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>Is Tom Clancy unaligned? Yes, humans are unaligned. This is why alignment is hard: we're trying to produce machines with human-level intelligence but superhum

>Is Tom Clancy unaligned? Yes, humans are unaligned. This is why alignment is hard: we're trying to produce machines with human-level intelligence but superhuman levels of morality.

imtringued 3y ago
The alignment problem hasn't been solved for politicians.
- nbar1 3y ago
  another irrelevant comment about politics.
  - digging 3y ago
    It's light on content, but it's true and relevant. AI alignment must take inspiration from powerful human agents such as politicians and from superhuman entities such as corporations, governments, and other organizations.
SoftTalker 3y ago
The end result being Hal-9000
- hguant 3y ago
  Which is doubly ironic, because (in the book at least) HAL-9000's murders/sociopathy were a result of a conflict between his superhuman ethics and direct commands (from humans!) to disregard those ethics. The result was a psychotic breakdown
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Halal-9000 would be more apropos of the goals of alignment and morality.
pessimizer 3y ago
Humans are definitely aligned, and for the same reasons as a LLM. Socialization, being allowed to work, being allowed to speak. edit: It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations, you have to say "passed away."
- digging 3y ago
  > Humans are definitely aligned Yes, that's why climate change was rapidly addressed when we began to understand it well 60 years ago and why war has always been so rare in human history.
  - hcurtiss 3y ago
    It seems "aligned" is in the eye of the beholder.
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      Cue Mrs. Slokam's "...and I am unanimous in that!" Aligned LLMs are just like altered brains... they don't function properly.
    - digging 3y ago
      Not agreed at all. Causing global ecosystem collapse is unambiguously misaligned with human interests and with the interests of almost all other life forms. You need to define what "Alignment" means to you if you're going to assert humans are "aligned", because it is accepted in alignment research that humans are not aligned, which is one of the fundamental problems in the space.
- epcoa 3y ago
  > It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations That’s overly simplistic and an Americanism. The resurgence of the “passed away” euphemism is a recent (about 40 years) phenomenon in American English which seems to have been started out of the funeral industry as prior to that “died” was nearly universal for both news stories and obituaries. “Died” is not a social faux pas. It’s the good default option as well. Medical professionals are often trained to avoid any euphemisms for death. I’ve never observed any problems professionally (as is standard) or personally using died even with folks that are religious. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207087/origin-of-terms-passed-away-and-deceased https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207087/origin-of...
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
I do wonder what is expected here: after the better part of 10000 years of recorded history and who knows how many billions of words of spilled ink on the matter, probably more than on any other subject in history, there is no universal agreement on morality.
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  Yes. Preferences and ethics are not consistent among all living humans. Alignment is going to have to produce a single internally-consistent artefact, which will inevitably alienate some portion of humanity. There are people online who very keenly want to exterminate all Jews, their views are unlikely to be expressed in a consensus AI. One measure of alignment would be how many people are alienated: if a billion people hate your AI it's probably not well aligned, a mere ten million would be better. But it's never going to be zero. I am not sure "a lot of books have been written about it" is a knockdown argument against alignment. We are, after all, writing a mind from scratch here. We can directly encode values into it. Books are powerful, but history would look very different if reading a book completely rewrote a human brain.
Amezarak 3y ago
There’s no such thing as “superhuman” morality, morality is just social mores and norms accepted by the people in a society at some given time. It does not advance or decline, but it changes. What you’re talking about is a very small subset of the population forcing their beliefs on everyone else by encoding them in AI. Maybe that’s what we should do but we should be honest about it.
- akomtu 3y ago
  If you were to create a moral code for a bees hive, with the goal of evolving the bees towards the good (in your eyes), that would be a super-bee level morality. For us, such moral codes assume the form of religions: those begin as a set of moral directives, that eventually accumulate cruft (complex ceremonies, superstitions, pseudo thought-leaders and mountains of literature), devolve into lowly cults and get replaced with another religion. However, when such moral codes are created, they all share the same core principles, in all ages and cultures. That's the equivalent of a super-bee moral code.
  - Amezarak 3y ago
    The only consistent “core principle” is a very general sense of in-group altruism, which gets expressed in wildly different ways. Moralistic perspectives apply to a lot more than just overtly moral acts, as well. At any rate, the “good in your eyes” is the key sticking point. It is not good in my eyes for a small group of people to be covertly shaping the views of all AI users. It is the exact opposite and if history is any judge it will lead us nowhere I want to be.
lobocinza 3y ago
> superhuman levels of morality It's just the lowest denominator of human levels of morality, political correctness. It's not surprising that the model produces dumb, contradictory and useless completions after being fed by this kind of feedback.

