The Good Intentions Problem Glossary
The Good Intentions Problem is the recurring fact that decent people with serious intentions can build dangerous systems once their intentions are housed inside institutions with money, power, scale, and instruments.
The point is not to sneer at the people. Many AI researchers, founders, engineers, and safety teams are plainly intelligent, sincere, and worried about real risks. The problem is that good intentions do not float free of structure. Investor demands, revenue targets, cloud contracts, politics, prestige, and the quiet gravitational pull of becoming very rich all shape what an institution can continue to mean by “for the public good.”
In the Firefly / Serenity register, this is the lesson of the Operative: not malice, but benevolence with instruments.
Judge not, lest ye be judged. But non-judgment is not naivete.