Sometimes people make various suggestions that we should simply build "safe" artificial Superintelligence (ASI), rather than the presumably "unsafe" kind.[1]There are various flavors of “safe” people suggest.Sometimes they suggest building “aligned” ASI: You have a full agentic autonomous god-like ASI running around, but it really really loves you and definitely will do the right thing.Sometimes they suggest we should simply build “tool AI” or “non-agentic” AI.Sometimes they have even more exotic, or more obviously-stupid ideas.Now I could argue at lengths about why this is astronomically harder than people think it is, why their various proposals are almost universally unworkable, why even attempting this is insanely immoral[2], but that’s not the main point I want to make.Instead, I want to make a simpler point:Assume you have a research agenda that, if executed, results in a ASI-tier powerful software system that you can “control”.[3]Punchline: On your way to figuring out how to bui...