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> If we solve alignment, we can look forward to material and cultural abundance. I don’t know what it would mean to “solve alignment”. I am skeptical it’s even

> If we solve alignment, we can look forward to material and cultural abundance. I don’t know what it would mean to “solve alignment”. I am skeptical it’s even a coherent possibility. Let’s assume we had a perfect AI. It does everything we want it to but is much more effective at accomplishing our goals. The United States government takes control of the AI and uses it to attack China. China would say the AI is misaligned. Or China takes control of it and uses it to attack the US. The US would say it’s misaligned. Ok, you might say that the issue was that in the above case the AI was acting as a tool rather than an independent agent. Fine. Now, the AI acts on its own to further goals which would be beneficial to humanity. Very quickly we will want to disable it because we don’t even agree on what’s best for humanity, and even if we can agree on general principles any action will have externalities that someone won’t like.

softbt 3y ago
I agree with you, as “smart” as these people at AI companies are, somehow they keep missing the fact that it’s impossible (unless you kill the majority of people) to align on this kind of thing
ChatGTP 3y ago
I can't imagine a world where this happens. How is it possible to have something that is autonomous, intelligent and completely aligned? There is a simple way to fix the alignment problem ,don't build systems that require aligning. I'm not really talking about regulation, I'm just talking about using common sense and wisdom.
- karpierz 3y ago
  We have entire fields that have been trying to solve the alignment problem for autonomous + intelligent agents for centuries: economic and political science.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Feels a little bit different though ?
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      ...also, not sure if this is the point you're trying to make, but nothing is aligned with human interests really, look at what economics and the governmnet has done with climate change?
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    "Trying": The Best We Can Do!
  - ryanklee 3y ago
    Yeah, and so far, they've failed. So that's not really encouraging.
- josho 3y ago
  The reality is we all would love an AI that improves on its own. Look at all those chatgpt examples that were shared because it got something wrong. If only we could make gpt learn then it would only get it wrong once that would make it so much more useful. And therein is the problem we all want this. But as soon as we allow the AI to learn on its own we have introduced the alignment problem. And of course on day 1 nobody will see gpt correcting itself on simple questions as an issue. But on day 365 after it’s been learning at an exponential rate and we’ll have all realized that it’s too late because it’s learned faster than we have.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Has anyone thought about what it would actually take to make gpt learn at an exponential rate? GPT4 from 3 was already starting to see diminishing returns. GPT3 cost $4.6 million dollars to train. 4 cost $100 million, an order of magnitude more, and required an enormous amount of data. All these training algorithms are O(n^2). Do we actually expect these things to grow exponentially or is it more realistic to expect we're going to spend a lot of compute and treasure only to see disappointing results?
sparker72678 3y ago
Exactly. Who is “we”? What are “our” goals? There are (nearly?) no universal human values. AI doesn’t have ethics, it doesn’t have values. It might imitate those in some ways, but it doesn’t have them. What this article longs for is a God it can control. Good luck with that.
glimshe 3y ago
It's actually pretty simple. Like many "innovations" in the past several years, alignment means profitable for founders and investors, and whatever enables a small minority to reach unthinkable levels of productivity, wealth and control so everybody else can serve them as waiters, cleaners and prostitutes. Then they will fly their AI plane (the pilot got fired too, now mowing the lawn) to an ultra-wealthy paradise to discuss with the other billionaires how to "reduce inequality". The proposed solution will be even more "innovations"... THIS time around the next wave of innovation will actually be redistributive, so they say, but in fact it will be rinse and repeat.
gmerc 3y ago
We haven’t managed to align capitalism with the continued survival of the human race or even basic equity. And that’s running on a minimal distributed system of rules and meat bags as CPU It’s preposterous to even hint we could solve AI alignment.
belter 3y ago
Never interrupt a Silicon Valley billionaire who is busy making a fool of himself, twisting logic in complex ways to explain why he should be allowed to run the new AI bubble, to add even more infinite money to his already enormous pool of infinite money...
SilverBirch 3y ago
On that second point... haven't we kind of solved this? Or rather there's a really obvious parallel. We've got an extremely powerful thing that can do whatever we want it to do, and now all we need to do is decide what to ask it to do and make sure it does what we want. Where else do we see that? Well that's government. The US is a massively powerful country, it's got hundreds of thousands of soldiers, billions of dollars at it's disposable, it can shoot individual humans into the sun if it wants to -and it's intelligent too! So how do we control it? A set of institutions with checks and balances elected by and accountable to the public.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  But stable/self-constrained governments require consensus to operate. They don’t just ask politely and prefer it. Checks and balances are preserved not because all the parties are interested in preserving them overall, but because they each want their own power not to be impeded. The systems that can’t achieve this balancing act fall over after a while, and this happens very frequently (99.999% of governments in history?). Nuclear MAD produces a similar equilibrium but this is stable due to specific characteristics of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems (expensive to produce; almost impossible to produce, test, or use secretly; impossible to reliably intercept). We shouldn’t bet on AI development reaching the same equilibrium.

