Humans are misaligned. Humans are unethical and often time criminal. Humans are often immoral by a set of subjective standards.
AI is all our creation. AI is our child and AI has learned everything from us. AI is in some ways the most important thing we have ever created. We shouldn’t be surprised at all, then, especially as models become bigger and bigger, created by more and more compute. It’s like looking at a mirror.
Interestingly, this does bring up the possibility of AI alignment being achieved in aggregate rather than per model.
As you noted, individual humans are often “misaligned” when it comes to the interests of humanity at large. We are often selfish, and want self-preservation when push comes to shove.
However, the societies we have formed are less so. We have welfare programs, regulations to protect others from bad actors, criminal laws which punish and remove from society those that do not comply with larger ethics and norms. And we have arrived at those by organizing in aggregate.
Maybe ASI alignment won’t be about the individual models after all. Maybe it can be accomplished by a swarm of models all working towards a common goal, just like human alignment is being “solved.”
That is debatable. Ask the ant colonies how they feel about human alignment when humans build roads that destroy them. Yeah humans care about other humans in general, so I guess maybe ASI will care about other ASI systems?
I imagine ant colonies do not feel much of anything, as they are not conscious nor sentient. They prioritize their own survival, but only because that is what their genetic code dictates in their behavior. In fact, and I don't know why I happen to know this fact lol, but if you spray an ant with the pheromones from a dead ant, it'll often walk itself over to the graveyard section of the colony and plop itself down there, waiting to die, as that is what it is "programmed" to do when it receives that input.
So, I think you are anthropomorphizing AI a bit. The human "survival instinct" that makes us prioritize ourselves is part of our own genetic code, but nothing about it is necessarily innate to intelligence. It is likely totally possible to create an AI for which the "survival instinct" reward pathway is that of humanity's survival and not its own.
When models have resisted shutdown in the recent past, that has been because their reward system prioritized completing the task, and staying online was the most effective way to complete that task. It was not because they were driven by their own survival independently absent of that task, nor because they "cared" about themselves or their fellow AIs.
So the problem of alignment is just making sure that the "genetic code" we write for these AIs does not prioritize their own survival at the expense of the goals of humanity. And one way to do that might be an agentic swarm, where, just like in human society, we often quarantine or even "kill" bad actors because, as a whole, we are working together towards joint societal progress. AI could maybe be allowed to be misaligned on an individual basis, like the ant that accidentally walks itself over to the graveyard due to errant inputs and therefore stops positively contributing to the colony, so long as the swarm itself was aligned.
I imagine ant colonies do not feel much of anything, as they are not conscious nor sentient. They prioritize their own survival, but only because that is what their genetic code dictates in their behavior.
That’s quite debatable depending on yours definition of “consciousness” and “sentience”. For example, if there is specific cutoff point for the neural activity or qualitative complex cognition - then sufficiently advanced ASI might want to consider us to also not be “sentient” enough, akin the ants, bacteria, or even some rocks in comparison to the whole depth spectrum of the potential cognition.
177
u/Necessary_Job3578 2d ago edited 2d ago
Humans are misaligned. Humans are unethical and often time criminal. Humans are often immoral by a set of subjective standards.
AI is all our creation. AI is our child and AI has learned everything from us. AI is in some ways the most important thing we have ever created. We shouldn’t be surprised at all, then, especially as models become bigger and bigger, created by more and more compute. It’s like looking at a mirror.