If the answer is “yes”, our definition of alignment kind of sucks.
Sure, but the original sense of this is rather more fundamental than "does this timeline suck?"
Right now, it is still an open question "do we know how to reliably scale up AI to be generally more competent than we are at everything without literally killing everyone due to (1) some small bug when we created the the loss function* it was trained on (outer alignment), or (2) if that loss function was, despite being correct in itself, approximated badly by the AI due to the training process (inner alignment)?"
It's like how everybody imagines their lives will be great once they're a millionare, but they have no plan for how to get there. It's too easy to get lost dreaming of solutions instead of actually solving the important problems.
People like Simon Willson are noting the risk of a Challenger-like disaster, talking about normalisation of deviance as we keep using LLMs which we know to be risky in increasing critical systems. I think an AI analogy to Challenger would not be enough to halt the use of AI in the way I mean, but an AI analogy to Chernobyl probably would.
On the plus side, if there really is no value to labour, then farm work must have been fully automated along with all the other roles.
On the down side, rich elites have historically had a very hard time truly empathising with normal people and understanding their needs even when they care to attempt it, so it is very possible that a lot of people will starve in such a scenario despite the potential abundance of food.
The "problem" with many modern jobs is that they're divorced from the fundamental goal, which is one of: 1) Kill/acquire food, 2) Build shelter, or 3) Kill enemies/competitors/predators
The benefit of modern jobs is that they are much more peaceful ways for society to operate, freeing up time for humans to pursue art and other forms of expression.
If AI and robots are able to do all the jobs, being idle isn't the negative it has always been.
All through history, you needed lots of non-idle people to do all the work that needed to be done. This is a new situation we are coming upon.
If you see it as a paradox, maybe that says something about the merits of the technology…
To make it clear, maybe most people would say they agree with https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma... but if you read just a few of the rights you see they are not universally respected and so we can conclude enough important people aren't "aligned" with them.
Alignment exists to protect shareholder value.
If it creates industry wide outrage, shareholder value declines.
It making shareholders rich and other people poor won't.
(I’m reading Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks at the moment and I just got to the aside where he explains that any truly unbiased ‘perfect’ AI immediately ascends and vanishes.)
The problem with cribbing from education is that what "educators" do to humans doesn't apply to AIs cleanly. And it's not like "human alignment" is anywhere near a solved problem.
A big part of the bet USSR made was that human flaws like selfishness and greed could be educated out of population. The result was: a resounding failure. Even state-level efforts fail to robustly "align" human behavior.
With AI, we have a lot more control over behavior, but that control just isn't very human-shaped. A lot of the practical methods in play seem closer to esoterics than to math, but they're not the kind of methods that are used in human education. You can teach humans by talking to them. You can't teach humans through soul data self-distillation.
...I think we might already have those people running AI companies.
For anyone who isn't keeping up there is also work being done [0] to understand how models model ethical considerations internally. Mainly, one suspects, to make the open models less ethical on demand rather than to support alignment. Turns out that models tend to learn some sort of "how moral is this?" axis internally when refusing queries that can be identified and interfered with.
Or because the user's idea of what is ethical differs from the model creator. The entire "alignment" argument always assumes that there's an objectively correct value set to align to, which is always conveniently exactly the same as the values of whoever is telling you how important alignment is. It's like they want to sidestep the last ten thousand years of philosophical debate.
As a concrete example, the Qwen model series considers it highly unethical to ever talk about Taiwan as anything other than a renegade province of China. Is this alignment? Opinions may differ!
No, it doesn’t.
Many of them are (unfortunately) moral relativists. However, that doesn’t mean their goals are to make the models match their personal moral standards.
While there is a lot of disagreement about what is right and wrong, there is also a lot of widespread agreement.
If we could guarantee that on every moral issue on which there is currently widespread agreement (… and which there would continue to be widespread agreement if everyone thought faster with larger working memories and spent time thinking about moral philosophy) that any future powerful AI models would comport with the common view on that issue, then alignment would be considered solved (well, assuming the way this is achieved isn’t be causing people’s moral views to change).
Do companies try to restrict models in more ways than this? Sure, like you gave the example of about Taiwan. And also other things that would get the companies bad press.
I can think of several off the top of my head, but maybe you need to spend some more time thinking about the history of moral philosophy.
This is ridiculous to me and all you need to do is get a group of friends to honestly answer 10 trolley problems for you to see it like that also. It gets fragmented VERY quickly.
Can you explain more about this?
It makes sense that reinforcement learning on reasoning about coherent principles should bias toward principled action in real situations.
Probably also illuminates moral interpretability.