Good luck to the ARC. Alignment is not a solvable problem. A paradox cannot be solved.
I've stated like the following:
“Alignment, which we cannot define, will be solved by rules on which none of us agree, based on values that exist in conflict, for a future technology that we do not know how to build, which we could never fully understand, must be provably perfect to prevent unpredictable and untestable scenarios for failure, of a machine whose entire purpose is to outsmart all of us and think of all possibilities that we did not.”
Thanks, interesting reference. However, their analysis doesn't tell us much about the quality of Grokipedia. Would be more interested in something like hallucination density, but I know of no way that could be measured.
That is a certainty. I was once asked to calculate how much time we would save through our companies code reuse program. I read all the material on estimating savings, but then proved it was all ridiculous.
I came across a study that attempted to estimate how long it took to build libraries that had already been built. In this case, there were no unknowns, you had the entire code. Estimates were off by orders of magnitude. If we can't estimate the work when the work is already done, how could we ever estimate the work when we know less?
Not sure how you get around the contamination problems. I use these everyday and they are extremely problematic about making errors that are hard to perceive.
They are not reliable tools for any tasks that require accurate data.
I think it is creating a growing interest in authenticity among some. Although, it still feels like this is a minority opinion. Every content platform is being flooded with AI content. Social media floods it into all of my feeds.
I wish I could push a button and filter it all out. But that's the problem we have created. It is nearly impossible to do. If you want to consume truly human authentic content, it is nearly impossible to know. Everyone I interact with now might just be a bot.
> AI is not inevitable fate. It is an invitation to wake up. The work is to keep dragging what is singular, poetic, and profoundly alive back into focus, despite all pressures to automate it away.
This is the struggle. The race to automate everything. Turn all of our social interactions into algorithmic digital bits. However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement. Not sure how that is going to play out, but we certainly aren't slowing down yet.
For example, take a look at the short clip I have posted here. It is an example of just how far everyone is scaling bot and content farms. It is an absolute flood of noise into all of our knowledge repositories.
https://www.mindprison.cc/p/dead-internet-at-scale
John Dewey on a similar theme, about the desire to make everything frictionless and the role of friction. The fallacy that because "a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."
> The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions.
> Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.
> It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.
I remember a few years back, here on HN everyone was obsessed with diets and supplements and optimizing their nutrients.
I remember telling someone that eating is also a cultural and pleasurable activity, that it's not just about nutrients, and that it's not always meant to be optimized.
It wasn't well received.
Thankfully these days that kind of posts are much less common here. That particular fad seems to have lost its appeal.
Oh yeah, it’s both funny and understandable how we’ve swung from the mania of huel-esque techbro belief of nutrition to the current holistic eating “beef tallow” and no-seed oils movement. I think we realized guzzling slop alone is spiritually empty.
The Culture dives into this concept with the idea of hegemonizing swarms, and Bolstrom touches on this with optimizing singletons.
Humans are amazing min/maxers, we create vast, and at least temporarily productive mono cultures. At the same time a scarily large portion of humanity will burn and destroy something of beauty if it brings them one cent of profit.
Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
> Myself I believe technology and eventually AI were our fate once we became intelligence optimizers.
Yes, everyone talks about the Singularity, but I see the instrumental point of concern to be something prior which I've called the Event Horizon. We are optimizing, but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.
"The point where we are now blind as to where we are going. The outcomes become increasingly unpredictable, and it becomes less likely that we can find our way back as it becomes a technology trap. Our existence becomes dependent on the very technology that is broken, fragile, unpredictable, and no longer understandable. There is just as much uncertainty in attempting to retrace our steps as there is in going forward."
>but without any understanding any longer for the outcomes.
A concept in driving where your braking distance exceeds your view/headlight range at any given speed. We've stomped on the accelerator and the next corner is rather sharp.
Isaac Asimov did a fictional version of this in the Foundation trilogy.
That's a very idealistic view to believe there ever was something as a point were some people had a really more clear and precise representation which was accurate of what was going to come.
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.
> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.
I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.
I've stated like the following:
“Alignment, which we cannot define, will be solved by rules on which none of us agree, based on values that exist in conflict, for a future technology that we do not know how to build, which we could never fully understand, must be provably perfect to prevent unpredictable and untestable scenarios for failure, of a machine whose entire purpose is to outsmart all of us and think of all possibilities that we did not.”
The full elaboration I wrote up here - https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-alignment-why-solving-it-is-i...
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