Or if you take evolution as the principal, the alignment problem wasn’t solved.
In what sense? Because modern humans use birth control? Then what do you make of the fact that most people seem to care about whether biological humans exist a billion years hence?
People definitely do not terminally care about inclusive genetic fitness in its pure abstract form, there is not something inside of them which pushes for plans which increase inclusive genetic fitness. Evolution failed at alignment, strictly speaking.
I think it’s more complicated to answer “did evolution kinda succeed, despite failing at direct alignment?”, and I don’t have time to say more at the moment, so I’ll stop there.
I think the focus on “inclusive genetic fitness” as evolution’s “goal” is weird. I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk about evolution’s “goals”, but if you want to call it an optimization process, the choice of “inclusive genetic fitness” as its target is arbitrary as there are many other boundaries one could trace. Evolution is acting at all levels, e.g. gene, cell, organism, species, the entirety of life on Earth. For example, it is not selecting adaptations which increase the genetic fitness of an individual but lead to the extinction of the species later. In the most basic sense evolution is selecting for “things that expand”, in the entire universe, and humans definitely seem partially aligned with that—the ways in which they aren’t seem non-competitive with this goal.
I don’t know, if I was a supervillian I’d certainly have a huge number of kids and also modify my and my children’s bodies to be more “inclusively genetically fit” in any way my scientist-lackeys could manage. Parents also regularly put huge amounts of effort into their children’s fitness, although we might quibble about whether in our culture they strike the right balance of economic, physical, social, emotional etc fitness.
In what sense? Because modern humans use birth control? Then what do you make of the fact that most people seem to care about whether biological humans exist a billion years hence?
People definitely do not terminally care about inclusive genetic fitness in its pure abstract form, there is not something inside of them which pushes for plans which increase inclusive genetic fitness. Evolution failed at alignment, strictly speaking.
I think it’s more complicated to answer “did evolution kinda succeed, despite failing at direct alignment?”, and I don’t have time to say more at the moment, so I’ll stop there.
I think the focus on “inclusive genetic fitness” as evolution’s “goal” is weird. I’m not even sure it makes sense to talk about evolution’s “goals”, but if you want to call it an optimization process, the choice of “inclusive genetic fitness” as its target is arbitrary as there are many other boundaries one could trace. Evolution is acting at all levels, e.g. gene, cell, organism, species, the entirety of life on Earth. For example, it is not selecting adaptations which increase the genetic fitness of an individual but lead to the extinction of the species later. In the most basic sense evolution is selecting for “things that expand”, in the entire universe, and humans definitely seem partially aligned with that—the ways in which they aren’t seem non-competitive with this goal.
I don’t know, if I was a supervillian I’d certainly have a huge number of kids and also modify my and my children’s bodies to be more “inclusively genetically fit” in any way my scientist-lackeys could manage. Parents also regularly put huge amounts of effort into their children’s fitness, although we might quibble about whether in our culture they strike the right balance of economic, physical, social, emotional etc fitness.