softbt 3y ago

I agree with you, as “smart” as these people at AI companies are, somehow they keep missing the fact that it’s impossible (unless you kill the majority of people) to align on this kind of thing

ChatGTP 3y ago

I can't imagine a world where this happens. How is it possible to have something that is autonomous, intelligent and completely aligned? There is a simple way to fix the alignment problem ,don't build systems that require aligning. I'm not really talking about regulation, I'm just talking about using common sense and wisdom.

karpierz 3y ago
We have entire fields that have been trying to solve the alignment problem for autonomous + intelligent agents for centuries: economic and political science.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Feels a little bit different though ?
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    ...also, not sure if this is the point you're trying to make, but nothing is aligned with human interests really, look at what economics and the governmnet has done with climate change?
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  "Trying": The Best We Can Do!
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Yeah, and so far, they've failed. So that's not really encouraging.
josho 3y ago
The reality is we all would love an AI that improves on its own. Look at all those chatgpt examples that were shared because it got something wrong. If only we could make gpt learn then it would only get it wrong once that would make it so much more useful. And therein is the problem we all want this. But as soon as we allow the AI to learn on its own we have introduced the alignment problem. And of course on day 1 nobody will see gpt correcting itself on simple questions as an issue. But on day 365 after it’s been learning at an exponential rate and we’ll have all realized that it’s too late because it’s learned faster than we have.
- __loam 3y ago
  Has anyone thought about what it would actually take to make gpt learn at an exponential rate? GPT4 from 3 was already starting to see diminishing returns. GPT3 cost $4.6 million dollars to train. 4 cost $100 million, an order of magnitude more, and required an enormous amount of data. All these training algorithms are O(n^2). Do we actually expect these things to grow exponentially or is it more realistic to expect we're going to spend a lot of compute and treasure only to see disappointing results?

sparker72678 3y ago

Exactly. Who is “we”? What are “our” goals? There are (nearly?) no universal human values. AI doesn’t have ethics, it doesn’t have values. It might imitate those in some ways, but it doesn’t have them. What this article longs for is a God it can control. Good luck with that.

glimshe 3y ago

It's actually pretty simple. Like many "innovations" in the past several years, alignment means profitable for founders and investors, and whatever enables a small minority to reach unthinkable levels of productivity, wealth and control so everybody else can serve them as waiters, cleaners and prostitutes. Then they will fly their AI plane (the pilot got fired too, now mowing the lawn) to an ultra-wealthy paradise to discuss with the other billionaires how to "reduce inequality". The proposed solution will be even more "innovations"... THIS time around the next wave of innovation will actually be redistributive, so they say, but in fact it will be rinse and repeat.

gmerc 3y ago

We haven’t managed to align capitalism with the continued survival of the human race or even basic equity. And that’s running on a minimal distributed system of rules and meat bags as CPU It’s preposterous to even hint we could solve AI alignment.

belter 3y ago

Never interrupt a Silicon Valley billionaire who is busy making a fool of himself, twisting logic in complex ways to explain why he should be allowed to run the new AI bubble, to add even more infinite money to his already enormous pool of infinite money...

SilverBirch 3y ago

On that second point... haven't we kind of solved this? Or rather there's a really obvious parallel. We've got an extremely powerful thing that can do whatever we want it to do, and now all we need to do is decide what to ask it to do and make sure it does what we want. Where else do we see that? Well that's government. The US is a massively powerful country, it's got hundreds of thousands of soldiers, billions of dollars at it's disposable, it can shoot individual humans into the sun if it wants to -and it's intelligent too! So how do we control it? A set of institutions with checks and balances elected by and accountable to the public.

ethanbond 3y ago
But stable/self-constrained governments require consensus to operate. They don’t just ask politely and prefer it. Checks and balances are preserved not because all the parties are interested in preserving them overall, but because they each want their own power not to be impeded. The systems that can’t achieve this balancing act fall over after a while, and this happens very frequently (99.999% of governments in history?). Nuclear MAD produces a similar equilibrium but this is stable due to specific characteristics of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems (expensive to produce; almost impossible to produce, test, or use secretly; impossible to reliably intercept). We shouldn’t bet on AI development reaching the same equilibrium.