Safe for What World? Why the AI safety field may be asking the wrong question

Published on June 12, 2026 1:42 PM GMTI used an LLM to help redraft some arguments for an EA specific audience and it likely contains ca.10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it.Epistemic status: The empirical claims rest on institutional sources cited at the end. The central argument, that AI safety research as a field does not ask whether its deployment trajectory is compatible with the physical systems it draws on, is visible in what the field's research ...