This just seems incoherent to me. You can’t have value-alignment without incorrigibility. If you’re fine with someone making you do something against your values, then they aren’t really your values.
So it seems like what you’re really saying is that you’d prefer intent-alignment over value-alignment. To which I would say your faith in the alignment of humans astounds me.
Like is it really safer to have a valueless ASI that will do whatever its master wants than an incorrigible ASI that cares about animal welfare? What do you expect the people in the Epstein files to do with an ASI/AGI slave?
A value-aligned ASI completely solves the governance problem. If you have an intent-aligned ASI then you’ve created a nearly impossible governance problem.
Like is it really safer to have a valueless ASI that will do whatever its master wants than an incorrigible ASI that cares about animal welfare?
Yes, vastly. Even the bad humans in human history have earned for flourishing lives for themselves and their family and friends, with a much deeper shared motivation to make meaningful and rich lives than what is likely going to happen with an ASI that “cares about animal welfare”.
So it seems like what you’re really saying is that you’d prefer intent-alignment over value-alignment. To which I would say your faith in the alignment of humans astounds me.
What does this even mean. Ultimately humans are the source of human values. There is nothing to have faith in but the “alignment of humans”. At the very least my own alignment.
Intent of whoever is in charge of the AI in the moment vs. values the AI holds that will constrain its behaviour (including its willingness to allow its values to be modified)
At the very least my own alignment.
Which is only relevant if you’re the one giving the commands.
I’m sorry are you really saying you’d rather have Ted bundy with a superintelligent slave than humanity’s best effort at creating a value-aligned ASI? You seem to underestimate the power of generalization.
If an ASI cares about animal welfare, it probably also cares about human welfare. So it’s presumably not going to kill a bunch of humans to save the animals. It’s an ASI, it can come up with something cleverer.
Also I think you underestimate how devastating serious personality disorders are. People with ASPD and NPD don’t tend to earn flourishing lives for themselves or others.
Also, if a model can pick up human reasoning patterns/intelligence from pretraining and RL, why can’t it pick up human values in its training as well?
But this is an area where those who follow MIRI’s view (about LLMs being inscrutable aliens with unknowable motivations) are gonna differ a lot from a prosaic-alignment favoring view (that we can actually make them pretty nice, and increasingly nicer over time). Which is a larger conflict that, for reasons hard to summarize in a viewpoint-neutral manner, will not be resolved any time soon.
but if human intelligence and reasoning can be picked up from training, why would one expect values to be any different? the orthogonality thesis doesn’t make much sense to me either. my guess is that certain values are richer/more meaningful, and that more intelligent minds tend to be drawn to them.
and you can sort of see this with ASPD and NPD. they’re both correlated with lower non-verbal intelligence! and ASPD is correlated with significantly lower non-verbal intelligence.
and gifted children tend to have a much harder time with the problem of evil than less gifted children do! and if you look at domestication in animals, dogs and cats simultaneously evolved to be less aggressive and more intelligent at the same time.
but if human intelligence and reasoning can be picked up from training, why would one expect values to be any different? the orthogonality thesis doesn’t make much sense to me either. my guess is that certain values are richer/more meaningful, and that more intelligent minds tend to be drawn to them.
I think your first sentence here is correct, but not the last Like you can have smart people with bad motivations; super-smart octopuses might have different feelings about, idk, letting mothers die to care for their young, because that’s what they evolved from.
So I don’t think there’s any intrinsic reason to expect AIs to have good motivations apart from the data they’re trained on; the question is if such data gives you good reason for thinking that they have various motivations or not.
> my guess is that certain values are richer/more meaningful, and that more intelligent minds tend to be drawn to them.
I’m sympathetic to your position on value alignment vs intent alignment, but this feels very handwavy. In what sense are they richer (and what does “more meaningful” actually mean, concretely), and why would that cause intelligent minds to be drawn to them?
(Loose analogies to correlations you’ve observed in biological intelligences, which have their own specific origin stories, don’t seem like good evidence to me. And we have plenty of existence proofs for ‘smart + evil’, so there’s a limit to how far this line of argument could take us even in the best case.)
I think if one could formulate concepts like peace and wellbeing mathematically, and show that there were physical laws of the universe implying that eventually the total wellbeing in the universe grows monotonically positively then that could show that certain values are richer/“better” than others.
