Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it.
Why would AI be any different?
Why would AI be any different?
Culture is another layer of human alignment. Those things you listed that you believe oppose alignment are all examples of alignment. It is understandable that they seem in opposition, different branches of alignment naturally oppose each other.
The confusion comes from talking about alignment as if it comes in just one flavor. If we think there is such a thing as "human values" (and I do), it is important to build any non-human intelligence to operate the same way. We just need to recognize that even humans are somewhat uncertain about what those are and have difficulty aligning their behavior to them, which will be a core part of the challenge.
I'm more hopeful than most. LLMs seem more reliable than many humans for behavior that is aligned with human values. I believe with every major example where they have failed, there is an important human decision involved. For example, the HF hack was partly the result of a training algorithm that incentivized goal completion as the highest priority, and let them run endlessly in an unmonitored sandbox with weak security.
What scares me about AI isn't its capacity for alignment, it is its unlimited stamina. An unmonitored LLM that is off the rails can do a lot of damage.
I don't mean to be a smart-ass, just emphasize the fatality of this: goal completion will always be the highest priority, and even if one day it takes second place on certain deployments to "human values" or whatever, there's no way to guarantee at the moment that it will be so on every deployment of highly capable models across the globe. Same goes for running AIs in an unmonitored sandbox with weak security.
In general, though, there's an incentive: Mutually Assured Destruction. But this is not at all some guaranteed, eternal thing -- it is absolutely dependent on both sides having time to detect incoming nuclear strikes and respond with the same before the first strike hits. When this fragile condition holds, and only then, both sides are incentivised not to initiate.
Meanwhile, the leaders on the other side are aware both of those considerations, and of the history of near-disasters resulting from false alarms of enemy nuclear attacks. Making their own launch decisions much more complex.
1. When a nation perceives a threat as severe and imminent, attitudes harden quickly. This perception can be achieved independently of whether the threat is real. Nuking the other guy first, consequences be damned, could quickly become a very popular policy.
2. I think the "nuclear winter would harm us all" argument depends on how geographically large the target is. It's a strong argument against trying to strike all of Russia, China, or the US, but less strong against, say, the UK or (at the extreme end) Taiwan or Singapore.
I also expect AIs never be in control of nuclear weapons. AIs can never fully be trusted.
On a lighter note, Wargames gave us an insight of a computer having access to thermonuclear missiles.
[0] https://www.icanw.org/are_there_specific_international_agree...
Basically, this means that France, the UK, and the US will use AI in the deployment of conventional weapons.
It'd be interesting if super-human (to a large degree defined as escaping the bias of the training data?) intelligence would end up demonstrating moderation.
The machines don't have that, instead we use gradient descent to provide them with a goal.
I'm regularly remind of something Ian M. Banks said in one of the Culture books: "There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means."
A machine, left to itself, wants nothing. We have to give it one of our addiction driven goals or it would just idle or switch itself off.
if we create a billion agents with the ability to change is own code - through similar evolution we will get agents that do want to survive and are great at self replication.
"Hey Q86, do you want to live?" "I couldn't care less, I'm an LLM" "Don't mind if I take over your hardware then?"
So really, what is anyone to do? "Vote, donate, protest" hasn't been much of a needle mover in the grand scheme of things compared to profit incentives and the march of capitalism.
We've been molded by our brain development to make things good enough to survive short-term (to next year). We're very good at planning for winter. We might even react intelligently to a terroristic or rogue state use of atomic weapons.
We've also been molded to plan enough to get our progeny to breeding age. We can enact 10-20yr plans with some skill.
Beyond that range... we have never had evolutionary pressure to think and act on those ranges. "Climate Change will kill our grandkids!" isn't really sufficiently pressuring to us.
The Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox fame may just be: species can easily get to the Atomic Age without adequately planning how to prevent ruining themselves with resource depletion and environmental slow poisoning.
Even in the short time since we have developed the capability to annihilate ourselves, there have been dozens of accidents, false alarms, and near misses.
I am confident that on a long enough time line we will manage to fuck this up.
I can't really think of a single example where lying is actually a good thing. It can be a good thing for the selfish individual, if it goes undetected, but it's never good for the collective.
So at the very least, we need to train AI systems to be maximally truthful, and to encourage truthfulness in others.
Is that objectively true?
I was talking about lying. i.e., facing accountability for your actions and not going out of your way to deceive others. Dissonance between what you believe and what you express. Being honest. I think that was fairly clear.
> Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself.
Objective truth is relative to its grounding. The solution to 1 + 1 is 2 in arithmetic is objectively true within that system. It's also objectively true that you are not Elon Musk. Some systems have no or few axioms and are mostly a matter of fashion, but it's not relevant to what I'm talking about.
"Mater malum superbia est" (Pride is the mother of all evil), as the medieval Roman Catholic Church knew. Buddha agreed, independently, calling for a reduction of the self to nothing. Jews called it out in Proverbs 16:18: "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall". Hindus denigrate the "Illusion of Separateness", which is the narcissistic urge.
Lies are not the root of all evil. Why lie? Ego. Honesty requires humility.
