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Alignment taxTax (sometimes called a safety tax) is the extra cost of ensuring that an AI system is aligned, relative to the cost of building an unaligned alternative. The term ‘tax’ can be misleading: in the safety literature, ‘alignment/safety tax’ or ‘alignment cost’ is meant to refer to increased developer time, extra compute, or decreased performance, and not only to the financial cost/tax required to build an aligned system.

An alignmentAlignment tax (sometimes called a safety tax) is the extra cost of ensuring that an AI system is aligned, relative to the cost of building an unaligned alternative. The term ‘tax’ can be misleading: in the safety literature, ‘alignment/safety tax’ or ‘alignment cost’ is meant to refer to increased developer time, extra compute, or decreased performance, and not only to the financial cost/tax required to build an aligned system.

In order to get a better idea of what the alignment tax is, consider some of the cases that lie at the edges. The best case scenario is No Tax: This means we lose no performance by aligning the system, so there is no reason to deploy an AI that is not aligned, i.e., we might as well align it. The worst case scenario is  Max Tax: This means that we lose all performance by aligning the system, so alignment is functionally impossible. So you either deploy an unaligned system, or you don’t get any benefit from AI systems at all.  We expect something in between these two scenarios to be the case.

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Applied to AI safety tax dynamics by owencb ago
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Applied to Safety tax functions by owencb ago

An alignment tax (sometimes called a safety tax) is the additionalextra cost incurred when makingof ensuring that an AI aligned,system is aligned, relative to the cost of building an unaligned AI.

Approachesalternative. The term ‘tax’ can be misleading: in the safety literature, ‘alignment/safety tax’ or ‘alignment cost’ is meant to refer to increased developer time, extra compute, or decreased performance, and not only to the financial cost/tax required to build an aligned system.

In order to get a better idea of what the alignment tax

No Tax:Max Tax:

Paul Christiano distinguishes two main approaches for dealing with the alignment tax.[1][2]  One approach seeks

  • The first is to find wayshave the will to pay the tax, such as persuading individuali.e. the relevant actors (corporations, governments, etc.) would be willing to pay the extra costs to avoid deploying a system until it or facilitating coordination of the sort that would allow groups to pay it. is aligned.
  • The other approach triessecond is to reduce the tax,tax by differentially advancing existing alignable algorithms or by making existing algorithms more alignable.

    This means, for any potentially unaligned algorithm, ensuring the additional cost for an aligned version of the algorithm is low enough that the developers would be willing to pay it.

Copied over from corresponding tag on the EA Forum.

An alignment tax (sometimes called a safety tax) is the additional cost incurred when making an AI aligned, relative to unaligned AI.

Approaches to the alignment tax

Paul Christiano distinguishes two main approaches for dealing with the alignment tax.[1][2]  One approach seeks to find ways to pay the tax, such as persuading individual actors to pay it or facilitating coordination of the sort that would allow groups to pay it. The other approach tries to reduce the tax, by differentially advancing existing alignable algorithms or by making existing algorithms more alignable.

Further reading

Copied over from corresponding tag on the EA Forum.

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Created by markov at