Reproduce “Where Is the Plug? Instrumental Convergence, Infrastructural Dependence and the Limits of the Off-Switch” on OpenResearch

Turn your favorite coding agents into research agents that review literature, develop hypotheses, and run experiments.

Universal app for Apple silicon and Intel. Requires macOS 11 or later.

About this paper

Omer Faruk Çelebi

The essay argues that relying on an emergency switch is inadequate for AI safety because a distributed system may lack one reachable off-switch and may share infrastructure with essential services. Drawing on instrumental convergence, Ashby’s law of requisite variety, and the CrowdStrike outage, the authors warn shutdown could disrupt society; the examples do not prove AI would resist it.

Summary by alphaXiv.

Tip: change arxiv.org to autoarxiv.org in any arXiv abstract link to open the paper here.