Why is the process by which humans come to reliably care about the real world
IMO this process seems pretty unreliable and fragile, to me. Drugs are popular; video games are popular; people-in-aggregate put more effort into obtaining imaginary afterlives than life extension or cryonics.
But also humans have a much harder time ‘optimizing against themselves’ than AIs will, I think. I don’t have a great mechanistic sense of what it will look like for an AI to reliably care about the real world.
One of the problems with English is that it doesn’t natively support orders of magnitude for “unreliable.” Do you mean “unreliable” as in “between 1% and 50% of people end up with part of their values not related to objects-in-reality”, or as in “there is no a priori reason why anyone would ever care about anything not directly sensorially observable, except as a fluke of their training process”? Because the latter is what current alignment paradigms mispredict, and the former might be a reasonable claim about what really happens for human beings.
EDIT: My reader-model is flagging this whole comment as pedagogically inadequate, so I’ll point to the second half of section 5 in my shard theory document.
IMO this process seems pretty unreliable and fragile, to me. Drugs are popular; video games are popular; people-in-aggregate put more effort into obtaining imaginary afterlives than life extension or cryonics.
But also humans have a much harder time ‘optimizing against themselves’ than AIs will, I think. I don’t have a great mechanistic sense of what it will look like for an AI to reliably care about the real world.
One of the problems with English is that it doesn’t natively support orders of magnitude for “unreliable.” Do you mean “unreliable” as in “between 1% and 50% of people end up with part of their values not related to objects-in-reality”, or as in “there is no a priori reason why anyone would ever care about anything not directly sensorially observable, except as a fluke of their training process”? Because the latter is what current alignment paradigms mispredict, and the former might be a reasonable claim about what really happens for human beings.
EDIT: My reader-model is flagging this whole comment as pedagogically inadequate, so I’ll point to the second half of section 5 in my shard theory document.