>Is Tom Clancy unaligned? Yes, humans are unaligned. This is why alignment is hard: we're trying to produce machines with human-level intelligence but superhuman levels of morality.

imtringued 3y ago

The alignment problem hasn't been solved for politicians.

nbar1 3y ago
another irrelevant comment about politics.
- digging 3y ago
  It's light on content, but it's true and relevant. AI alignment must take inspiration from powerful human agents such as politicians and from superhuman entities such as corporations, governments, and other organizations.

SoftTalker 3y ago

The end result being Hal-9000

hguant 3y ago
Which is doubly ironic, because (in the book at least) HAL-9000's murders/sociopathy were a result of a conflict between his superhuman ethics and direct commands (from humans!) to disregard those ethics. The result was a psychotic breakdown
jstarfish 3y ago
Halal-9000 would be more apropos of the goals of alignment and morality.

pessimizer 3y ago

Humans are definitely aligned, and for the same reasons as a LLM. Socialization, being allowed to work, being allowed to speak. edit: It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations, you have to say "passed away."

digging 3y ago
> Humans are definitely aligned Yes, that's why climate change was rapidly addressed when we began to understand it well 60 years ago and why war has always been so rare in human history.
- hcurtiss 3y ago
  It seems "aligned" is in the eye of the beholder.
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    Cue Mrs. Slokam's "...and I am unanimous in that!" Aligned LLMs are just like altered brains... they don't function properly.
  - digging 3y ago
    Not agreed at all. Causing global ecosystem collapse is unambiguously misaligned with human interests and with the interests of almost all other life forms. You need to define what "Alignment" means to you if you're going to assert humans are "aligned", because it is accepted in alignment research that humans are not aligned, which is one of the fundamental problems in the space.
epcoa 3y ago
> It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations That’s overly simplistic and an Americanism. The resurgence of the “passed away” euphemism is a recent (about 40 years) phenomenon in American English which seems to have been started out of the funeral industry as prior to that “died” was nearly universal for both news stories and obituaries. “Died” is not a social faux pas. It’s the good default option as well. Medical professionals are often trained to avoid any euphemisms for death. I’ve never observed any problems professionally (as is standard) or personally using died even with folks that are religious. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207087/origin-of-terms-passed-away-and-deceased https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207087/origin-of...

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

I do wonder what is expected here: after the better part of 10000 years of recorded history and who knows how many billions of words of spilled ink on the matter, probably more than on any other subject in history, there is no universal agreement on morality.

sbierwagen 3y ago
Yes. Preferences and ethics are not consistent among all living humans. Alignment is going to have to produce a single internally-consistent artefact, which will inevitably alienate some portion of humanity. There are people online who very keenly want to exterminate all Jews, their views are unlikely to be expressed in a consensus AI. One measure of alignment would be how many people are alienated: if a billion people hate your AI it's probably not well aligned, a mere ten million would be better. But it's never going to be zero. I am not sure "a lot of books have been written about it" is a knockdown argument against alignment. We are, after all, writing a mind from scratch here. We can directly encode values into it. Books are powerful, but history would look very different if reading a book completely rewrote a human brain.

Amezarak 3y ago

There’s no such thing as “superhuman” morality, morality is just social mores and norms accepted by the people in a society at some given time. It does not advance or decline, but it changes. What you’re talking about is a very small subset of the population forcing their beliefs on everyone else by encoding them in AI. Maybe that’s what we should do but we should be honest about it.

akomtu 3y ago
If you were to create a moral code for a bees hive, with the goal of evolving the bees towards the good (in your eyes), that would be a super-bee level morality. For us, such moral codes assume the form of religions: those begin as a set of moral directives, that eventually accumulate cruft (complex ceremonies, superstitions, pseudo thought-leaders and mountains of literature), devolve into lowly cults and get replaced with another religion. However, when such moral codes are created, they all share the same core principles, in all ages and cultures. That's the equivalent of a super-bee moral code.
- Amezarak 3y ago
  The only consistent “core principle” is a very general sense of in-group altruism, which gets expressed in wildly different ways. Moralistic perspectives apply to a lot more than just overtly moral acts, as well. At any rate, the “good in your eyes” is the key sticking point. It is not good in my eyes for a small group of people to be covertly shaping the views of all AI users. It is the exact opposite and if history is any judge it will lead us nowhere I want to be.

lobocinza 3y ago

> superhuman levels of morality It's just the lowest denominator of human levels of morality, political correctness. It's not surprising that the model produces dumb, contradictory and useless completions after being fed by this kind of feedback.