Conjecture

Genesis, the statesman's case, sides with prevention at the frontier: undesirable machine behaviour "must be not merely prohibited, but entirely prevented. All punishment would come too late", and "We cannot pursue a strategy of trial and error when there is but a single trial and zero tolerance for error." Yet it credits runtime learning for today's systems: public use "has likely helped to accelerate the progress of technical alignment". Read together, the book draws our boundary (correct at runtime where failure is survivable, prevent where it is not) rather than refuting runtime alignment. Where it differs is where the line falls: it puts every frontier failure beyond it.

Institutional design