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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

They imitate humans. Alignment is about shaping their behavior towards safety.

Alignment is a myth. Safety of whom? Humanity couldn't agree on common set of values for thousands of years and we're not gonna suddenly do that in the next ten.

Safety of humans!!! Simple things like not getting killed or enslaved. We could start there...

But what if I want certain other humans to get killed?

Then we should still prioritize the safety of humans

What if I want to smoke cigarettes? Or sell tobacco I grew artisinally to enthusiast tobacco smokers?

Which ones?

Which ones? Because many humans kill other humans rationalizing it by safety of other humans.

I mean I know it seems simple, let's just be excellent to each other. Christianity got pretty far on a decent basic set of values. But it's never simple[1]

1. All the history books

Surely all the AI companies working with the US Department of War shows this is nonsense though? Even if they have accepted Anthropic’s red line of no autonomous lethal weapons, which seems to be the strictest anyone tried to impose, that’s still leaving tonnes of room where they intend AI to help target and kill humans.

But Thiel wants people enslaved and Musk wants then killed. Altman wants them "obsolete" which means desolation.

AfD wants people dead. Right wing men wants women without rights and docile. I could go on ...

The atomic bombings of Japan killed hundreds of thousands of people but most likely "saved" millions.

What should the AI do when asked if it should nuke a country?

Run and present the numbers, then defer.

This is not rocket science.

That wasn't the question.

Yes, it was:

> What should the AI do when asked if it should nuke a country?

Despite all the fancy language, its more about aligning the AI behavior with the corporation's interests.

ie: the corporation wants the AI to behave a certain way for various reasons: to make it easier for them to avoid regulation, to make the corporation more money via different tiers of AI offerings, to ensure that the corporations products are hard for competitors to use, etc. And those are just the easy ones.

Every product is shaped this way. AI is not different.

If they do, they imitate the way humans are portrayed online, in the media. That is a very distorted view of humanity

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