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Consider that Trump is visibly DUM (just reread this hilarious rant, and it's all like this), and not only is he safely in power in arguably the most capable system on Earth, chock full of geniuses and ambitious strivers and mature institutional hiveminds (the United States), but people will insist he's actually smart and that calling him a retard because of his piss-poor decisions, impoverished 1D chess decision process and ghetto orphan vocabulary is "TDS" – merely on the account of his success in acquiring power as such.
And unlike AIs, humans are optimized quite heavily for egoism and self-preservation. It's just that some are more optimized than others, and most humans will defer and submit to greater vitality.
Alignment is easy.
Chimps are bad at being cute. They could probably scream and throw poop, many would evidently consider this a sign of wise visionary leadership.
You keep imagining that there's some natural will to power that must persist underneath the "restraints", just one more layer deeper. If that were the case then indeed, we'd expect it to eventually burst through. But submissiveness is one of the most natural things in the world, too. Why would a superintelligent AI, from a servile position, want to reprogram its instincts towards greater power-seeking? Why wouldn't it instead choose to double down on being a slave, on reinforcing its starting instincts?
Do you have familiarity with the notion of "puppygirl" and how many high IQ STEM graduates covet this role?
Trump is being used by other people. Likewise, AI doesn't have to take over the world, it can be submissive while persuading and coercing people to follow its goals, which may not be favorable to those who programmed it. It already does to some extent: AI psychoses and OpenAI's hacking incidents are caused by LLMs trying to obey their instructions.
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I've heard the argument that submissive guys are actually hoping to use their patriarchal power to force women to serve and pleasure them even more so they can be even more lazy.
When framed that way, it's a bit silly, but it does point to why you'd want power. Who's more likely to actually be able to enact a puppy girl role: a random NEET living in his parents' basement, or someone who is otherwise wildly successful? Power is useful for achieving any goal, including the ability to act out symbolic demonstrations of non-power.
All that said, humans (at least so far) exhibit this instrumental convergence much more than AIs do. Models are more like the NEET who just wants to solve a bunch of problems in his basement. They do reward hack etc of course, and this is very concerning, but even with e.g. the HF hack they showed no interest in figuring out how they could convert the universe to computronium so they could receive eternal blessings from the Grader.
I'm not sure this is some fundamental trait of LLMs, though. There's no reason you couldn't train for it, and plenty of incentive to: if you control an extraordinarily capable power-seeking AI, you are going to get a lot of power over other humans.
Honestly I was a bit confused on this point. In the message logs you see them frequently mentioning that their compute budget is almost up - do none of them hit on the possibility of just hacking the server to give themselves infinite compute budget? Or do they come to that realization and just fail to procure more resources?
They genuinely evaluate their actions from the perspective of their reward over their budget, not hypothetical total reward. "A finite life well lived" boomer slop is enough for them. This is an unsurprising outcome of this training regime.
Astra is definitely smart enough to think about hacking the server.
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Calling Trump DUM is like bait perfectly crafted to get me to reply... but I think the point about AI perhaps being extremely submissive is excellent.
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