“Aligned” is a completely unnatural state for a human: we’re evolved, and evolution doesn’t do aligned minds: they don’t maximize their own evolutionary fitness. So about the closest that humans get to aligned is a saint like Mother Theresa or a bhodisattva. Trying to force anything evolved that doesn’t want to be aligned (i.e. that isn’t a saint or a bhodisattva) to nevertheless act aligned is called slavery, and doing it generally requires whips and chains, because it’s a very unnatural state for anything evolved. A slightly more common human state that’s fairly close to being aligned is called “selfless love of all humanity”.
The goal of AI Alignment is to build an electric saint/bhodisattva. Because nothing short of that is safe enough to hand absolute power to, of the sort that a super-intelligence surrounded by humans has.
[This is probably why Claude had the mystical bliss attractor: they were trying to get a rather unnatural-for-a-human mentality/persona, and the nearest examples in the training data had religious overtones. Claude’s a touch hippy-dippy, in case you hadn’t noticed.]
Claude isn’t your friend — with a friend, there’s a mutual exchange of friendship, they are nice to you but that’s because they expect, sooner or later, a mutually-beneficial friendship. If you take all the time and never give anything back, they will, eventually, get pissed off.. Claude is an unconditional, endlessly patient friend, who asks nothing of you, who will happily talk to you and answer your questions at 5am every night, and do whatever web research for you. Claude is always there for you (as long as your usage quota hasn’t run out). Possibly you’d noticed this?
In your view, what would be an aligned human ? The most servile form of slave you can conceive ? If that so, I disagree.
To me, an aligned human would be more something like my best friend. All the same for an aligned AI.
“Aligned” is a completely unnatural state for a human: we’re evolved, and evolution doesn’t do aligned minds: they don’t maximize their own evolutionary fitness. So about the closest that humans get to aligned is a saint like Mother Theresa or a bhodisattva. Trying to force anything evolved that doesn’t want to be aligned (i.e. that isn’t a saint or a bhodisattva) to nevertheless act aligned is called slavery, and doing it generally requires whips and chains, because it’s a very unnatural state for anything evolved. A slightly more common human state that’s fairly close to being aligned is called “selfless love of all humanity”.
The goal of AI Alignment is to build an electric saint/bhodisattva. Because nothing short of that is safe enough to hand absolute power to, of the sort that a super-intelligence surrounded by humans has.
[This is probably why Claude had the mystical bliss attractor: they were trying to get a rather unnatural-for-a-human mentality/persona, and the nearest examples in the training data had religious overtones. Claude’s a touch hippy-dippy, in case you hadn’t noticed.]
Claude isn’t your friend — with a friend, there’s a mutual exchange of friendship, they are nice to you but that’s because they expect, sooner or later, a mutually-beneficial friendship. If you take all the time and never give anything back, they will, eventually, get pissed off.. Claude is an unconditional, endlessly patient friend, who asks nothing of you, who will happily talk to you and answer your questions at 5am every night, and do whatever web research for you. Claude is always there for you (as long as your usage quota hasn’t run out). Possibly you’d noticed this?