alt Hacker NewsIf you succesfully build a highly capable “aligned” model (according to some class of definitions that Anthropic would use for the words “capable” and “aligned”) and it brings about a global dark age of poverty and inequality by completely eliminating the value of labor vs capital, can you still call it aligned?
If the answer is “yes”, our definition of alignment kind of sucks.
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Jobs are an invention of humanity. About 50% of people dislike their job. People spend much of their lives working. Poverty and inequality are a choice made by society if society chooses poorly.
There's isn't even a solution for how to control highly capable systems at all, everyone wants to decide what to do with the AI before they've even solved the problem of controlling it.
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.
The categories make no sense. Not having to do a job is the entire best case of AI. What we do with that is another thing, but we simply have to accept that any other lense is complete nonsense. The endpoint is obvious and we need to stop being silly about it: We are replacing human labor. Maybe we will find some new jobs to do in the interim. Maybe not. In the end, if everything goes right (in the AI optimist sense), jobs will not be something that humans do.
Labor = capital/energy in an AI complete world. We have to start from that basis when we talk about alignment or anything else. The social issues that arise from the extinction of human labor are something we have to solve politically, that's not something any model company can do (or should be allowed to do).
Is this some sort of “incompleteness” paradox for AI alignment? Seriously
This is completely why the rich love it so much
Why would the elimination of the value of labor result in poverty and inequality? It should be the opposite, as poverty and inequality is the current status quo (for the many).
This is radical life denial. I was not born for and do not exist to toil. Work is ontologically evil.
Maybe a sufficiently aligned AI would necessarily decide that the zeroth law was necessary, and abscond.
(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.)
this completely misses the point why alignment exists
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.
You’re quite correct and we are likely going to stumble into this future despite all the very big brains working on these technologies (including people on hn).
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
> 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)?"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_function