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[Ramble incoming]
I guess, then, between the Chinese Room and AlphaGo and AI art and GPT, what we're really worried about is meaning. Did AlphaGo mean to be so good? What does it say when it rose to the top and the damn thing doesn't even "know" in any meaningful way what it did?
Kind of calls back to the recent thread about the Parable of the Hand Axe. For most of human history, our works were judged not merely by the output, but the journey. We appreciate the artist's processes, the engineer's struggles, the scientist's challenges, the warlord's sacrifices, the king's rationales, and so on. AI has recently provoked so much backlash because some realize, correctly or not, consciously or not, that AI threatens to shortcut the meaning imbued in the process of creation. Effortless generation of anything you want, but it will mean nothing because there's no "soul" to it.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, but I also have the capacity to acknowledge that maybe the way we think about "meaning through struggle" has the potential to become outmoded. On the third hand, though, it might be mind-boggling and embarrassing to think that humanity operated this way for so, so long. On the fourth hand, however, maybe the fact that current AIs were trained on the scraped works of a significant chunk of humanity does contain meaning in of itself--if meaning is achieved through the struggle and not the end result, AI still counts, just for the entire species and not merely the few.
I think meaning is another of these subjective/human concepts that may be useful but that are also dangerous, because it starts with the premise that humans are unique. But from other standpoint humans are "just" result of an evolutionary process that optimizes for inclusive genetic fitness. Imagine that we really are living in a simulation where somebody started the whole Life game by introducing Earth environment and simple rule for biosphere to optimize for inclusive genetic fitness. Except in a few billion ticks, the simulation produced species homo sapiens that evolved algorithm that can "hack" many instrumental goals that evolution developed as implementation of its main goal. One of those things for instance is sexual drive to increase number of offspring - humans were however able to hack this by being able to masturbate or use condoms. They sucked out the "meaning" of this activity, or maybe they found their own meaning there - to great exasperation of our simulation designer who now observes something strange happening in his model.
To expand the analogy, "optimize for inclusive genetic fitness" is akin to "optimize for predicting next word" in world of AI. Then goal of "learn to play Go" is akin to "have a lot of sex". But the Alpha Go somehow hacked its programing so to speak and learned something different, it decided to not play Go in a sense humans though it will. One can speculate that it developed its own meaning for the game Go and decided to stubbornly ignore whatever was meant by its creators. That is what I meant about bad news for aligning, whatever the LLM learns can be absolutely orthogonal to system used to train it (be it darwinian evolutionary process or next word prediction for a text) and it can be orthogonal even to some very detailed observation of output that however is superficial under many conditions (such as homo sapiens shagging like rabbits or Alpha Go beating good human Go players for years). What happens under the hood can be very hard to understand, but it does not mean it has no meaning.
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