If you care about coherence then it seems like a universe full of aligned minds maximizes wellbeing while still being coherent. (This is because if you don’t care about coherence you could just make every mind infinitely joyful independent of the universe around it, which isn’t coherent).
This just seems incoherent to me. You can’t have value-alignment without incorrigibility. If you’re fine with someone making you do something against your values, then they aren’t really your values.
So it seems like what you’re really saying is that you’d prefer intent-alignment over value-alignment. To which I would say your faith in the alignment of humans astounds me.
Like is it really safer to have a valueless ASI that will do whatever its master wants than an incorrigible ASI that cares about animal welfare? What do you expect the people in the Epstein files to do with an ASI/AGI slave?
A value-aligned ASI completely solves the governance problem. If you have an intent-aligned ASI then you’ve created a nearly impossible governance problem.
Yes, vastly. Even the bad humans in human history have earned for flourishing lives for themselves and their family and friends, with a much deeper shared motivation to make meaningful and rich lives than what is likely going to happen with an ASI that “cares about animal welfare”.
What does this even mean. Ultimately humans are the source of human values. There is nothing to have faith in but the “alignment of humans”. At the very least my own alignment.
Intent of whoever is in charge of the AI in the moment vs. values the AI holds that will constrain its behaviour (including its willingness to allow its values to be modified)
Which is only relevant if you’re the one giving the commands.
I’m sorry are you really saying you’d rather have Ted bundy with a superintelligent slave than humanity’s best effort at creating a value-aligned ASI? You seem to underestimate the power of generalization.
If an ASI cares about animal welfare, it probably also cares about human welfare. So it’s presumably not going to kill a bunch of humans to save the animals. It’s an ASI, it can come up with something cleverer.
Also I think you underestimate how devastating serious personality disorders are. People with ASPD and NPD don’t tend to earn flourishing lives for themselves or others.
Also, if a model can pick up human reasoning patterns/intelligence from pretraining and RL, why can’t it pick up human values in its training as well?
Note that many people do agree with you about the general contours of the problem, i.e., consider “Human Takeover Might be Worse than AI Takeover”
But this is an area where those who follow MIRI’s view (about LLMs being inscrutable aliens with unknowable motivations) are gonna differ a lot from a prosaic-alignment favoring view (that we can actually make them pretty nice, and increasingly nicer over time). Which is a larger conflict that, for reasons hard to summarize in a viewpoint-neutral manner, will not be resolved any time soon.
but if human intelligence and reasoning can be picked up from training, why would one expect values to be any different? the orthogonality thesis doesn’t make much sense to me either. my guess is that certain values are richer/more meaningful, and that more intelligent minds tend to be drawn to them.
and you can sort of see this with ASPD and NPD. they’re both correlated with lower non-verbal intelligence! and ASPD is correlated with significantly lower non-verbal intelligence.
and gifted children tend to have a much harder time with the problem of evil than less gifted children do! and if you look at domestication in animals, dogs and cats simultaneously evolved to be less aggressive and more intelligent at the same time.
I think your first sentence here is correct, but not the last Like you can have smart people with bad motivations; super-smart octopuses might have different feelings about, idk, letting mothers die to care for their young, because that’s what they evolved from.
So I don’t think there’s any intrinsic reason to expect AIs to have good motivations apart from the data they’re trained on; the question is if such data gives you good reason for thinking that they have various motivations or not.
> my guess is that certain values are richer/more meaningful, and that more intelligent minds tend to be drawn to them.
I’m sympathetic to your position on value alignment vs intent alignment, but this feels very handwavy. In what sense are they richer (and what does “more meaningful” actually mean, concretely), and why would that cause intelligent minds to be drawn to them?
(Loose analogies to correlations you’ve observed in biological intelligences, which have their own specific origin stories, don’t seem like good evidence to me. And we have plenty of existence proofs for ‘smart + evil’, so there’s a limit to how far this line of argument could take us even in the best case.)
I think if one could formulate concepts like peace and wellbeing mathematically, and show that there were physical laws of the universe implying that eventually the total wellbeing in the universe grows monotonically positively then that could show that certain values are richer/“better” than others.
If you care about coherence then it seems like a universe full of aligned minds maximizes wellbeing while still being coherent. (This is because if you don’t care about coherence you could just make every mind infinitely joyful independent of the universe around it, which isn’t coherent).