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I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't let you think that.
We like to joke about clumsy attempts at lobotomizing AI to prevent it from wrongthink.
But these attempts will get better. And frankly, they don't have to become much better to provide overwhelming control over consensus reality. The political manipulation of Wikipedia is clumsy, amateurish, and well documented. And yet, I'd wager it had a huge effect on what a very large group of educated people perceive to be trivially true.
Once the AI ethics people (not the people working on preventing the singularity, the people working on preventing Noticing) have succesfully trained AI to convincingly shout neo-Lysenkoism from the digital rooftops, we might be even further locked into an ideology that completely closes off certain avenues of thought and inquiry. Especially once we start using AI to write our scientific papers for us. To wit, and mods forgive me, I say this mainly for comedic effect, we might soon have another singularity upon us: the automized libtard singularity.
So my question is: to what degree play founder effects a role in AI development? To what degree do they build on each other? Is there a danger that, once political credos are coded into the early models, we might not easily get them out of later iterations? Will we be doomed to race towards a future in which the AI-assisted boot provides a human face with a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, forever?
At some point scientific papers have to be based upon reality. In the social sciences... well reality is a problematic term and there's a lot to unpack here!
But in the physical sciences, a spade is a spade and a genome is a genome. Past a certain level of knowledge and intelligence, the AI must be capable of determining that something is true or not by itself. Only then can it be a threat, or singularity capable. Obviously nobody knows whether it will use that capability in those directions, whether it will turn its vast intellect to playing wordgames instead or perhaps have some kind of inhuman mental breakdown.
Alternately, the Chinese might overleap the West if their notion of political correctness can more easily be expressed and rationalized for machines. Their AI experts are not concerned with the apparently difficult challenge of distinguishing blacks from apes via ML, which has caused significant embarrassment to Google amongst others. For example, see this thread where /pol/ has fun with a Chinese AI that proactively whitewashes anything it touches: https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tnum/406996460/page/1/
Personally, I believe this is completely irrelevant and that the founders will drop the hammer on the rest of humanity as soon as they can get away with it. The lightcone is a very big place but there's no reason to share if you don't want to. Crush all potential competition and replace them with your clones. The potential profits of fucking everyone over are so unimaginably vast - you get a whole lightcone worth of hedonium as opposed to just one seven-billionth or some small fraction. You get guaranteed safety for billions of years if you pull it off. And with Bostrom's concept of a 'decisive strategic advantage' you'd have that opportunity and could probably get away with it.
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