The basis of all successful technology to date has been separation of concerns. One of the problems with Alignment as an academic discipline is keeping the focus on problems that can actually be solved, without drawing in all of philosophy and politics. It’s like the old joke about object-oriented programming: you asked for a banana, but you got a gorilla holding the banana, and the entire jungle too.
Do you mean like there are (at least) two subproblems that can be addressed separately?
how to align AI with any set of values
exact specification of human values
Where the former is the proper concern of AI researchers, and the latter should be studied by someone else (even if we currently have no idea who could do such thing reliably, it’s a separate problem regardless).
I’m actually more interested in corrigibility than values alignment, so I don’t think that AI should be solving moral dilemmas every time it takes an action. I think values should be worked out in the post-ASI period, by humans in a democratic political system.
The basis of all successful technology to date has been separation of concerns. One of the problems with Alignment as an academic discipline is keeping the focus on problems that can actually be solved, without drawing in all of philosophy and politics. It’s like the old joke about object-oriented programming: you asked for a banana, but you got a gorilla holding the banana, and the entire jungle too.
Do you mean like there are (at least) two subproblems that can be addressed separately?
how to align AI with any set of values
exact specification of human values
Where the former is the proper concern of AI researchers, and the latter should be studied by someone else (even if we currently have no idea who could do such thing reliably, it’s a separate problem regardless).
I’m actually more interested in corrigibility than values alignment, so I don’t think that AI should be solving moral dilemmas every time it takes an action. I think values should be worked out in the post-ASI period, by humans in a democratic political system.
Basically what I’m thinking here, as an upvoter of Conor.