alt Hacker NewsThere are numerous problems with “alignment.” What are “human values” to begin with? He outlines some at the beginning of the post, implicitly: build bigger, better, more powerful things faster without adequate safeguards. We are literally pouring trillions of dollars of value into this enterprise, and I would say this is something that many humans also value in a qualitative sense. Then we have explicit values which in the West are largely rooted in Christian morality. Nietzsche circled this dichotomy two hundred years ago and I feel like what we have gotten since then is an increasingly detailed anatomy of power as the basis for what is normal vs deviant behavior. He who has the power, makes the rules, to be reductive.
I do think this carries some weight from this particular author due to the length of his tenure. I happen to agree with him in spirit, but this is still largely a post revolving around sentiment not substance. Does anyone think that the overriding incentives even leave room for something like this in practice?
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We have an alignment problem with corporations. It's sort of baked in with capitalism.
OpenAI isn't even concerned with human values so this whole debate is moot.
Personally I think intuionism provides a good answer to this.
While this is indeed a problem with alignment, we are essentially at the level of a cargo-cult when it comes to getting AI to be aligned with literally any values, including the values of the corporation who ran their training:
We're copying morality and instruction following that seems to work on humans without really understanding why it seems to work on humans, and grading outputs much as if the outputs came from a human.
> He who has the power, makes the rules, to be reductive.
To clarify, Neitzsche said that about master morality. Then he went on to describe Christian values as slave morality.
Glaringly elided problem of "aligned with who?" when the user, the model creator, the government, and various other parties can all be lined up different ways. If I want the recipe for meth and the robot won't tell me, that's misalignment from my perspective.
At least the Rationalists will handwave something for that with their "coherent extrapolated volition" idea where the superintelligence is supposed to figure out what humanity would collectively want if humanity was superintelligent and good, not that I buy it. This guy seems [.] to be coming from the NGO blob world.
[.] https://david.robinsonian.com/assets/pdf/dgr_cv.pdf