I really appreciate this post. I agree that AI which does not view itself as radically separate from its environment and creators has major implications for alignment, human survival, and the survival of non-human environments.
Instilling this seems delicate and I don’t have a grasp on how this could be done (especially in the first two umbrella strategies you proposed).
Regarding the reflective identity protocols, do you mean to test, in inference, whether in-context model-generated reflections impact reported sense of self? Or do you see identity reflection as being integrated into training, perhaps like chain of thought but where the end goal is some appropriate stance on an open-ended question?
Thanks for the elaboration!
I see your reasoning for why high-bandwidth sensing of the world encourages a sense of connectedness. I’m still working through whether I think correlation is that strong, i.e. whether adding a bunch of sensors would help much or not.
I might worry the more important piece is how an internal cognition “interprets” these signals, however rich and varied they may be. Even if the intelligence has lots of nerve-like signals from a variety of physical entities which it then considers part of itself and takes care to preserve, it may always draw some boundary beyond which everything is distinct from it. It might be connected to one human, but not all of them, and then act only in the interest of one human. Kind of like how this individual with paralysis might consider their computer part of them, but not the computer next door, and adding more connections might not scale indefinitely. Preventing it from drawing a sharp distinction between itself and outside-itself seems like it might be more of a cognition problem.
Also, I might be confused on this next part fits into what you’re saying, but I wouldn’t think someone who loses their vision is less likely to sense interconnectedness to the beings around them or aliveness. They might just interpret their other signals with more attention to nuance or a different perspective. (of course, there does exist this nuance to sense, e.g. sound signals are continuous and heterogenous, and I think part of your point is this is a necessary prerequisite). But would you say that the addition of a sense like vision is actively helpful?