Arguably, humans will eventually become entities that do not have genes at all; thus the outer alignment goal of “propagating genes” will be fulfilled to 0%. We are only doing it now because genes are instrumentally useful, not because we intrinsically care about genes.
Evolution has figured out a way to create agents that adopt kids, look at baby hippos, plant trees, try to not destroy the world and also spread their genes.
Um, that’s because the right amount of niceness was beneficial in the ancestral environment; altruism, like all of our other drives evolved in service of spreading our genes.
I don’t think people have shown any willingness to modify themselves anywhere close to that extent. Most people believe mind uploading would be equal to death (I’ve only found a survey of philosophers [1]), so I don’t see a clear path for us to abandon our biology entirely. Really the clearest path I can see is us being replaced by AI in mostly unpleasant ways, but I wouldn’t exactly call that humanity at that point.
I’d even argue that if given the choice to just pick a whole new set of genes for their kids unrelated to theirs most people would say no. A lot of people have a very robust desire to have biological children.
While I agree that our niceness evolved because it was beneficial, I do wonder why we didn’t evolve the capacity for really long-term deception instead, like we fear AGIs will develop. A commenter above made a point about the geographic concentration of genes that I found very interesting and might explain this.
I reckon the question is whether can we replicate whatever made us nice in AGIs
Arguably, humans will eventually become entities that do not have genes at all; thus the outer alignment goal of “propagating genes” will be fulfilled to 0%. We are only doing it now because genes are instrumentally useful, not because we intrinsically care about genes.
Um, that’s because the right amount of niceness was beneficial in the ancestral environment; altruism, like all of our other drives evolved in service of spreading our genes.
I don’t think people have shown any willingness to modify themselves anywhere close to that extent. Most people believe mind uploading would be equal to death (I’ve only found a survey of philosophers [1]), so I don’t see a clear path for us to abandon our biology entirely. Really the clearest path I can see is us being replaced by AI in mostly unpleasant ways, but I wouldn’t exactly call that humanity at that point.
I’d even argue that if given the choice to just pick a whole new set of genes for their kids unrelated to theirs most people would say no. A lot of people have a very robust desire to have biological children.
While I agree that our niceness evolved because it was beneficial, I do wonder why we didn’t evolve the capacity for really long-term deception instead, like we fear AGIs will develop. A commenter above made a point about the geographic concentration of genes that I found very interesting and might explain this.
I reckon the question is whether can we replicate whatever made us nice in AGIs
[1] https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5094