Thanks for your response! Could you explain what you mean by “fully general”? Do you mean that alignment of narrow SI is possible? Or that partial alignment of general SI is good enough in some circumstance? If it’s the latter could you give an example?
By “fully general” I mean something like “With alignment process x, we could take the specification of any SI, apply x to it, and have an aligned version of that SI specification”. (I assume almost everyone thinks this isn’t achievable)
But we don’t need an approach that’s this strong: we don’t need to be able to align all, most, or even a small fraction of SIs. One is enough—and in principle we could build in many highly specific constraints by construction (given sufficient understanding).
This still seems very hard, but I don’t think there’s any straightforward argument for its impossibility/intractability. Most such arguments only work against the more general solutions—i.e. if we needed to be able to align any SI specification.
Thanks for your response! Could you explain what you mean by “fully general”? Do you mean that alignment of narrow SI is possible? Or that partial alignment of general SI is good enough in some circumstance? If it’s the latter could you give an example?
By “fully general” I mean something like “With alignment process x, we could take the specification of any SI, apply x to it, and have an aligned version of that SI specification”. (I assume almost everyone thinks this isn’t achievable)
But we don’t need an approach that’s this strong: we don’t need to be able to align all, most, or even a small fraction of SIs. One is enough—and in principle we could build in many highly specific constraints by construction (given sufficient understanding).
This still seems very hard, but I don’t think there’s any straightforward argument for its impossibility/intractability. Most such arguments only work against the more general solutions—i.e. if we needed to be able to align any SI specification.
Here’s a survey of a bunch of impossibility results if you’re interested.
These also apply to stronger results than we need (which is nice!).