Denote natural selection’s (NS’s) objective by X. That is, X is something like {finding and propagating patterns (genetic or otherwise) that continue to exist}.
I think it’s important to distinguish between
(i) Humanity as a whole is aligned with X.
(ii) Most individual humans are (mostly) aligned with X.
To the extent that X and (i) are coherent concepts/claims, I’d agree that (i) is likely true (for now, before TAI).[1] OTOH, (i) seems kinda vacuous, since {humanity as a whole} is (currently) basically an evolving animal population, i.e. an “instantiation” of NS? And of course NS is aligned with NS.
I think (ii) is sketchy at best: Sure, lots of people have a desire/shard to produce things that will last; things like e.g. music, art, genetic offspring, mausoleums, etc. But my impression is that for most humans, that desire is just one among many, and usually not even the strongest desire/shard. (And often the desire to produce lasting things is just a proxy/means for gaining some other thing, e.g. status.)
Thus: I think that—to the extent that it makes sense to think of NS as an optimizer with an objective—individual humans (i.e. the intelligences that NS designed) are in fact unaligned/misaligned with NS’s objectives. I continue to see {NS designing humans} as an example of an optimization process P creating new optimization processes that are misaligned with P.
I feel like I probably missed a bunch of nuance/bits-of-info in the post, though. I’m guessing OP would disagree with my above conclusion. If so, I’m curious what I missed / why they disagree.
Then again, under a sufficiently broad interpretation of X, almost any process is perhaps aligned with X; since any process eventually evolves into a heat-dead universe, which in turn is a very persistent/continues-to-exist pattern?
Denote natural selection’s (NS’s) objective by X. That is, X is something like {finding and propagating patterns (genetic or otherwise) that continue to exist}.
I think it’s important to distinguish between
(i) Humanity as a whole is aligned with X.
(ii) Most individual humans are (mostly) aligned with X.
To the extent that X and (i) are coherent concepts/claims, I’d agree that (i) is likely true (for now, before TAI).[1] OTOH, (i) seems kinda vacuous, since {humanity as a whole} is (currently) basically an evolving animal population, i.e. an “instantiation” of NS? And of course NS is aligned with NS.
I think (ii) is sketchy at best: Sure, lots of people have a desire/shard to produce things that will last; things like e.g. music, art, genetic offspring, mausoleums, etc. But my impression is that for most humans, that desire is just one among many, and usually not even the strongest desire/shard. (And often the desire to produce lasting things is just a proxy/means for gaining some other thing, e.g. status.)
Thus: I think that—to the extent that it makes sense to think of NS as an optimizer with an objective—individual humans (i.e. the intelligences that NS designed) are in fact unaligned/misaligned with NS’s objectives. I continue to see {NS designing humans} as an example of an optimization process P creating new optimization processes that are misaligned with P.
I feel like I probably missed a bunch of nuance/bits-of-info in the post, though. I’m guessing OP would disagree with my above conclusion. If so, I’m curious what I missed / why they disagree.
Then again, under a sufficiently broad interpretation of X, almost any process is perhaps aligned with X; since any process eventually evolves into a heat-dead universe, which in turn is a very persistent/continues-to-exist pattern?