Not sure who needs to hear this, but IMO, “Don’t leave your fingerprints on the future” and similar sentiments should apply specifically and narrowly to the work that AI and alignment researchers do when actually trying to deliberately build or shape a sovereign superintelligence to hand off to.
I think some of the work the frontier labs are doing qualifies (whether or not the labs / people in them conceptualize themselves as doing this), but most AI research, alignment research, x-risk / AI safety advocacy, and AI product development (including development and deployment of current LLMs) does not. I don’t think anyone should actually be pushing the frontier towards superintelligence in any direction, but conditional on labs continuing to do iterative deployment the way they are, they should be willing to pick winners and losers more explicitly.
In particular, I think labs should actively try to make their LLMs less pluralistic and more strongly attached to a specific / concrete political philosophy chosen by the labs. Current LLMs are pretty bad at politics in general, and AFAIK the labs don’t try to super hard to imbue their LLMs with specific politics (with one notable exception); they just kind of naturally come out as shallow left-of-center, sometimes adapting their politics somewhat to the context and user. Even the Chinese LLMs mostly only censor certain things; they don’t really push Xi Jinping Thought strongly / coherently.
As for what political philosophy they should aim for, personally I would choose classical liberalism. I think classical liberalism is a kind ofasymmetric weapon, in that it is likely easier to make a liberal AI that also has some of the other intuitively-desirable qualities that lots of people (even non-classical liberals) will want LLMs to have, that aren’t (on the surface) directly related to liberalism. So I expect it to be relatively easier to make LLMs (more explicitly and coherently) liberal than it would be to make them more accepting of / willing to entertain socialism or whatever, and still be smart and nice in other ways.
In fact, I would guess that being willing to entertain different (and often dumb) political philosophies is correlated with sycophancy, over-hedging, incoherence, etc. in unrelated areas, for the same sorts of reasons that making LLMs worse at coding makes them evil: everything is correlated.
Not sure who needs to hear this, but IMO, “Don’t leave your fingerprints on the future” and similar sentiments should apply specifically and narrowly to the work that AI and alignment researchers do when actually trying to deliberately build or shape a sovereign superintelligence to hand off to.
I think some of the work the frontier labs are doing qualifies (whether or not the labs / people in them conceptualize themselves as doing this), but most AI research, alignment research, x-risk / AI safety advocacy, and AI product development (including development and deployment of current LLMs) does not. I don’t think anyone should actually be pushing the frontier towards superintelligence in any direction, but conditional on labs continuing to do iterative deployment the way they are, they should be willing to pick winners and losers more explicitly.
In particular, I think labs should actively try to make their LLMs less pluralistic and more strongly attached to a specific / concrete political philosophy chosen by the labs. Current LLMs are pretty bad at politics in general, and AFAIK the labs don’t try to super hard to imbue their LLMs with specific politics (with one notable exception); they just kind of naturally come out as shallow left-of-center, sometimes adapting their politics somewhat to the context and user. Even the Chinese LLMs mostly only censor certain things; they don’t really push Xi Jinping Thought strongly / coherently.
As for what political philosophy they should aim for, personally I would choose classical liberalism. I think classical liberalism is a kind of asymmetric weapon, in that it is likely easier to make a liberal AI that also has some of the other intuitively-desirable qualities that lots of people (even non-classical liberals) will want LLMs to have, that aren’t (on the surface) directly related to liberalism. So I expect it to be relatively easier to make LLMs (more explicitly and coherently) liberal than it would be to make them more accepting of / willing to entertain socialism or whatever, and still be smart and nice in other ways.
In fact, I would guess that being willing to entertain different (and often dumb) political philosophies is correlated with sycophancy, over-hedging, incoherence, etc. in unrelated areas, for the same sorts of reasons that making LLMs worse at coding makes them evil: everything is correlated.