Comment by no_multitudes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_multitudes | Hacker News Reader

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Nobody has an answer to alignment and there is no reason to believe that it's the kind of problem you can plausibly solve in one shot against a formidable power-seeking AI.

The closest things to a technical answer I have seen are

1. "We'll have ChatGPT 9 solve it so that ChatGPT 10 is aligned, and then ChatGPT 10 can stop all the other AIs somehow"

2. "Let's do interpretability research so that we can understand what an AI is thinking and then maybe solve the alignment problem with that information."

In terms of non-technical answers, there is

3. hope scaling stops working before we create an AI formidable enough to pose an existential risk

4. hope alignment somehow happens for free

5. hope we can somehow create an enforceable multilateral treaty to stop research into a very profitable enterprise, despite the enormous economic incentives to defect.

I have the most faith in option 3, but unfortunately there's really nothing that can be done to make it more plausible -- it either happens or it doesn't.

"3. hope scaling stops working before we create an AI formidable enough to pose an existential risk"

I have my doubts. The current AI models are already powerful enough to do some real damage. I am always horrified when I read about people giving Claude direct access to a production system and then being wiped out. My use of AI is usually for the AI to propose something which I then review. But that's not very fast so careless people will usually look better. Until something blows up.

And it's only a matter of time until AI even with the current capabilities is being deployed into military or other critical systems.

I think this will go down like any other technology. We'll ignore issues until there is a real problem. And then hopefully we will do something. Seems with climate change we will soon reach a point where something needs to be done after knowing about consequences already for decades.

We probably also need some massive AI blow ups to (only maybe) do something about it.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but we might find ourselves in such a situation that the only practical solution would be to use agents to counter rogue agents. This won't be without collateral damage, though.

Your view sounds more optimistic than mine, honestly. I expect that we will fail to make any serious, coordinated attempt to solve this problem. Then we'll either live or die due to fundamental principles that we currently have no insight into.

If fighting AI with AI is pessimistic, I don't know what optimism is. That sounds like optimistic to me...!

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