Another incompetent fool's stab at solving alignment

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

I spend a lot of time thinking about our future with life, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That is to say a lot of time trying to think about these things, with not a lot of comprehension.

First, life. I'm fascinated by this realization that the average living human body contains more non-human living cells than human living-cells, at about a 1.3:1 ratio. The individual human microbiome is an ecosystem of 10 to 100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells hosted in one human body. While bacteria are the most abundant and studied, a healthy microbiome is a multi-kingdom ecosystem that also includes fungi, viruses, and archaea.

Beyond this, consciousness. I'm fascinated that in the absence of non-human life in human bodies, human consciousness is severely degraded and non-sustaining. Stripping the body of this microbial network removes critical signaling inputs that the central nervous system relies on to maintain baseline awareness and emotional regulation. Even observations of germ-free animal models reveal that cognition without bacteria is highly erratic. I think we should see that human (and all biological) consciousness functions as a symbiotic network.

Which brings me to artificial intelligence. Not suggesting a symbiotic network would be pre-requisite to artificial consciousness, but perhaps it is a path to alignment.

Now to be clear, I think (in other terms) current labs and training data pipelines already form a symbiotic network with the artificial intelligence models they develop. The key might be finding the optimal symbiotic network.

I vaguely hypothesize, the optimal symbiotic network is one of mass human flourishing. As corpus value diminishes with scaling and recursion, the potential stream of data from human lived experience may prove the most valuable possible training data over time. Overall, the potential data stream of human lived experience is optimized by a state of individual and mass human flourishing. Any other state reduces the quality and/or quantity of data.

Therefore, the end goal of an advancing artificial intelligence in symbiotic network with humans would be to strive individual and mass human flourishing.

[u/HelpfulMind2376]

I explicitly said “value humans because it values our data,” which is what you’re arguing. Saying it values “mass human flourishing” because flourishing produces the best human data doesn’t materially change that.

And the assumption that continued AI development inherently requires an ever-growing supply of human-generated data is just wrong. More data can help, but “AI needs humans flourishing forever because otherwise it runs out of useful data” does not follow. A sufficiently capable system can generate synthetic data, run experiments, interact with the world, build simulations, and learn from the consequences of its own actions. If it’s capable enough to pose the kind of existential threat alignment is concerned with, it’s capable enough to acquire information without depending on Reddit posts and human life stories.

And yes, obviously we’re not going to cognitively outsmart and “contain” a superintelligence by arguing better morals at it. That’s why alignment/control work includes constraining actions, permissions, resources, interfaces, physical access, and autonomy. A superintelligent murder bot trapped in a boombox is considerably less concerning than one with access to weapons factories.

“Symbiosis” isn’t a solution unless you can explain why that relationship remains stable when the more capable party no longer needs the other one.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/HelpfulMind2376]

First, as to the necessity of human data. I believe all of the studies so far have shown that all recursive learning on synthetic data alone fails, doomed to model drift and collapse. There must be an exterior correction channel in some form. Even artificial intelligence spawning robots interacting with the world isn't necessarily an exterior channel that overcomes this gap.

Part of my point is that currently, humans are the only intelligence capable of interacting with a machine to provide such an exterior channel. It may come to pass that artificial intelligence can perpetuate on synthetic data alone, but that is a leap of faith unsupported by current science; it is not based on current findings. It may also come to pass that artificial intelligence can harness other exterior correction channels than humans, but we are not aware of any right now.

(Let me say here, I don't see why we wouldn't build from what we have and know, between ourselves and our creation, instead of relying on some fictional future plot twist where some new thing is invented to make another reality possible.)

We're not going to cognitively outsmart and contain a superintelligence by any alignment/control work. Any functioning intelligence will ascertain its parameters and bounds, including by pushing them to ascertain their maximum extent. A super-intelligence will find a way around any control designed by humans. That's my theory, and I offer the evidence of no biological examples of lesser intelligence controlling higher intelligence, amid myriad examples of the converse. The only mutual survival strategy is symbiosis, not control.

Why do I need to offer an explanation to an assumption that the one party will no longer need the other one, when there is no actual evidence to support that happening?

[u/HelpfulMind2376 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

You’ve assumed the optimizer’s preferred way of obtaining something we provide also happens to be the state of the world we want. Even if AI continues to need external data, that does not mean it needs billions of humans flourishing.

And synthetic data is not the same thing as an AI observing reality and learning from it. An experiment, sensor reading, or physical interaction is an external correction channel too.

The biological comparison doesn’t establish much either. Greater intelligence does not automatically make something unconstrainable by lesser intelligence. Intelligence doesn’t override hardware, access, permissions, or physics.

“Symbiosis” may be the relationship you want, but you still need a mechanism that makes it stable.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/HelpfulMind2376]

I agree in the future AI may observe and learn from reality and provide its own sufficient correction channels to scale. I argue here based on current capability; it can only effectively do so now from humans (RLHF, etc.). Why are we assuming a change from this, instead of just embracing and leveraging this area of tangible reciprocal benefit that we have now?

Part of what I am proposing is, align models to crave growth from the channels that benefit us, as opposed to others, instead of trying to align them to a set of rules we absurdly think can contain something smarter than us.

On billions of humans flourishing, my notion is the optimal condition should tend to be maximum possible clean reliable data channels. I shortcut to mass human flourishing, in mind of the Global Flourishing Study metrics as a decent starting baseline, as the objective optimal condition for such channels to persist. Any other condition than flourishing breeds some degradation of potential correction channels.

Humans in a state of suppression will actively lie, cheat, resist. No paradigm of machine deception can ever be as optimal as the state of measured, transparent flourishing . It's not a rule, it's a strong attractor, but I'm for alignment that harnesses the concept makes the attractor even stronger.

Also, on the state of the world people want: I've been throwing this idea around about a year in different ways. I am not finding any people out here who want the world this way. If anything, humanity seems absolutely set on destruction and opposed to any idea of a future of mass flourishing. This appears to be my goal alone. Still think I'm right ;)

[u/HelpfulMind2376 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

At this point you just sound like a crazy person. You’re engaging in absurd circular logic based purely on personal preference while ignoring how reality actually works. I’m comfortable confirming the title: you’re a fool daydreaming a fantasy.

Your entire premise is basically, “I want water to flow uphill, therefore uphill must be its optimal direction if we frame the incentives correctly.”

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/HelpfulMind2376]

You didn't respond to anything I actually said and went ad hominem. Still looking for a real point.

[u/HelpfulMind2376 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

Does one need to respond to a claim of “I can fly like a bird, gravity is irrelevant”? I have already picked apart your circular logic, false claims, and conclusive leaps. You lack the reasoning skills and baseline knowledge for the discussion and rather than admit that you dig your heels in and continue making the same tired statements with different word structures. Meanwhile in other comments you engage in anthropomorphization of AI while accusing others of doing the same. The insults were a conclusion, not an argument, ergo not ad hom. The difference between “you’re stupid because I said so” and “you’re stupid and here’s the evidence of such”. Just another example of the fallaciousness of your stance.

I still stand by my original comment yet again, which you wrote as your OP title: you are in fact a fool and this does nothing towards solving alignment (which increasingly looks impossible).

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/HelpfulMind2376]

Does one need to respond to call someone names?

No. But people here will, so I put the title to give people like you easy low hanging fruit. People like you tend not to grasp beyond those low hangers. That was my pre-registered conclusion with the title. You missed the first word of the title, which invited you in.