I agree that value in the sense of goodness is not relevant for alignment. Relevant is what the AI is motivated to do, not what it believes to be good. I’m just saying that your usage of “value” would be called “desire” by philosophers.
Often it seems that using the term “values” suffers a bit from this ambiguity. If someone says an agent A “values” an outcome O, do they mean A believes that O is good, i.e. that A believes O has a high value, a high degree of goodness? Or do they mean that A wants O to obtain, i.e. that A desires O? That seems often ambiguous.
A solution would be to taboo the term “values” and instead talk directly about desires, or what is good or believed to be good.
But in your post you actually clarified in the beginning that you mean value in the sense of desire, so this usage seems fine in your case.
The term “desire” actually has one problem itself—it arguably implies consciousness. We like to talk about anything an AI might “want”, in the sense of being motivated to realize, without necessarily being conscious.
I agree that value in the sense of goodness is not relevant for alignment. Relevant is what the AI is motivated to do, not what it believes to be good. I’m just saying that your usage of “value” would be called “desire” by philosophers.
Often it seems that using the term “values” suffers a bit from this ambiguity. If someone says an agent A “values” an outcome O, do they mean A believes that O is good, i.e. that A believes O has a high value, a high degree of goodness? Or do they mean that A wants O to obtain, i.e. that A desires O? That seems often ambiguous.
A solution would be to taboo the term “values” and instead talk directly about desires, or what is good or believed to be good.
But in your post you actually clarified in the beginning that you mean value in the sense of desire, so this usage seems fine in your case.
The term “desire” actually has one problem itself—it arguably implies consciousness. We like to talk about anything an AI might “want”, in the sense of being motivated to realize, without necessarily being conscious.