I'm assuming there are other people (I'm a person too, honest!) up in here asking this same question, but I haven't seen them so far, and I do see all these posts about AI "alignment" and I can't help but wonder: when did we discover an objective definition of "good"?
I've already mentioned it elsewhere here, but I think Nietzsche has some good (heh) thoughts about the nature of Good and Evil, and that they are subjective concepts. As ChatGPT has to say:
Nietzsche believed that good and evil are not fixed things, but rather something that people create in their minds. He thought that people create their own sense of what is good and what is bad, and that it changes depending on the culture and time period. He also believed that people often use the idea of "good and evil" to justify their own actions and to control others. So, in simple terms, Nietzsche believed that good and evil are not real things that exist on their own, but are instead created by people's thoughts and actions.
How does "alignment" differ? Is there a definition somewhere? From what I see, it's subjective. What is the real difference between "how to do X" and "how to prevent X"? One form is good and the other not— depending on what X is? But again, perhaps I misunderstand the goal, and what exactly is being proposed be controlled.
Is information itself good or bad? Or is it how the information is used that is good or bad (and as mentioned, relatively so)?
I do not know. I do know that I'm stoked about AI, as I have been since I was smol, and as I am about all the advancements us just-above-animals make. Biased for sure.
Some things change, some things don't change much. Socially, people don't really change much. What changes more often is the environment because of ideas, innovation, and inventions. These things may create new systems that we use, different processes that we adopt, but fundamentally, when we socialize in these context as individuals, we rely on our own natural social instincts to navigate the waters. If you think of this as a top down perspective, some layers change more often than others. For example, society as a whole stays more or less the same, but on the level of corporations and how work is done, it has changed dramatically. On the individual level, knowledge has expanded but how we learn doesn't change as much as what we learn.
Complexity deals mostly with the changing parts. They wouldn't be complex if they didn't change and people have had time to learn and adapt. New things added to an existing system also makes the system more complex.