If your conclusion is that we don’t know how to do value alignment, I and I think most alignment thinkers would agree with you. If the conclusion is that AGI is useless, I don’t think it is at all. There are a lot of other goals you could give it beyond directly doing what humanity as a whole wants in any sense. Some are taking instructions from some (hopefully trustworthy) humans, and another is following some elaborate set of rules to give humans more freedoms and opportunities to go on deciding what they want as history unfolds.
I agree that the values future humans would adopt can only be reached through a process of societal progression. People have expressed this idea by saying that human values are path-dependent.
So, if our goal were simply to observe the values that emerge naturally from human efforts alone, an AGI would indeed be nothing more than a paperweight. However, the values humanity develops with the assistance of an AGI aren’t necessarily worse—if anything, I’d suspect they’d be better.
The world as it stands is highly competitive and often harsh. If we had external help that allowed us to focus more on what we truly want—like eliminating premature death from cancer or accidents, or accelerating technological progress for creative and meaningful projects—we’d arrive at a very different future. But I don’t think that future would be worse; in fact, I suspect it would be significantly better. It would be less shaped by competition, including warfare, and less constrained by the tragedy of involuntary death.
An AGI that simply fulfills human desires without making rigid commitments about the long-term future seems like it would be a net positive—potentially a massive one.
I think the paradox you mention is generally accepted to be an unsolved problem with value alignment—we don’t know how to ask for what we will want, since what we will want could be a bunch of different things depending on the path, and we don’t know what path to what values and what world would in any sense be best.
This is commonly listed as one of the big difficulties with alignment. I think it only sort of is. I think we really want the future to remain in human hands for at least some time. The concept of a “long reflection” is one term people use to describe this.
In the meantime, you either have an AGI whose goal is to facilitate that long reflection, according to some criteria, or you have an AGI that takes instructions from some human(s) you trust.
This is one reason I think Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI. The reasoning there is pretty different from the conceptual difficulties with value alignment you mention here; it’s just easier to specify “do what this person meant by what he tells you” than what we mean by human values—and you get to change your mind by instructing it to shut down. Even if that worked we’d have to worry: If we solve alignment, do we die anyway? because having a bunch of different humans in charge of a bunch of different AGIs could produce severe conflicts. But that whole logic is separable from the initial puzzle you posed.
“If your conclusion is that we don’t know how to do value alignment, I and I think most alignment thinkers would agree with you. If the conclusion is that AGI is useless, I don’t think it is at all.”
Sort of- I worry that it may be practically impossible for current humans to align AGI to the point of usefulness.
“If we had external help that allowed us to focus more on what we truly want—like eliminating premature death from cancer or accidents, or accelerating technological progress for creative and meaningful projects—we’d arrive at a very different future. But I don’t think that future would be worse; in fact, I suspect it would be significantly better.”
That’s my intuition and hope- but I worry that these things are causally entangled with things that we don’t anticipate. To use your example- what if we only ask an aligned and trusted AGI to cure premature death by disease and accident, which wouldn’t greatly conflict with most people’s values in the way that radical life extension would, but then a sudden loss of an entire healthcare and insurance industry results, causing such a total economic collapse that causes vast swaths of people to starve. (I don’t think this would actually happen, but it’s an example of the kind of unforeseen consequence that getting a wish suddenly granted may cause, when you ask an instruction following AGI to give, without counting on a greater intelligence to project and weigh all of the consequences.)
I also worry about the phrase “a human you trust.”
Again- this feels like cynicism, if not the result of a catastrophizing mind (which I know I have.) I think you make a very good argument- I’m probably indulging too much in black-and-white thought- that there’s a way to fulfill these desires quickly enough that we are able to relieve more suffering than we would have if left to our devices, but still slow enough to monitor unforeseen consequences. Maybe the bigger question is just whether we will.
The bigger question is whether we will achieve usefully aligned AGI. And the biggest question is what we can do.
Ease your mind! Worries will not help. Enjoy the sunshine and the civilization while we have it, don’t take it all on your shoulders, and just do something to help!
As Sarah Connor said:
NO FATE
We are not in her unfortunately singular shoes. It does not rest on our shoulders alone. As most heroes in history have, we can gather allies and enjoy the camaraderie and each day.
On a different topic, I wish you wouldn’t call yourself a failed scifi author or a failed anything. I hope it’s in jest or excessive modesty. Failure is only when you give up on everything or are dead. I think there is much to accomplish in writing good fiction. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Changing directions isn’t failing either; it’s changing strategy, hopefully as a result of learning.
Yeah- calling myself a failed scifi writer really was half in jest- had some very limited success as an indie writer for a good number of years, and recently need has made me shift direction. Thank you for the encouragement, though!
