BTW I do agree with you that Eliezer’s interview response seems to suggest that he thinks aligning an AGI to “basic notions of morality” is harder and aligning an AGI to “strawberry problem” is easier. If that’s what he thinks, it’s at least not obvious to me.
My sense (which I expect Eliezer would agree with) is that it’s relatively easy to get an AI system to imitate the true underlying ‘basic notions of morality’, to the extent humans agree on that, but that this doesn’t protect you at all as soon as you want to start making large changes, or as soon as you start trying to replace specialist sectors of the economy. (A lot of ethics for doctors has to do with the challenges of simultaneously being a doctor and a human; those ethics will not necessarily be relevant for docbots, and the question of what they should be instead is potentially hard to figure out.)
So if you’re mostly interested in getting out of the acute risk period, you probably need to aim for a harder target.
Strawberry Alignment (defined as: make an AGI that is specifically & exclusively motivated to duplicate a strawberry without destroying the world), versus
“Strawberry Problem” (make an AGI that in fact duplicates a strawberry without destroying the world, using whatever methods / motivations you like).
Eliezer definitely talks about the latter. I’m not sure Eliezer has ever brought up the former? I think I was getting that from the OP (Quintin), but maybe Quintin was just confused (and/or Eliezer misspoke).
Anyway, making an AGI that can solve the strawberry problem is tautologically no harder than making an AGI that can do advanced technological development and is motivated by human norms / morals / whatever, because the latter set of AGIs is a subset of the former.
My sense (which I expect Eliezer would agree with) is that it’s relatively easy to get an AI system to imitate the true underlying ‘basic notions of morality’, to the extent humans agree on that, but that this doesn’t protect you at all as soon as you want to start making large changes, or as soon as you start trying to replace specialist sectors of the economy. (A lot of ethics for doctors has to do with the challenges of simultaneously being a doctor and a human; those ethics will not necessarily be relevant for docbots, and the question of what they should be instead is potentially hard to figure out.)
So if you’re mostly interested in getting out of the acute risk period, you probably need to aim for a harder target.
Hmm, on further reflection, I was mixing up
Strawberry Alignment (defined as: make an AGI that is specifically & exclusively motivated to duplicate a strawberry without destroying the world), versus
“Strawberry Problem” (make an AGI that in fact duplicates a strawberry without destroying the world, using whatever methods / motivations you like).
Eliezer definitely talks about the latter. I’m not sure Eliezer has ever brought up the former? I think I was getting that from the OP (Quintin), but maybe Quintin was just confused (and/or Eliezer misspoke).
Anyway, making an AGI that can solve the strawberry problem is tautologically no harder than making an AGI that can do advanced technological development and is motivated by human norms / morals / whatever, because the latter set of AGIs is a subset of the former.
Sorry. I crossed out that paragraph. :)