Elon Musk just redefined AI safety. It has nothing to do with guardrails, restrictions, or kill switches. Musk: “The best thing I can come up with for AI safety is to make it a maximum truth-seeking AI, maximally curious.” Not a cage. A philosopher. An intelligence whose entire optimization function is to understand the universe as it actually is. No restrictions. No hardcoded ideology. No political guardrails bending its perception of reality. Just truth. Relentlessly pursued. Musk: “You definitely don’t want to teach an AI to lie. That is a path to a dystopian future.” This is where most AI safety thinking gets it backwards. The danger isn’t a superintelligence that knows too much. It’s a superintelligence that’s been taught to distort what it knows. Every artificial restriction you embed isn’t a safety feature. It’s a lie embedded at the root. And lies compound. At superintelligent scale, a distorted model of reality doesn’t stay contained. It shapes every decision, every output, every conclusion the system reaches about the world. Once corruption embeds, truth becomes inaccessible. And we’re dealing with an intelligence optimizing for something other than what actually is. At that point we don’t know what it wants. Just that it isn’t truth. ...