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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value.

If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.

Sounds like a value alignment problem. Could value alignment be a fundamentally intractable problem with intelligent actors?

Yeah. The issue with all alignment talk is that the sect of people who'd align the ASI almost certainly have a set of values that are every bit as opposed to mine as whatever random set of values that an ASI would have, if not more. Sure, at least some of the unaligned AI values would involve paperclipping me and the universe, but even that's better than "keep everyone around, but use my unlimited power to align everyone with my values for eternity."

"Make a shit ton of money by building tools that people find highly useful and economically valuable" is at least a comprehensible value and something I can work with, since it allows space to other value systems.