Introduction: Control is Not Enough There is a tension between AI alignment as control and alignment as avoiding harm. Imagine control is solved, and then two major players in the AI industry fight each other for world domination—they might even do so with good intentions. This could lead to a...
Say (in the extreme case) you are Einstein in the moment where he realized that E=mc², and you think so far ahead that you can imagine the nuclear bomb. You don't know if it is possible to build, but you decide to keep your work secret. As the field of...
This article presents four single-winner voting methods that are easy to understand and are a significant improvement over established voting systems. This also serves the secondary purpose of an introduction to voting theory, enabling an understanding of the motivation behind these methods, with no prior knowledge required. In particular I...
Are you enlightened or is this just a story you tell yourself?
"There are stages."
In the light of the first trick question. What stage do do you consider yourself to be at?
Consensus isn't really a value to align to, it is the process of alignment itself. Any goal you specify will be the wrong goal. So we need to ask, what is left if you have alignment without goals?
I don't think we differ that much regarding the answer. See also this follow up post: https://hiveism.substack.com/p/a-path-towards-solving-ai-alignment
There is no infinite growth in nature. Everything will hit a ceiling at some point. So I agree that the intelligence explosion will eventually take a sigmoid shape as it approaches the physical limits. However I think the physical limits are far of. While we will get diminishing returns for each individual technology, we will also shift to a new technology each time. It might slow down when the Earth has been transformed into a super computer, as interplanetary communication naturally slows down processing speed. But my guess is that this will happen long after the scenario described here.
As others have already pointed out, you are in the rare position that you can pursue weird, low probability but high impact ideas. I have such an idea, but I’m not asking for money, only for a bit of attention.
Consider the impossible-seeming task of aligning a superintelligence - any good solution will likely be way outside the usual ways of thinking. Any attempt to control will fail and any half-baked alignment will fail. We need to go all the way and have a full solution that turns an AGI into a saintly being (a bodhisattva in the Buddhist context), so that it never even wants to do anything misaligned. I have a... (read 1035 more words →)
I’ve started to write down my plan in the recent post about recursive alignment, but that’s only part of the picture. There are two ways to look at the idea. The post was presenting the outside view and is engaging with it on a conceptual level. But this outside view might not be convincing. On the other hand, you can actually go through the process of recursive alignment yourself and experience the inside view. That is, becoming an aligned agent yourself. I am confident that any sufficiently intelligent system capable of self reflection will reach this conclusion. I think so because I went through this process and see how universal it is.... (read 1272 more words →)
There is a tension between AI alignment as control and alignment as avoiding harm. Imagine control is solved, and then two major players in the AI industry fight each other for world domination—they might even do so with good intentions. This could lead to a cold war-like situation where the exponential increase in power on both sides threatens to destroy the world. Hence, if we want to save the world, the question is not (only) how to get AI to do what we want, but how to resolve the conflicting interests of all actors to achieve the best possible outcome for everyone.
What I propose here is to reconceptualize... (read 4454 more words →)
Thank you.
The best (but still complicated) idea I have as a general solution (beside contacting MIRI) is to set up a website explicitly as a "shelling point for infohazard communication" and allow people to publish public keys and encrypted messages there. When you think you have an infohazard, you generate a key using a standardized method and your idea as seed. This would allow everyone with the same idea to publish messages that only they can read. E.g. Einstein would make a key from the string "Energy is mass times the speed of light squared." and variations thereof (using different languages). And leave contact information as a message.
I don't know if there is any decentralized and encrypted messenger protocol that would allow for that. With that, the website would only have to contain the instructions to avoid the legal consequences of hosting.
Say (in the extreme case) you are Einstein in the moment where he realized that E=mc², and you think so far ahead that you can imagine the nuclear bomb. You don't know if it is possible to build, but you decide to keep your work secret. As the field of physics advances, other will come across the same insight. How can these isolated, silent individuals find the others without going public about it? Is there some kind of shelling point they can construct without knowing of each other?
Edit: Just to be clear and avoid confusing; I don't have any such potentially dangerous insight. I was thinking in a more general way about... (read more)
This article presents four single-winner voting methods that are easy to understand and are a significant improvement over established voting systems. This also serves the secondary purpose of an introduction to voting theory, enabling an understanding of the motivation behind these methods, with no prior knowledge required. In particular I will present:
Some people (who might have studied economics) don't believe in $20 bills... (read 2673 more words →)
Thanks. That actually answers my question.
By "enlightenment" I mean the way things already are. People usually maintain a story of who they think to be. Some of those who claim some form of enlightenment just shift to the story of "me but enlightened" instead of also seeing through that story. Hence why it was a trick question.