If the answer is “yes”, our definition of alignment kind of sucks.
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.
Please note I’ve never had this problem before, until recently.
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)?"
My point is: 1) that this binary is fundamentally insufficient to prescribe good and equitable outcomes for people - if the aligned AI flags overpopulation as a problem and kills a few billion people to improve QoL for the rest, is that good? It doesn’t take much creativity to go from this to the AI simply choosing the mean over the median, and concentrating untold wealth while billions starve or live on subsistence outside their walls. Is that good?
And 2) if you come up with a better definition, the parts of it that live inside the model weights cannot be disaggregated from the parts that live outside the model weights. From my perspective (and this article agrees) we have done a pretty excellent job of getting the model weights to work in a way that makes them follow instructions, and a pretty horrible job of suggesting or (gasp) implementing policy that actually creates a decent world in the presence of “aligned” AI.
https://github.com/space-bacon/SRT
This repository empirically proves computational semiotics.
The options aren't as binary as "die or The Culture", the cause of death can be something that feels positive to live through similar to fictional examples like the Stargate SG-1 episode where people live contentedly in a shrinking computer-controlled safe zone in an otherwise toxic planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisions_(Stargate_SG-1)
Conversely "aligned" AI, the question obviously becomes "aligned with whom?": if famous historical villains such as Stalin or Genghis Khan had an AI aligned with them, this would suck for everyone else and in the latter case would freeze human development at a terrible level, but we can't even do that much yet.
> My point is: 1) that this binary is fundamentally insufficient to prescribe good and equitable outcomes for people - if the aligned AI flags overpopulation as a problem and kills a few billion people to improve QoL for the rest, is that good? It doesn’t take much creativity to go from this to the AI simply choosing the mean over the median, and concentrating untold wealth while billions starve or live on subsistence outside their walls. Is that good?
Your point *is* (part of) the alignment problem: we don't know what a good loss function is, nor how to confirm the AI is even implementing it if we did.
We also don't know how to debug proposed loss functions to train for the right thing (whatever that is), nor how to debug trained weights (against the loss function).
> And 2) if you come up with a better definition, the parts of it that live inside the model weights cannot be disaggregated from the parts that live outside the model weights. From my perspective (and this article agrees) we have done a pretty excellent job of getting the model weights to work in a way that makes them follow instructions, and a pretty horrible job of suggesting or (gasp) implementing policy that actually creates a decent world in the presence of “aligned” AI.
I really don't understand what you're getting at with this, sorry.
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.
But beyond that there's still problems like concentration of power and surveillance, permanent loss of jobs, cyber and bio security. I'm not convinced things will go well even if we can avoid these problems though. I try to think about what the world will be like if AI becomes more creative than us, what happens if it can produce the best song or movie ever made with a prompt, do people get lost in AI addiction? We sort of see that with social media already, and it's only optimizing the content delivery, what happens when algorithms can optimize the content itself?
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.
[0] Need to consider there're a few humans potentially kept alive against their will (if not having a will to survive is a will at all) with machines for whatever reason.
So, like the past 20 years?
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).
This isn't theory, ask the Luddites why they got so mad when their employers started buying machines to replace them. They didn't get richer and freer: they were thrown out to rot on the pavement, while their ex-employers kept 100% of the productivity increases.
Statements that have been utterly ridiculous from the dawn of life to modernity, backfilled to conveniently fit the zeitgeist.
(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.)
If big corps made an offer like say “We will fund the next X years of your life 100%, for you to do all the things you wanted to do but never could because of work and bills” many people would probably take it, with the understanding that after those X years: euthanasia.
This would eliminate a vast amount of people from this world and leave behind only those who have chosen to stay and endure life: working hard, propping up the system that remains. The end of forced poverty.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
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.
