I agree that AI in general has the potential to implement something-like-CEV, and this would be better than what we have now by far. Reading your original post I didn’t get much sense of attention to the ‘E,’ and without that I think this would be horrible. Of course, either one implemented strongly enough goes off the rails unless it’s done just right, aka the whole question is downstream of pretty strong alignment success, and so for the time being we should be cautious about floating this kind of idea and clear about what would be needed to make it a good idea.
There’s a less than flattering quote from a book from 1916 that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” That pretty well summarizes my main fear for this kind of proposal and the ways most possible implementation attempts at it would go wrong.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Yes, I think this is too idealistic. Ideal democracy (for me) is something more like “the theory that the common people know what they feel frustrated with (and we want to honor that above everything!) but mostly don’t know the collective best means of resolving that frustration.
I agree that AI in general has the potential to implement something-like-CEV, and this would be better than what we have now by far. Reading your original post I didn’t get much sense of attention to the ‘E,’ and without that I think this would be horrible. Of course, either one implemented strongly enough goes off the rails unless it’s done just right, aka the whole question is downstream of pretty strong alignment success, and so for the time being we should be cautious about floating this kind of idea and clear about what would be needed to make it a good idea.
There’s a less than flattering quote from a book from 1916 that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” That pretty well summarizes my main fear for this kind of proposal and the ways most possible implementation attempts at it would go wrong.
Yes, I think this is too idealistic. Ideal democracy (for me) is something more like “the theory that the common people know what they feel frustrated with (and we want to honor that above everything!) but mostly don’t know the collective best means of resolving that frustration.