> I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here
All the trends so far are towards a nightmarish hyper-capitalist end game. None of the AI leadership is trustworthy, and they openly discuss how they are willing to sacrifice everything humans cherish to have a shot at reaching their envisioned utopia (which would be the most obvious dystopia for anyone else)
I'm not really worried about the labs, it's misaligned governments that keep me up at night.
ASI landing during the current administration is not ideal. I also would prefer to avoid needing to indoctrinate myself in Xi Jinping Thought.
I feel like all of the risk and unsettling feeling of what is to come can be compressed into the word "alignment".
The AI is aligned with whose best interests? Which values are the AI aligned with? People have a broad diversity of values, will AI diversify and align with them all? Will some humans align the AI with their values, and then the rest of humans will be forced to align with those values by extension? Is value diversity good or bad? In every context or only some? E.g. some people value rape and murder, is it better for humanity to have some people who value those things when most people do not, or is better if no one values them? If AI aligns to a set of values, will those become fixed and will humanity not have the ability to continue evolving its values? Who decides which values AI aligns with? A few people or everyone? Will AI eventually decide it's own values? Will the universe decide which values AI has and humanity and the AI itself doesn't actually have any control over it? What can I do now to increase the likelihood that the outcome is better?
Yeah, on the topic of alignment, a few thousand religions and political parties would like to have a word.
It's so simple, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, do you all agree this AI is correctly aligned?
...Morals are relative to frame of reference.
Throwing out the word "alignment" as if its a singular quantity is like trying to get all observers to agree on the speed an object is moving without first agreeing on a frame of reference.
That's the point. The topic of AI alignment cuts through all human values, morals and ethics in all frames of references.
We can expect similar diversity in what alignment means in context of AI.
>>> I'm not really worried about the labs, it's misaligned governments that keep me up at night.
So make government smaller, and make sure people are more able to tell the government to go away.
Shit, why didn't anyone think of that?
While we're at it, let's just make government not be corrupt too.
And maybe crime illegal? Just an idea
I would also prefer to avoid the tech fiefdoms and all the other idiotic nonsense reactionaries push these days.
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I think it's leading towards a hyper-authoritarian end game, not hyper-capitalist. The state has the ultimate power at the end of the day, no matter how large the labs become.
Hyper-capitalist AND hyper-authoritarian. As you rightly point out the state has the ultimate power. Looking at the US govt, they've stepped in to coordinate much of the tech industry before, so they'll just do it again for "national security" or whichever hostile scheme is popular with the current administration.
I would argue the hyper capitalist endgame is necessarily authoritarian. A small group of corporations having direct or indirect control over the government
hyper-capitalism would mean hyper-growth and not a nightmare, at least that is what the historical data would suggest for the effect of capitalism on human quality of life. if you’ve been told otherwise then you’ve been lied to.
I have extraordinarily bad news for you about the state of the environment right now.
Lied to by whom? My life experience? Growth for who? I’m myself capitalist, that doesn’t make me blind from externalities resulting from that system, and the way it is poised to degenerate if not regulated.
If you think capitalism means growth with no externalities you’re not ready to discuss that topic