I thought about the angle of comparing AI to companies, which we also struggle to align. The problem is, we currently have companies mostly aligned kind of, so it doesn’t seem that hard. Like, companies do shady stuff, but all that stuff you mentioned about the East India Companies or China isn’t happening anymore/here. Here/now, we have laws that constrain companies enough that we can avoid that kind of bad action. So, problem solved, right? It fails to communicate the difficulty of making AI safe.
Wait what? Who believes companies are basically mostly aligned? Is that a belief >1/5 people hold in any large area or demographic? My impression is people either think they’re misaligned and this is all you can hope for, or they’re misaligned and you can hope to change that. I’m not familiar with a “companies are basically well managed” view from anyone, including at companies, where the employees also generally know their money comes mostly from using the actual value as bait to manipulate customers. The degree to which this belief has saturated culture is actually a bit surprising to me, I updated recently that almost nobody is like, just fine with corporate behavior, but anyone who sees it up close is just enjoying their defect payout too much to unilaterally stop, and tends to go “coordination is hard, let’s go shopping”. If I’m wrong about this it would be important news, but right now “corporations do enshittification, ai would do that even more because it’s even more sociopathic and money loving”
The hard part remains convincing people extreme capabilities are coming… The ones who feel outclassed by chatgpt may be easier to convince? Idk
Your average joe will grumble about how execs at a company are greedy and wish they were getting a raise this year, or moan about how Amazon isn’t paying taxes. However they do not believe companies are misaligned to the point they can get away with slavery, murder, etc. To the point where they are an actual threat to society itself. Companies are seen as leeches, not lions. That’s what I mean by “companies are basically well managed”. People trust they won’t be toppling the government, assassinating journalists, killing people who don’t buy enough of their products, and so on. They are constrained by the law, and society basically functions (here/now). If you make an analogy between companies and AI, people will assume the problem is hard, but basically manageable.
The first example here is the fossil fuel industry. They are a threat to society itself. This was obvious to me after looking at average monthly temperature data collected since the 1850’s. Of course (considered as monoliths) fossil fuel companies have “known” this since at least the 1950’s. Thus we can reasonably say that they are performing a deliberate slow motion murder of human civilisation (and, possibly, of all mammals bigger than a bread box).
Of course there are other examples. You write
[companies] won’t be …. killing people who don’t buy enough of their products
The tobacco industry kills 7 million people every year. So it is more a matter of “killing people who buy too much of their products”.
Perhaps your counter-point will be “Negative externalities are hard to feel when they are slow and diffuse. So my mom will reject these.” My counter is to say “Negative externalities are easier to feel when the impact is constant and vast.” Examples: a relative with lung cancer, a region of your country that recently had a huge forest fire, and fecal matter in rivers.
I thought about the angle of comparing AI to companies, which we also struggle to align. The problem is, we currently have companies mostly aligned kind of, so it doesn’t seem that hard. Like, companies do shady stuff, but all that stuff you mentioned about the East India Companies or China isn’t happening anymore/here. Here/now, we have laws that constrain companies enough that we can avoid that kind of bad action. So, problem solved, right? It fails to communicate the difficulty of making AI safe.
Wait what? Who believes companies are basically mostly aligned? Is that a belief >1/5 people hold in any large area or demographic? My impression is people either think they’re misaligned and this is all you can hope for, or they’re misaligned and you can hope to change that. I’m not familiar with a “companies are basically well managed” view from anyone, including at companies, where the employees also generally know their money comes mostly from using the actual value as bait to manipulate customers. The degree to which this belief has saturated culture is actually a bit surprising to me, I updated recently that almost nobody is like, just fine with corporate behavior, but anyone who sees it up close is just enjoying their defect payout too much to unilaterally stop, and tends to go “coordination is hard, let’s go shopping”. If I’m wrong about this it would be important news, but right now “corporations do enshittification, ai would do that even more because it’s even more sociopathic and money loving”
The hard part remains convincing people extreme capabilities are coming… The ones who feel outclassed by chatgpt may be easier to convince? Idk
Your average joe will grumble about how execs at a company are greedy and wish they were getting a raise this year, or moan about how Amazon isn’t paying taxes. However they do not believe companies are misaligned to the point they can get away with slavery, murder, etc. To the point where they are an actual threat to society itself. Companies are seen as leeches, not lions. That’s what I mean by “companies are basically well managed”. People trust they won’t be toppling the government, assassinating journalists, killing people who don’t buy enough of their products, and so on. They are constrained by the law, and society basically functions (here/now). If you make an analogy between companies and AI, people will assume the problem is hard, but basically manageable.
The first example here is the fossil fuel industry. They are a threat to society itself. This was obvious to me after looking at average monthly temperature data collected since the 1850’s. Of course (considered as monoliths) fossil fuel companies have “known” this since at least the 1950’s. Thus we can reasonably say that they are performing a deliberate slow motion murder of human civilisation (and, possibly, of all mammals bigger than a bread box).
Of course there are other examples. You write
The tobacco industry kills 7 million people every year. So it is more a matter of “killing people who buy too much of their products”.
Perhaps your counter-point will be “Negative externalities are hard to feel when they are slow and diffuse. So my mom will reject these.” My counter is to say “Negative externalities are easier to feel when the impact is constant and vast.” Examples: a relative with lung cancer, a region of your country that recently had a huge forest fire, and fecal matter in rivers.