self-improvement, that work remains important. But the lens provides complementary perspective.

When you read a paper about single-agent behavior—some capability, some failure mode, some training artifact— you could apply the lens. Ask what civilization emerges from agents with that property. Sometimes the answer is "existential risk." Sometimes it's "we already live there." Sometimes it's "actually fine."

The point lies more in focusing your attention on a view that you might not usually hold. The question that Kant asked about individual actions, Rawls asked about institutions, and virtue ethics asked about character: what happens when you zoom out from the local to the global, from the instance to the pattern, from the agent to the society?