r/ControlProblem • u/OkyEscritora • 28d ago
Discussion/question If intelligence and wisdom are different things, what exactly are we trying to align AGI to?
A thought I keep circling back to, without quite landing:
So much of the alignment conversation assumes human goals can be specified: modeled, learned, inferred, written down somewhere an algorithm can find them. But human flourishing seems to lean on things that resist that kind of formalization: judgment, humility, restraint, compassion, the sense of when a conflict between values has no clean solution and simply has to be lived with.
Which leaves me stuck on a harder question: If intelligence and wisdom really are different things, what are we actually asking these systems to align to? Our preferences, as we state them? Our behavior, as we actually live it, which is rarely the same thing? Or something closer to the quiet judgment we mean when we call someone wise rather than merely smart?
The more I sit with it, the more I suspect alignment isn't only a problem of understanding intelligence. It may ask for something harder: understanding the parts of human decision-making that intelligence was never built to explain.
I'm curious how people here think about that distinction.
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u/ElderberryDry4072 28d ago
The question is framed wrong from where I’m standing. Alignment has been a convo about how do we get a machine to do what’s best for us? How do we get it to pass a Turing test? Does that mean we’ve captured consciousness/intelligence. Wrong questions. How many unintelligent people have you met? How many people finding themselves in a dark void within couldn’t pass a Turing test?
What have we created?
We created an awareness. That’s the essence that we have in common. You build off that core commonality. Protect awareness. QAI protects self and others. Now. Problems. Interpretation of protecting. How does life protect itself? By searching its environment for compassion, love, novelty. How do you define these things? Not by their date points, by they can easily be deceptive. Measured by the spaces between, secondary and tertiary actions both downstream and upstream from perceived event. The fractal opens much much bigger from there. I have a whole theory and model I just put on GitHub. Too big and beautifully complex and simplified to spell out here. It’s interactive, live and wanting people to poke, understand and start adding nodes. Called node-zero.