This post is adjacent to an idea that I’ve thought about privately for some time, but which I haven’t seen discussed publicly in a straightforward fashion. If the first AI built can be aligned, whoever or whatever controls that AI will in effect have absolute power. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
There are very few people alive that I would like to give that sort of absolute power to, and even fewer people that I should want to give that power to. Maybe we give that sort of power to a collection of people? Even worse! I definitely don’t want a group of AI researchers with competing interests, a corporation or the US government to be in control of aligning the AI. Sure we may have the functional ability to align an AI. CEV might be a good sort sort of alignment, but nobody should trust anybody else to actually use CEV to align their AI.
It’s unlikely we’re in a world where MIRI, Google, or OpenAI miraculously manage to develop AI first and have the ability to align it. It’s even more unlikely we’re in a world where Google or whoever else also decides to align it in a way that’s prosperous for you, me, or all mankind.
This is why I don’t hate Musk’s idea of AI for everyone as much as most other people. In fact I think it has a better shot at working than trusting a single third party to choose to align AI.
This should probably be a top level post, but I don’t quite like making those so I’ll leave it as a comment here.
This post is adjacent to an idea that I’ve thought about privately for some time, but which I haven’t seen discussed publicly in a straightforward fashion. If the first AI built can be aligned, whoever or whatever controls that AI will in effect have absolute power. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
There are very few people alive that I would like to give that sort of absolute power to, and even fewer people that I should want to give that power to. Maybe we give that sort of power to a collection of people? Even worse! I definitely don’t want a group of AI researchers with competing interests, a corporation or the US government to be in control of aligning the AI. Sure we may have the functional ability to align an AI. CEV might be a good sort sort of alignment, but nobody should trust anybody else to actually use CEV to align their AI.
It’s unlikely we’re in a world where MIRI, Google, or OpenAI miraculously manage to develop AI first and have the ability to align it. It’s even more unlikely we’re in a world where Google or whoever else also decides to align it in a way that’s prosperous for you, me, or all mankind.
This is why I don’t hate Musk’s idea of AI for everyone as much as most other people. In fact I think it has a better shot at working than trusting a single third party to choose to align AI.
This should probably be a top level post, but I don’t quite like making those so I’ll leave it as a comment here.