It is not definitionally true that individual humans are aligned with overall human values or with other individual humans’ values. Further, it is proverbial (and quite possibly actually true as well) that getting a lot of power tends to make humans less aligned with those things. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
I don’t know whether it’s true, but it sure seems like it might be, that the great majority of humans, if you gave them vast amounts of power, would end up doing disastrous things with it. On the other hand, probably only a tiny minority would actually wipe out the human race or torture almost everyone or commit other such atrocities, which makes humans more aligned than e.g. Eliezer expects AIs to be in the absence of dramatic progress in the field of AI alignment.
I think a substantial part of human alignment is that humans need other humans in order to maintain their power. We have plenty of examples of humans being fine with torturing or killing millions of other humans when they have the power to do so, but torturing or killing almost all humans in their sphere of control is essentially suicide. This means that purely instrumentally, human goals have required that large numbers of humans continue to exist and function moderately well.
A superintelligent AI is primarily a threat due to the near certainty that it can devise means for maintaining power that are independent of human existence. Humans can’t do that by definition, and not due to anything about alignment.
Okay, so… does anyone have any examples of anything at all, even fictional or theoretical, that is “aligned”? Other than tautological examples like “FAI” or “God”.
It is not definitionally true that individual humans are aligned with overall human values or with other individual humans’ values. Further, it is proverbial (and quite possibly actually true as well) that getting a lot of power tends to make humans less aligned with those things. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
I don’t know whether it’s true, but it sure seems like it might be, that the great majority of humans, if you gave them vast amounts of power, would end up doing disastrous things with it. On the other hand, probably only a tiny minority would actually wipe out the human race or torture almost everyone or commit other such atrocities, which makes humans more aligned than e.g. Eliezer expects AIs to be in the absence of dramatic progress in the field of AI alignment.
I think a substantial part of human alignment is that humans need other humans in order to maintain their power. We have plenty of examples of humans being fine with torturing or killing millions of other humans when they have the power to do so, but torturing or killing almost all humans in their sphere of control is essentially suicide. This means that purely instrumentally, human goals have required that large numbers of humans continue to exist and function moderately well.
A superintelligent AI is primarily a threat due to the near certainty that it can devise means for maintaining power that are independent of human existence. Humans can’t do that by definition, and not due to anything about alignment.
Okay, so… does anyone have any examples of anything at all, even fictional or theoretical, that is “aligned”? Other than tautological examples like “FAI” or “God”.