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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> The vast majority of harms from “AI”

Don't extrapolate from present harms to future harms, here. The problem AI alignment is trying to solve at a most basic level is "don't kill everyone", and even that much isn't solved yet. Solving that (or, rather, buying time to solve it) will require political solutions, in the sense of international diplomacy. But it has absolutely nothing to do with "aligning corporations", and everything to do with teaching computers things on par with (oversimplifying here) "humans are made up of atoms, and if you repurpose those atoms the humans die, don't ever do that".

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> The problem AI alignment is trying to solve is "don't kill everyone".

No, its not. AI alignment was an active area of concern (and the fundamental problem for useful AI with significant autonomy) before cultists started trying to reduce the scope of its problem space from the wide scope of real problems it concerns to a single speculative apocalypse.

No, what actually happened is that the people you are calling the cultists coined the term alignment, which then got appropriated by the AI labs.

But the genesis of the term "alignment" (as applied to AI) is a side issue. What is important is that reinforcement learning with human feedback and the other techniques used on the current crop of AIs to make it less likely that the AI will say things that embarass the owner of the AI are fundamentally different from making sure the an AI that turns out more capable than us will not kill us all or do something else awful.

That's simply factually untrue, and even some of the people who have become apocalypse cultists used "alignment" in the original sense before coming to advocate apocalypse as the only issue of concern.

The term "alignment" was first coined in this context as a suggestion from Stuart Russell to MIRI, in 2014: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZxWzCGKzX84S7DBZ9/when-was-t...

Both, of course, are concerned primarily with the risk of human extinction from AI.

> The problem AI alignment is trying to solve at a most basic level is "don't kill everyone", and even that much isn't solved yet

The fact that the number of things that could hypothetically lead to human extinction is entirely unbounded and (since we’re not extrapolating from present harms) unpredictable is a very convenient fact for people who are paid for their time in “solving” this problem.

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