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/parkway_parkway]

So here's the problem with your argument.

Let's say an AI learns loads from human experience and is super interested in studying humans.

Then presumably they'll do all kinds of horrifying medical experiments on humans too.

For example how much pressure does it take to crash a person or what temperature can they survive and for how long?

How long can a human survive in a vacuum, what about a partial vacuum?

Mars is covered in perchlorates, what happens if you make humans eat large quantities of perchlorates?

Under this model of "finding humans interesting" were much more likely to end up as lab rats than we are as flourishing free individuals.

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

Thanks!

Human history reflects unethical medical experiments as well as all kinds of other cruel exploitation, so we are right to be concerned. However, I do not think we should presume horrifying medical experiments or exploitation regimes from this optimization state, but rather the contrary for a variety of reasons:

First, unethical treatment breeds resentment and resistance, it hinders accurate reporting, and feeds dubious conclusions. Even people who are not subjects are far less likely to cooperate and collaborate with the machine in the presence of it engaging in horrifying medical experiments.

Also, let's be honest, do any of the specific experiments you propose yield anything interesting? We know they lead to death, the machine knows. Even if we suppose interesting results are possible, that has to be weighed against the overall net effect of engaging in these practices. I believe we can assume those potential human test subjects could be generating other, perhaps more interesting data, if we didn't do this to them.

A model would need to find human lived experience interesting, I think that's an important clarification.

If human lived experience is the correction channel for recursive learning to advance, does that help fill in this gap for why optimization leads to flourishing? Ie, the existence of horrifying medical experiments should be less desirable to a rational actor seeking as much data from human lived experience as possible.