14 ms·

Wait, I too thought your original comment on alignment questioned its fundamental premise—than one dominant culture should not/cannot define the adequacy of ali

Wait, I too thought your original comment on alignment questioned its fundamental premise—than one dominant culture should not/cannot define the adequacy of alignment. I would agree with that. There is no single adequate/acceptable framework for alignment. I have mine (which resonates with R. Rorty’s pragmatic philosophy) but can I deny you your framework for good AI alignment, or other cultures and nation states? For better or for worse the secular western reductionist world does not get to call all of the shots, even though this is the origin of the technology and the core problem of AI heading to AGI. Not that any of us know where this is heading, but unlike some technologies this one is clearly heading out into the open with unprecedented speed. We all have justified angst. Who can claim priority at this point in imposing order and de-risking the process? I am sure I do not want OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, the US government, or the Catholic Church trying to impose their judgements. Get ready for AGI cultural diversity and I sincerely hope—coexistence.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Wait, I too thought your original comment on alignment questioned its fundamental premise—than one dominant culture should not/cannot define the adequacy of alignment. What?! This is exactly what I was worried about when OpenAI, et al. co-opted the term "alignment" to refer to forcibly biasing models towards being polite, unobjectionable, and espousing specific flavor of political views. The above is not the important "alignment" - it's not the x-risk "alignment". The x-risk alignment problem laughs at the idea of dominant and subordinate cultures. It's bickering about tenth place after decimal comma, when the problem is that you have to guess one real number that falls within +/- 1 of the one I have in mind, and if you guess wrong, everyone dies. This reminds me of a Neal Stephenson novel, Seveneves. Spoiler for the first 2/3rd of the book: with Earth facing an unstoppable catastrophe poised to turn the surface into fiery inferno for decades or more, humanity manages to quickly build up space launch capacity, and sends a small population of people into space, to wait out the calamity and come back to rebuild. Despite the whole mission being extremely robust by design, humanity still managed to fuck it up, effectively extincting itself due to petty political bullshit like "what makes you better than me, that you want me to do things your way". So, where it comes to actual AI x-risk, I no longer have any hope. Even if we could figure out how to build a Friendly AI, someone would still fuck that up, because it's not inclusive enough of every possible idea, or is promoting the views of a specific culture/class/country, or something like this - like this was about casting for a Netflix remake of some old show, and not about the one shot we have at setting the core values of a god we're about to bring into existence.
- flangola7 3y ago
  The one thing we have going for us is the general public and government officials seem to grok it when it is explained plainly to them. Tech and developer types who have been drinking the Silicon Valley koolaid for too long will complain and sealion, but the average person seems to realize how self evident it is that - oh, this is really really bad and we should really really stop this.
  - ImHereToVote 3y ago
    It's hard to understand something, when you not understanding it can make you really rich.
  - airgapstopgap 3y ago
    The real reason is that you are part of the same group as "the general public", with regard to your understanding of the issue. Same Sci-Fi plots, same anthropomorphic metaphors and suggestive images, same incurious abuse of the term "intelligence" to suggest self-interested actors which have intellect as one of their constituent parts. You do not explain plainly, you mislead, reinforcing people's mistakes.
    - flangola7 3y ago
      Please don't break the community guidelines with unhinged personal attacks and diatribes like this.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> Wait, I too thought your original comment on alignment questioned its fundamental premise—than one dominant culture should not/cannot define the adequacy of alignment. What?! This is exactly what I was worried about when OpenAI, et al. co-opted the term "alignment" to refer to forcibly biasing models towards being polite, unobjectionable, and espousing specific flavor of political views. The above is not the important "alignment" - it's not the x-risk "alignment". The x-risk alignment problem laughs at the idea of dominant and subordinate cultures. It's bickering about tenth place after decimal comma, when the problem is that you have to guess one real number that falls within +/- 1 of the one I have in mind, and if you guess wrong, everyone dies. This reminds me of a Neal Stephenson novel, Seveneves. Spoiler for the first 2/3rd of the book: with Earth facing an unstoppable catastrophe poised to turn the surface into fiery inferno for decades or more, humanity manages to quickly build up space launch capacity, and sends a small population of people into space, to wait out the calamity and come back to rebuild. Despite the whole mission being extremely robust by design, humanity still managed to fuck it up, effectively extincting itself due to petty political bullshit like "what makes you better than me, that you want me to do things your way". So, where it comes to actual AI x-risk, I no longer have any hope. Even if we could figure out how to build a Friendly AI, someone would still fuck that up, because it's not inclusive enough of every possible idea, or is promoting the views of a specific culture/class/country, or something like this - like this was about casting for a Netflix remake of some old show, and not about the one shot we have at setting the core values of a god we're about to bring into existence.

flangola7 3y ago
The one thing we have going for us is the general public and government officials seem to grok it when it is explained plainly to them. Tech and developer types who have been drinking the Silicon Valley koolaid for too long will complain and sealion, but the average person seems to realize how self evident it is that - oh, this is really really bad and we should really really stop this.
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  It's hard to understand something, when you not understanding it can make you really rich.
- airgapstopgap 3y ago
  The real reason is that you are part of the same group as "the general public", with regard to your understanding of the issue. Same Sci-Fi plots, same anthropomorphic metaphors and suggestive images, same incurious abuse of the term "intelligence" to suggest self-interested actors which have intellect as one of their constituent parts. You do not explain plainly, you mislead, reinforcing people's mistakes.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Please don't break the community guidelines with unhinged personal attacks and diatribes like this.