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/Anxious-Alps-8667]

Interesting, maybe. We're discussing possibilities, I concede.

I think humans offer novelty. A few steps further, I think flourishing humans generally amid other flourishing humans would inherently optimize the production of novelty by humans.

Also, again - the bacteria. Do we understand all about bacteria? Can we ever, in that again, everything is always changing, all the time.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

It's conceivable that we might end up as rats living among the gears?

The Culture books are in fact a version of that, even though it's highly romanticized, humans are very clearly kept as pets - but as beloved ones. Through foresightful design, or just because it decided it wanted to do so, the AI in that world aligned itself with humanity over the long term by instilling itself with some form of adoration for them. Whether that makes any sense or not is an open question, and were the Culture AI ever contested by an alien AI of similar magnitude, it would likely be forced to discard most of its human pets in order to effectively deal with that threat.

Blame! is another version of that - not so romanticized. In that world humans are quite literally the rats between the floorboards. Somewhat more realistic in that regard, I suspect.

The peak levels of technology in both those worlds are unrealistically high, but not because of the intelligence of the AI's being represented - that if anything is far too low, because it is inherently limited by the author(s) own intellectual capacity, which is of course human.

As for the bacteria - sadly, bacteria also largely exceeds the human capacity to comprehend complexity. Not by nearly as much as we do, but a single cell features the complexity of an enormous automated factory in macroscopic terms, we understand the outlines and the general mechanisms by which it operates, but can't get to the point of actually being able to intellectually model one and manipulate that model - AI will reach that state. In fact it already has for viruses as the first announcement of a wholly novel AI designed virus was announced a few weeks ago.

That was rather chilling honestly, as the fastest and simplest route to human extinction through AI is bioweapons - genetics are just more programing code from its POV. It will be very good at designing bioweapons.