If your conclusion is that we don’t know how to do value alignment, I and I think most alignment thinkers would agree with you. If the conclusion is that AGI is useless, I don’t think it is at all. There are a lot of other goals you could give it beyond directly doing what humanity as a whole wants in any sense. Some are taking instructions from some (hopefully trustworthy) humans, and another is following some elaborate set of rules to give humans more freedoms and opportunities to go on deciding what they want as history unfolds.
I agree that the values future humans would adopt can only be reached through a process of societal progression. People have expressed this idea by saying that human values are path-dependent.
So, if our goal were simply to observe the values that emerge naturally from human efforts alone, an AGI would indeed be nothing more than a paperweight. However, the values humanity develops with the assistance of an AGI aren’t necessarily worse—if anything, I’d suspect they’d be better.
The world as it stands is highly competitive and often harsh. If we had external help that allowed us to focus more on what we truly want—like eliminating premature death from cancer or accidents, or accelerating technological progress for creative and meaningful projects—we’d arrive at a very different future. But I don’t think that future would be worse; in fact, I suspect it would be significantly better. It would be less shaped by competition, including warfare, and less constrained by the tragedy of involuntary death.
An AGI that simply fulfills human desires without making rigid commitments about the long-term future seems like it would be a net positive—potentially a massive one.
I think the paradox you mention is generally accepted to be an unsolved problem with value alignment—we don’t know how to ask for what we will want, since what we will want could be a bunch of different things depending on the path, and we don’t know what path to what values and what world would in any sense be best.
This is commonly listed as one of the big difficulties with alignment. I think it only sort of is. I think we really want the future to remain in human hands for at least some time. The concept of a “long reflection” is one term people use to describe this.
In the meantime, you either have an AGI whose goal is to facilitate that long reflection, according to some criteria, or you have an AGI that takes instructions from some human(s) you trust.
This is one reason I think Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI. The reasoning there is pretty different from the conceptual difficulties with value alignment you mention here; it’s just easier to specify “do what this person meant by what he tells you” than what we mean by human values—and you get to change your mind by instructing it to shut down. Even if that worked we’d have to worry: If we solve alignment, do we die anyway? because having a bunch of different humans in charge of a bunch of different AGIs could produce severe conflicts. But that whole logic is separable from the initial puzzle you posed.
“If your conclusion is that we don’t know how to do value alignment, I and I think most alignment thinkers would agree with you. If the conclusion is that AGI is useless, I don’t think it is at all.”
Sort of- I worry that it may be practically impossible for current humans to align AGI to the point of usefulness.
“If we had external help that allowed us to focus more on what we truly want—like eliminating premature death from cancer or accidents, or accelerating technological progress for creative and meaningful projects—we’d arrive at a very different future. But I don’t think that future would be worse; in fact, I suspect it would be significantly better.”
That’s my intuition and hope- but I worry that these things are causally entangled with things that we don’t anticipate. To use your example- what if we only ask an aligned and trusted AGI to cure premature death by disease and accident, which wouldn’t greatly conflict with most people’s values in the way that radical life extension would, but then a sudden loss of an entire healthcare and insurance industry results, causing such a total economic collapse that causes vast swaths of people to starve. (I don’t think this would actually happen, but it’s an example of the kind of unforeseen consequence that getting a wish suddenly granted may cause, when you ask an instruction following AGI to give, without counting on a greater intelligence to project and weigh all of the consequences.)
I also worry about the phrase “a human you trust.”
Again- this feels like cynicism, if not the result of a catastrophizing mind (which I know I have.) I think you make a very good argument- I’m probably indulging too much in black-and-white thought- that there’s a way to fulfill these desires quickly enough that we are able to relieve more suffering than we would have if left to our devices, but still slow enough to monitor unforeseen consequences. Maybe the bigger question is just whether we will.
I agree with everything you’ve said there.
The bigger question is whether we will achieve usefully aligned AGI. And the biggest question is what we can do.
Ease your mind! Worries will not help. Enjoy the sunshine and the civilization while we have it, don’t take it all on your shoulders, and just do something to help!
As Sarah Connor said:
NO FATE
We are not in her unfortunately singular shoes. It does not rest on our shoulders alone. As most heroes in history have, we can gather allies and enjoy the camaraderie and each day.
On a different topic, I wish you wouldn’t call yourself a failed scifi author or a failed anything. I hope it’s in jest or excessive modesty. Failure is only when you give up on everything or are dead. I think there is much to accomplish in writing good fiction. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Changing directions isn’t failing either; it’s changing strategy, hopefully as a result of learning.
Yeah- calling myself a failed scifi writer really was half in jest- had some very limited success as an indie writer for a good number of years, and recently need has made me shift direction. Thank you for the encouragement, though!