Aren’t there a lot of clearer words for this? “Well-intentioned”, “nice”, “benevolent”, etc.
Fair enough. I guess it just seems somewhat incongruous to say. “Oh yes, the AI is aligned. Of course it might desperately crave murdering all of us in its heart (we certainly haven’t ruled this out with our current approach), but it is aligned because we’ve made it so that it wouldn’t get away with it if it tried.”
Sounds like a lot of political alliances! (And “these two political actors are aligned” is arguably an even weaker condition than “these two political actors are allies”.)
At the end of the day, of course, all of these analogies are going to be flawed. AI is genuinely a different beast.
Personally, I like mentally splitting the space into AI safety (emphasis on measurement and control), AI alignment (getting it to align to the operators purposes and actually do what the operators desire), and AI value-alignment (getting the AI to understand and care about what people need and want).
Feels like a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, and yet some distinct non-overlap spaces.
By my framing, Redwood research and METR are more centrally AI safety. ARC/Paul’s research agenda more of a mix of AI safety and AI alignment. MIRI’s work to fundamentally understand and shape Agents is a mix of AI alignment and AI value-alignment. Obviously success there would have the downstream effect of robustly improving AI safety (reducing the need for careful evals and control), but is a more difficult approach in general with less immediate applicability.
I think we need all these things!
Fair enough. I guess it just seems somewhat incongruous to say. “Oh yes, the AI is aligned. Of course it might desperately crave murdering all of us in its heart (we certainly haven’t ruled this out with our current approach), but it is aligned because we’ve made it so that it wouldn’t get away with it if it tried.”
Sounds like a lot of political alliances! (And “these two political actors are aligned” is arguably an even weaker condition than “these two political actors are allies”.)
At the end of the day, of course, all of these analogies are going to be flawed. AI is genuinely a different beast.
Personally, I like mentally splitting the space into AI safety (emphasis on measurement and control), AI alignment (getting it to align to the operators purposes and actually do what the operators desire), and AI value-alignment (getting the AI to understand and care about what people need and want). Feels like a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, and yet some distinct non-overlap spaces.
By my framing, Redwood research and METR are more centrally AI safety. ARC/Paul’s research agenda more of a mix of AI safety and AI alignment. MIRI’s work to fundamentally understand and shape Agents is a mix of AI alignment and AI value-alignment. Obviously success there would have the downstream effect of robustly improving AI safety (reducing the need for careful evals and control), but is a more difficult approach in general with less immediate applicability. I think we need all these things!