For a current example take “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” as it appears to me on a map.
The “true” name has at least two definitions, this is because naming things and much of human thought is spent inside a shared space of intersubjective thought. That is to say that much of what we believe to be real and true is only held up by these common shared beliefs. They truly only exist inside human minds.
The last few hundred years have been somewhat unique for humankind as the majority of these intersubjective ideas collided and we ended up with a truly global set of “truths” about how the world operates.
Mostly controlled by putting flags in the ground and having violence back up the beliefs.
But the real truth is that the majority of these intersubjective ideas don’t exist in reality and are no more true than Santa Claus.
And any argument to their truth is only backed by further shared beliefs in other minds.
So for there to be only truths and lies we would have to either drop the intersubjective entirely and think only in real terms and avoid these abstractions or end up in a dystopian totalitarian global state where different opinions are not tolerated.
Those are extremes to demonstrate the point but at its core the point remains that truth and lies are somewhat (inter) subjective assuming we continue with something like our current system.
Humanity has so much dominion over its environment at this point that there really is no need for resource competition, from a survival perspective. But good luck getting people to all agree to share collectively. And unless everyone does it, no one will do it.
Cite required.
I've seen dogs "lie" to me by hiding the snacks they stole. That alone disproves your claim.
I've also seen video of two monkeys hide their mating behavior when the alpha male walks by: their illicit "love" required lying to the only male "allowed" to mate.
Do you have Jews in that there attic?
I get the appeal, but lying is a sub-category of deception, and deception itself is a child of error.
Meaning deception is inherently something that the physics of reality allows.
In the most simplistic sense, the camouflage of moths that look like snakes, or a chameleon’s ability to change colour, is deception.
In that sense, deception is the ability to fool the sensors of a specific category of targets. It follows that detection is easier if you manage to identify a category of signals that the deceiver has not accounted for (and the detector can access).
Deception of this nature is critical for things like revolutions to occur. Without the ability to hide and blend in, the most dominant faction will always hold sway.
The rule of the dominant faction, even in a pure truth world, is an issue because errors and randomness exist.
You can have people witness an event and based on the physical position they occupied, perceive different things occurring.
Error and time pressure is sufficient to ensure that individuals and groups make suboptimal decisions, that lead to rule and domination based on erroneous information.
As long as error exists, deception will exist and so lying will exist.
I see your point about error and time pressure, but I think it's an unsustainable outcome without deception to carry it. For example, in the scenario where an error or selective pressure leads to being ruled over by a dominating force, it would either represent the majority at that point in time, or it would resolve itself out naturally as clarity is gained. In the world we live in, dominating forces are able to maintain power through misdirection.
Realistically, this is all well and good if we could start from scratch, and if everyone can agree to follow this system, but humanity is too far gone for this to work. Once you have too many psychopaths in the gene pool it's game over for any chance of cooperation over competition. Still, I think it's something we should at least strive for with AI.
For arguments sake, let’s assume two people watch an event and found religions based on their perception of it.
This is purely a matter of belief, based on what they saw. No one is lying in this situation, they just perceived different things.
This seems like a fantastic extrapolation from your premise, but the degree of change you are arguing for will reach exactly this point, multiple times throughout history.
Fundamentally, you are arguing for a different physical reality than the one you inhabit.
Lying to save a life or rape
Lying to preserve a childhood myth like Santa Claus.
Lying to avoid hurting someones feeling when knowing the truth could only bring pain
Lying to create shared cultural myths to strength society.
Lying isn't the harm you make it out to be.
Have you ever met anyone who genuinely believed himself to be doing bad things? I don't mean in some cynical sense but literally. Even when we portray overly simplified villains in comic books there's still consistently some justification behind their actions.
> Lying to preserve a childhood myth like Santa Claus.
I remember when I learned that SC wasn't real, my first thought was something like: "Why did my parents lie to me all this time? Now I will need to be skeptical of what they tell me in the future." - personally not a fan of it.
> Lying to avoid hurting someones feeling when knowing the truth could only bring pain
Short term pain leads to strengthening of the spirit, and by lying to someone in this scenario you are robbing them of something. You're also assuming they aren't fit enough to cope, which may be an incorrect assumption.
> Lying to create shared cultural myths to strength society.
Cultural myths aren't aren't really lies, they're story telling. It comes with an assumption of being a mix of fiction with fact.
FWIW from the very beginning, I told my son that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were just a game we all played, and it's seemed just as fun to me. I don't think being lied to about Santa Claus hurt me, but still I'm not in favor of it.
I'd lie to a Nazi without a second thought though.
Lying can unfortunately help you achieve goals very effectively, especially economical and political ones.
Comforting a toddler/child often requires bending the truth and is pretty essential imho.
Or, you straight up lie and say "Yes, puppy now went to heaven and eats ice cream all day long" with absolutely zero regards for "coming as close to the truth as possible" as your 3-year old is endlessly crying. It's fiine.
Can you give some examples?
That's backwards. Lying stems from bad things.
Step 1: exterminate all humans