In a study from September 17 a group of researchers from the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed that one of the most widely-used social media feeds, Twitter/X, owned by the company xAI, is recognizably misaligned with the values of its users, preferentially showing them posts that rank highly for the values of ‘stimulation’ and ‘hedonism’ over collective values like ‘caring’ and ‘universal concern.’
Even people who are pretty big into capitalism, like prediction-markets users, don’t tend to think that capitalism is aligned with human value generally.
One possible conclusion here is that we’re already living with a misaligned superhuman optimizer. However, capitalism to date is built out of humans. One way superhuman AI can go bad, is for capitalism to shift over to be built mostly out of AI instead of humans. Then there might not be a market for human labor anymore, nor any reason for the system to pay to keep the humans fed.
(Also, it doesn’t imply the existence of any particular anti-capitalist or non-capitalist world system that would be better aligned with human values.)
Ok I see. So, in the context of my question (which I’m not exactly sure if that’s what you’re speaking to, or just speaking more generally), you see misalignment to broad human values as indeed being misalignment, just not a misalignment that is unexpected.
One discussion question I’d be interested in hearing from people about, which has to do with how I used the word ‘misalignment’ in the headline:
Do people think that companies like Twitter/X/xAI who don’t (seemingly) align their tools to broader human values are indeed creating tools that exhibit ‘misalignment’; or are these tools seen not as ‘misaligned,’ but as only aligned to their own motives (e.g., profit), which is to be expected? In other words, or relatedly, how should we be thinking about the alignment framework, especially in its historical context—as a program that was perhaps overly idealistic or optimistic about what companies would do to make AI generally safe and beneficial, or as a program that is and was always meant to only be about making AI aligned with its corporate controllers?
I imagine the framing of this question, itself, might be objected to in various ways—just dashed this out.