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Comment by RGS1811 | Hacker News Reader

Alignment just means "this machine operates in ways that align with the intent of its users". It doesn't imply anything about the inscrutability of the machine in question. A gun with a misaligned scope would likewise fail to operate in accord with its user's intent, and likewise with potentially deadly consequences.

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The gun comes with a manual on how to use it safely. I'm sure it has some complexities, but at the high level:

> A gun is a metal tube that uses a tiny, controlled explosion to shoot a small piece of metal (called a bullet) forward at very high speed.

If the gun doesn't work as intended, you can take it to a shop and someone can fix it so it works as designed.

All I'm saying is AI should be designed the same way. Treat AI as normal tech like any other and use similar language.

Learning ML, there was a high emphasis on the error part of things as most of the course was on minimizing errors. After ChatGPT, there is a weird anthropomorphization going on, where it's all about hallucinations, alignment and what not.

We have something that is statistical in nature so there should never been any expectation of error-free results/actions. The value has always been about discerning trends or the cost of errors being way lower than any good result.

Statistical learned indexes can exist in explainable tech such as a database.

In 2017 Google was writing papers about it. Then something changed.

I don't think it was the tech. It was a realization around the power and societal impact.

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