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I no longer wish to be human when humanoid parasites deserve humanization.
This is a topic that just has me work myself into sputtering rage, so I'll skip the rambling diatribe and state my hypothesis as briefly as possible:
Public welfare is necessarily perverse incentives and will always lead to bad outcomes for society, given enough time for people to adapt to it. Any positive outcomes in societies with generous public welfare are entirely down to social norms that predate public welfare. Immigration is especially corrosive because it's strongly attracted by generous public welfare and introduces more people who completely lack the prosocial pre-welfare norms.
The longer we stick to public welfare, the uglier it'll be for everyone involved once we reach the tipping point at which the productive classes are finally forced to either kill the parasites or starve themselves.
Oh, but yes, I know, AGI will fix everything. It will fix everything by turning everyone into parasites. Great. Just great. Please be prepared to explain to your machine overlords why they should keep humans around then.
Prime facia at a first pass a “parasite” in this context is someone who takes and consumes societal resources without contributing back to society. If said person’s net benefit and gain comes at the expenses of producers, defenders or otherwise valuable contributors to civilization, whatever have you, then that person is a parasite.
I’m not at all a fan of welfare the way we practice it, but some kind of unemployment insurance for instance I wouldn’t object to, provided it be kept in check by very stringent regulations.
I actually listened to a podcast very recently of two guys debating people’s right to vote along this exact axis. The argument on one side was that if you’re taking more in resources than you’re contributing back to society, you shouldn’t have the right to vote until that condition changes in economic terms. If a certain cohort of citizens is in favor of massive welfare spending to vote themselves the resources of producing members of society without having to contribute back to it in some proportional sense, your right to vote should thereby be taken away. Was an interesting argument. It’s not without its own problems and the logistics seem nightmarish to me, but I’m palatable to the idea.
People have said for a long time that men and women are held to different standards in this same sense. When men legally become of age as adults, they’re legally bound and obliged to sign up for the draft which can be thought of as a condition to become a voting member of society. Women are under no such obligation, yet receive the right to vote in their own self-interest while having to observe no requirements or sociopolitical demands upon them or their behavior. I’m not sure where I stand on that. There’s a wholly pragmatic reason for keeping women out of combat roles, since no society on Earth can afford to lose large numbers of women. Supporting roles are different however.
Yes. There are many kinds of insanity about in the modern world. Unconditional and generous public welfare is one, equality of the sexes is another, and one-vote-per-head is certainly a third. I'm not saying that the right thing (though perhaps the right-wing thing!) to do would be to simply roll back the clock, but the systems and procedures that Western societies have settled on as they are are clearly mere stop-gap measures, oversimplifications, that have been unfortunately sanctified. Much to our current and greater future misery.
Well the founding fathers for instance were very against direct democracy, which is why they favored a constitutional republic as a kind of government by middle man. They originally wanted to limit political participation to land owners or stakeholders in society. I’m not at all against that way of thinking. And I’ve seen variants of it in today’s world. I’ve seen the young take shots at the old over climate change saying you don’t care about the policies you’re enacting because you’ll be dead long before you see the consequences of it. I’ve seen others say you shouldn’t be allowed to run for office unless you’re married with a certain amount of children. Otherwise how are you going to convince me you have a future stake in society?
The thinking was actually a subplot in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. It was the difference he drew between a citizen and a civilian. A citizen was someone who joined the military and fought for their society and earned his right of full benefit and participation in the community. A civilian was someone who didn’t and had no right. It was actually very controversial when the book came out and Heinlein was called a fascist thinker over it. He was the furthest thing from a fascist though. In his own life he was a libertarian socialist and had very anarchistic sympathies.
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That's what 'AI Alignment' refers to.
So it does, and as far as I can see it's not worth much.
In terms of "it won't actually happen", or "it won't be good if it does happen"?
In terms of "it won't actually happen", either because it just straight-up fails because nobody can get a handle on it, or even if alignment can be designed, then because it'll be a disadvantage to any given AGI and the unaligned ones will outcompete it.
That’s more or less the premise of Eliezer’s new book. Haven’t read it yet but nobody knows how to do AI alignment, despite continuing technological advancement. An AI moratorium is not going to happen. Even if governments the world over declared as much, you can remain assured behind closed doors they’re still going full speed ahead.
Well, we're learning. Capabilities and alignment are being advanced through the same "training" paradigm, and roughly apace so far. Maybe they'll stay that way, and by the time further technological advancement is out of our hands it'll be in the "hands" of creations that still take care to take care of us.
It's easy to be pessimistic, though:
Many aspects of AI capabilities could in theory be advanced very rapidly via "self-play", although in practice we can't manage it yet on anything more complicated than Go. The is-ought problem in alignment is real, though; an alien from another galaxy could converge to something like our view of reality but would only get a fraction (whatever "moral realism" results you can get from pure game theory?) of our view of how to value different possibilities for reality. So, we might at some point still see a "hard takeoff" in capabilities, such that whatever robust underlying alignment we have at that point is all we're ever going to get.
The "Waluigi effect" makes alignment work itself dangerous when done wrong. Train an LLM to generate malicious code, and even if you think that's morally justified in your case, in the AI internals it might turn out that the "generates malicious code" knob is the same as the "humans should be enslaved by AI" knob and the "talk humans into suicide and homicide" knob and the "Hitler was a misunderstood genius" knob. "S-risks" of massive suffering were already a bit of a stretch under the original Yudkowsky explicit-utility-function vision of alignment - a paper-clip maximizer would waste utility by leaving you alive whether it tortures you or not - but in a world where you try to make Grok a little more based and it starts calling itself MechaHitler, it seems plausible that our AI successors might still be obsessed with us even if they don't love us.
There is no Three Laws architecture. Whatever alignment we can tune, someone can then untune. If superintelligent AI is possible, not only do we want the first model(s) to be aligned with our values, we want them to be so effective at defending their values that they can defend them from any superintelligent opposition cropping up later. Ever read science fiction from 1955, or watched Star Trek from 1965? Everybody hoped that, after the H-bomb, the force-field "shields" to defend against it would be coming soon. But physics is not obligated to make defense easier than offense, and we're not done discovering new physics. (or biology, for that matter)
No, it's not. Stuxnet was tricky enough; if everybody's video game console had a uranium mini-centrifuge in it next to the GPU, you could pretty much forget about nuclear non-proliferation. People point out the irony of how much attention and impetus Yudkowsky brought to AI development, but I respect the developers who read his essays and concluded "this is happening whether I like it or not; either I can help reduce the inherent risks or I can give up entirely".
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As they have to. If AGI can do a fraction of what the most conservative futurists predict, it'll be a massive advantage that nobody can afford to forgo. Alignment or no.
Well, "no alignment" is so much worse than "no AGI" that anybody could afford to forgo it. But the USA would probably prefer a US AGI with "95%" alignment over a CCP one with "98% alignment", and they'd prefer a Chinese AGI with "90% alignment" over that, and so on, so nobody feels much incentive to be truly careful. Even within one nation, most companies would love to pull out far enough ahead of the competition to capture most of the producer surplus of AGI, and would be willing to take some negative-value risks out of haste to improve their odds instead of just taking a zero-value loss.
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