A different way to maybe triangulate here: Is misalignment possible, on your view? Like does it ever make sense to say something like “A created B, but failed at alignment and B was misaligned with A”? I ask because I could imagine a position, that sort of sounds a little like what you’re saying, which goes:
There’s no such thing as misalignment. There’s one overarching process, call it evolution or whatever you like, and this process goes through stages of creating new things along new dimensions, but all the stages are part of the overall process. Anything called “misalignment” is describing the relationship of two parts or stages that are contained in the overarching process. The overarching process is at a higher level than that misalignment relationship, and the misalignment helps compute the overarching process.
I literally provided examples of what misalignment with bio-evolution would look like:
Due to observational selection effects, we naturally wouldn’t be here if mesaoptimization failure during brain evolution was too common across the multiverse.[3] But we could have found ourselves in a world with many archaeological examples of species achieving human general technocultural intelligence and then going extinct—not due to AGI of course, but simply due to becoming too intelligent to reproduce.
A different way to maybe triangulate here: Is misalignment possible, on your view? Like does it ever make sense to say something like “A created B, but failed at alignment and B was misaligned with A”? I ask because I could imagine a position, that sort of sounds a little like what you’re saying, which goes:
I literally provided examples of what misalignment with bio-evolution would look like:
If we haven’t seen such an extinction in the archaeological record, it can mean one of several things:
misalignment is rare, or
misalignment is not rare once the species becomes intelligent, but intelligence is rare or
intelligence usually results in transcendence, so there’s only one transition before the bio becomes irrelevant in the lightcone (and we are it)
We don’t know which. I think it’s a combination of 2 and 3.