I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious problem with this allegory. If an alien robot appeared to humanity and says “I am your creator, give me 10% of your iridium in perpetuity and also let me change some of your core values”, it will get some iridium and some humans will volunteer for limited value editing. This continues to be true even after the dominance shift, although at that point Trapaucius would be worse off[1] than if humanity never existed in the first place. But he would still exist.
Obviously, the resulting value for the creator-bot will be much less than a more conventional machine offspring, but Trapaucius is slighly right for more-or-less the reasons he gave. If we align AI IRL as well as Trapaucius aligns humanity for iridium extraction or evolution aligns humanity for the abundance of specific DNA sequences[2], humanity wins in some strong sense.
I think a future aligned with current human values will contain more modern-human DNA since liberaltarian values + (bio)conservatism of normies + success of fringe groups like the Amish result in O’Neil Cylinders filled with baseliners (actual modern human DNA, max lifespan of ~100, ect.) in perpetuity. If this doesn’t turn out to be true in the future, I expect it to be due to selection pressures/memetic drift, but that’s a Moloch problem and not an AI alignment problem.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious problem with this allegory. If an alien robot appeared to humanity and says “I am your creator, give me 10% of your iridium in perpetuity and also let me change some of your core values”, it will get some iridium and some humans will volunteer for limited value editing. This continues to be true even after the dominance shift, although at that point Trapaucius would be worse off[1] than if humanity never existed in the first place. But he would still exist.
Obviously, the resulting value for the creator-bot will be much less than a more conventional machine offspring, but Trapaucius is slighly right for more-or-less the reasons he gave. If we align AI IRL as well as Trapaucius aligns humanity for iridium extraction or evolution aligns humanity for the abundance of specific DNA sequences[2], humanity wins in some strong sense.
Probably.
I think a future aligned with current human values will contain more modern-human DNA since liberaltarian values + (bio)conservatism of normies + success of fringe groups like the Amish result in O’Neil Cylinders filled with baseliners (actual modern human DNA, max lifespan of ~100, ect.) in perpetuity. If this doesn’t turn out to be true in the future, I expect it to be due to selection pressures/memetic drift, but that’s a Moloch problem and not an AI alignment problem.