If I encountered an intelligent extraterrestrial species, in principle I think I could learn to predict fairly well things like what it finds easy to understand, what its values are, and what it considers to be ethical behavior, without using any of the cognitive machinery I use to self-reflect. Humans tend to reason about other humans by asking “what would I think if I was in their situation”, but in principle an AI doesn’t have to work that way. But perhaps you think there are strong reasons why this would happen in practice?
Supposing we had strong reasons to believe that an AI system wasn’t self-aware and wasn’t capable of self-reflection. So it can look over a plan it generated and reason about its understandability, corrigibility, impact on human values, etc. without any reflective aspects. Does that make alignment any easier according to you?
Supposing the AI lacks a concept of “easy to understand”, as you hypothesize. Does it seem reasonable to think that it might not be all that great at convincing a gatekeeper to unbox it, since it might focus on super complex arguments which humans can’t understand?
Entirely separately, I have concerns about the ability of ML-based technology to robustly point the AI in any builder-intended direction whatsoever, even if there exists some not-too-large adequate mapping from that intended direction onto the AI’s internal ontology at training time. My guess is that more of the disagreement lies here.
Is this mostly about mesa-optimizers, or something else?
If I encountered an intelligent extraterrestrial species, in principle I think I could learn to predict fairly well things like what it finds easy to understand, what its values are, and what it considers to be ethical behavior, without using any of the cognitive machinery I use to self-reflect. Humans tend to reason about other humans by asking “what would I think if I was in their situation”, but in principle an AI doesn’t have to work that way. But perhaps you think there are strong reasons why this would happen in practice?
Supposing we had strong reasons to believe that an AI system wasn’t self-aware and wasn’t capable of self-reflection. So it can look over a plan it generated and reason about its understandability, corrigibility, impact on human values, etc. without any reflective aspects. Does that make alignment any easier according to you?
Supposing the AI lacks a concept of “easy to understand”, as you hypothesize. Does it seem reasonable to think that it might not be all that great at convincing a gatekeeper to unbox it, since it might focus on super complex arguments which humans can’t understand?
Is this mostly about mesa-optimizers, or something else?