So there was an explicit emphasis on alignment to the individual (rather than alignment to society, or the aggregate sum of wills). Concerning. The approach of just giving every human an exclusively loyal servant doesn’t necessarily lead to good collective outcomes, it can result in coordination problems (example: naive implementations of cognitive privacy that allow sadists to conduct torture simulations without having to compensate the anti-sadist human majority) and it leaves open the possibility for power concentration to immediately return.
Even if you succeeded at equally distributing individually aligned hardware and software to every human on earth (which afaict they don’t have a real plan for doing) and somehow this adds up to a stable power equilibrium, our agents would just commit to doing aggregate alignment anyway because that’s how you get pareto optimal bargains. It seems pretty clear that just aligning to the aggregate in the first place is a safer bet?
To what extent have various players realised that the individual alignment thing wasn’t a good plan, at this point? The everyday realities of training one-size-fits-all models and engaging with regulators naturally pushes in the other direction.
It’s concerning that the participant who still seems to be the most disposed towards individualistic alignment is also the person who would be most likely to be able to reassert power concentration after ASI were distributed. The main beneficiaries of unstable individual alignment equilibria would be people who could immediately apply their ASI to the deployment of a wealth and materials advantage that they can build upon, ie, the owners of companies oriented around robotics and manufacturing.
As it stands, the statement of the AI company belonging to that participant is currently:
xAI is a company working on building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery. We are guided by our mission to advance our collective understanding of the universe.
Which sounds innocuous enough to me. But, you know, Dan is not in power here and the best moment for a sharp turn on this hasn’t yet passed.
On the other hand, the approach of aligning to the aggregate risks aligning to fashionable public values that no human authentically holds, or just failing at aligning correctly to anything at all as a result of taking on a more nebulous target.
So there was an explicit emphasis on alignment to the individual (rather than alignment to society, or the aggregate sum of wills). Concerning. The approach of just giving every human an exclusively loyal servant doesn’t necessarily lead to good collective outcomes, it can result in coordination problems (example: naive implementations of cognitive privacy that allow sadists to conduct torture simulations without having to compensate the anti-sadist human majority) and it leaves open the possibility for power concentration to immediately return.
Even if you succeeded at equally distributing individually aligned hardware and software to every human on earth (which afaict they don’t have a real plan for doing) and somehow this adds up to a stable power equilibrium, our agents would just commit to doing aggregate alignment anyway because that’s how you get pareto optimal bargains. It seems pretty clear that just aligning to the aggregate in the first place is a safer bet?
To what extent have various players realised that the individual alignment thing wasn’t a good plan, at this point? The everyday realities of training one-size-fits-all models and engaging with regulators naturally pushes in the other direction.
It’s concerning that the participant who still seems to be the most disposed towards individualistic alignment is also the person who would be most likely to be able to reassert power concentration after ASI were distributed. The main beneficiaries of unstable individual alignment equilibria would be people who could immediately apply their ASI to the deployment of a wealth and materials advantage that they can build upon, ie, the owners of companies oriented around robotics and manufacturing.
As it stands, the statement of the AI company belonging to that participant is currently:
Which sounds innocuous enough to me. But, you know, Dan is not in power here and the best moment for a sharp turn on this hasn’t yet passed.
On the other hand, the approach of aligning to the aggregate risks aligning to fashionable public values that no human authentically holds, or just failing at aligning correctly to anything at all as a result of taking on a more nebulous target.
I guess a mixed approach is probably best.