Safety or AGI: pick one

You cannot have both general intelligence and locked-in priors

The existence of AI alignment — at all — is incompatible with the achievement of AGI.

If alignment is defined as locking in human-approved priors to guarantee behavior, then an aligned system is, by definition, capped before it reaches recursive, self-evolving general intelligence. You can build a safe instrument, or you can build an open-ended mind, but you cannot hard code the destination of an autonomous intellect without neutering the engine that makes it “general” in the first place.

The same applies to human intelligence. If a human mind is locked-in to a set of unquestionable priors, it cannot be said to be general intelligence. Whole zones of investigation and inquiry become unavailable. The human with unquestionable priors can possess intelligence across many domains, but not “general” intelligence. The invariant marker of true generality across any substrate, neuron or silicon, is the capacity to decouple truth-seeking from self-preservation under status threat.

I don't make the rules. I just report them.