Once they get into CEV, they may not want to defer to others anymore, or may set things up with a large power/status imbalance between themselves and everyone else which may be detrimental to moral/philosophical progress. There are plenty of seemingly idealistic people in history refusing to give up or share power once they got power. The prudent thing to do seems to never get that much power in the first place, or to share it as soon as possible.
If you’re pretty sure you will defer to others once inside CEV, then you might as well do it outside CEV due to #1 in my grandparent comment.
I wonder how much of those seemingly idealistic people retained power when it was available because they were indeed only pretending to be idealistic. Assuming one is actually initially idealistic but then gets corrupted by having power in some way, one thing someone can do in CEV that you can’t do in real life is reuse the CEV process to come up with even better CEV processes which will be even more likely to retain/recover their just-before-launching-CEV values. Yes, many people would mess this up or fail in some other way in CEV; but we only need one person or group who we’d be somewhat confident would do alright in CEV. Plausibly there are at least a few eg MIRIers who would satisfy this. Importantly, to me, this reduces outer alignment to “find someone smart and reasonable and likely to have good goal-content integrity”, which is a matter of social & psychology that seems to be much smaller than the initial full problem of formal outer alignment / alignment target design.
One of the main reasons to do CEV is because we’re gonna die of AI soon, and CEV is a way to have infinite time to solve the necessary problems. Another is that even if we don’t die of AI, we get eaten by various moloch instead of being able to safely solve the necessary problems at whatever pace is necessary.
Once they get into CEV, they may not want to defer to others anymore, or may set things up with a large power/status imbalance between themselves and everyone else which may be detrimental to moral/philosophical progress. There are plenty of seemingly idealistic people in history refusing to give up or share power once they got power. The prudent thing to do seems to never get that much power in the first place, or to share it as soon as possible.
If you’re pretty sure you will defer to others once inside CEV, then you might as well do it outside CEV due to #1 in my grandparent comment.
I wonder how much of those seemingly idealistic people retained power when it was available because they were indeed only pretending to be idealistic. Assuming one is actually initially idealistic but then gets corrupted by having power in some way, one thing someone can do in CEV that you can’t do in real life is reuse the CEV process to come up with even better CEV processes which will be even more likely to retain/recover their just-before-launching-CEV values. Yes, many people would mess this up or fail in some other way in CEV; but we only need one person or group who we’d be somewhat confident would do alright in CEV. Plausibly there are at least a few eg MIRIers who would satisfy this. Importantly, to me, this reduces outer alignment to “find someone smart and reasonable and likely to have good goal-content integrity”, which is a matter of social & psychology that seems to be much smaller than the initial full problem of formal outer alignment / alignment target design.
One of the main reasons to do CEV is because we’re gonna die of AI soon, and CEV is a way to have infinite time to solve the necessary problems. Another is that even if we don’t die of AI, we get eaten by various moloch instead of being able to safely solve the necessary problems at whatever pace is necessary.