I think there’s something here, but it’s usually thought of the other way around, i.e. solving AI alignment implies solving human alignment, but the opposite is not necessarily true because humans are less general intelligences than AI.
Also, consider that your example of Taylorism is a case study in an alignment mechanism failing, in that it tried to align the org but failed in that it spawned the creation of a subagent (the union) that caused it to do something management might have considered worse than the loss of potential gains given up by not applying Taylorism.
Anyway, this is a topic that’s come up a few times on LessWrong; I don’t have links handy though but you should be able to find them via search.
I’m not trying to prove full alignment from these. It is more like a) a case study at actual efforts to align intelligent agents by formal means and b) the identification of conditions where this does succeed.
Regarding its failure: It seems that a close reading of its history doesn’t prove that: a) Taylorism didn’t fail within the factories and b) the unions were not founded within these factories (by their workers) but existed before and pursued their own agendas. Clearly real humans have a life outside of factories and can use that to coordinate—something that wouldn’t hold for a zero-agent AI.
I tried to find examples on LW and elsewhere. That is what turned up the link at the bottom. I am on LW for quite a while and have not seen this discussed in this way. I have searched again and all searches involving combinations of human intelligence, alignment and misc words for analogy or comparison turn up not much than this one which matches just because of its size:
Thank you for your detailed reply. I was already wondering whether anybody saw these shortform posts at all. They were promoted at a time but currently it seems hard to notice them with the current UI. How did you spot this post?
I read LW via /allPosts and they show up there for me. Not sure if that’s the default or not since you can configure the feed, which I’m sure I’ve done some of but I can’t remember what.
I think there’s something here, but it’s usually thought of the other way around, i.e. solving AI alignment implies solving human alignment, but the opposite is not necessarily true because humans are less general intelligences than AI.
Also, consider that your example of Taylorism is a case study in an alignment mechanism failing, in that it tried to align the org but failed in that it spawned the creation of a subagent (the union) that caused it to do something management might have considered worse than the loss of potential gains given up by not applying Taylorism.
Anyway, this is a topic that’s come up a few times on LessWrong; I don’t have links handy though but you should be able to find them via search.
I’m not trying to prove full alignment from these. It is more like a) a case study at actual efforts to align intelligent agents by formal means and b) the identification of conditions where this does succeed.
Regarding its failure: It seems that a close reading of its history doesn’t prove that: a) Taylorism didn’t fail within the factories and b) the unions were not founded within these factories (by their workers) but existed before and pursued their own agendas. Clearly real humans have a life outside of factories and can use that to coordinate—something that wouldn’t hold for a zero-agent AI.
I tried to find examples on LW and elsewhere. That is what turned up the link at the bottom. I am on LW for quite a while and have not seen this discussed in this way. I have searched again and all searches involving combinations of human intelligence, alignment and misc words for analogy or comparison turn up not much than this one which matches just because of its size:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5bd75cc58225bf0670375575/the-learning-theoretic-ai-alignment-research-agenda
Can you suggest better ones?
Thank you for your detailed reply. I was already wondering whether anybody saw these shortform posts at all. They were promoted at a time but currently it seems hard to notice them with the current UI. How did you spot this post?
I read LW via /allPosts and they show up there for me. Not sure if that’s the default or not since you can configure the feed, which I’m sure I’ve done some of but I can’t remember what.
The /allPosts is pretty useful. Thank you!