At the time my main worry was honestly probably just wanting money. Also a general distrust of deepmind, along with a feeling that alignment would be easy—compare the alignment optimism perspective, which I think discusses the same mechanisms and I would have agreed without qualification then. I still think some parts of that model, but now believe that the alignment problem’s main manifestations are moloch, authoritarianism, and rentseeking, and the failure story I expect no longer looks like “deepmind is in charge” and looks rather more like a disneyland without children. So the alignment approaches that seem promising to me are the ones that can counter people who are attempting to get alignment with the ownership system, because I expect humans to be suddenly locked out of the ownership system, including humans who are currently very rich within it.
I spoke to the cofounder a lot about mechanism design of social systems, and we had very interesting ideas for how to do it. If the world were going to stay human I’d be optimistic about designing novel currencies that are optimized to be unusually hard to moloch, and that optimism arose from many long conversations with him. But recent conversations with him seem to imply his views are corrupted by the drive for money; his views on mechanism design don’t seem to me to solve the misalignment of markets with their poor participants. He does have interesting ideas and I might have interest in having a lesswrong dialogue with him at some point.
At the time my main worry was honestly probably just wanting money. Also a general distrust of deepmind, along with a feeling that alignment would be easy—compare the alignment optimism perspective, which I think discusses the same mechanisms and I would have agreed without qualification then. I still think some parts of that model, but now believe that the alignment problem’s main manifestations are moloch, authoritarianism, and rentseeking, and the failure story I expect no longer looks like “deepmind is in charge” and looks rather more like a disneyland without children. So the alignment approaches that seem promising to me are the ones that can counter people who are attempting to get alignment with the ownership system, because I expect humans to be suddenly locked out of the ownership system, including humans who are currently very rich within it.
I spoke to the cofounder a lot about mechanism design of social systems, and we had very interesting ideas for how to do it. If the world were going to stay human I’d be optimistic about designing novel currencies that are optimized to be unusually hard to moloch, and that optimism arose from many long conversations with him. But recent conversations with him seem to imply his views are corrupted by the drive for money; his views on mechanism design don’t seem to me to solve the misalignment of markets with their poor participants. He does have interesting ideas and I might have interest in having a lesswrong dialogue with him at some point.
Makes sense, thanks for sharing!