Ram Rachum

Current plans for AI alignment (examples) come from a narrow, implicitly filtered, and often (intellectually, politically, and socially) liberal standpoint. This makes sense, as the vast majority of the community, and hence alignment researchers, have those views. We, the authors of this post, belong to the minority of AI Alignment researchers who have more conservative beliefs and lifestyles, and believe that there is something important to our views that may contribute to the project of figuring out how to make future AGI be a net benefit to humanity. In this post, and hopefully series of posts, we want to lay out an argument we haven’t seen for what a conservative view of AI alignment would look like. We re-examine the AI Alignment problem through a different, and more politically conservative lens, and we argue that the insights we arrive at could be crucial. We will argue that as usually presented, alignment by default leads to recursive preference engines that eliminate disagreement and conflict, creating modular, adaptable cultures where personal compromise is unnecessary. We worry that this comes at the cost of reducing status to cosmetics and eroding personal growth and human values. Therefore, we argue that it’s good that values inherently conflict, and these tensions give life meaning; AGI should support enduring human institutions by helping communities navigate disputes and maintain norms, channeling conflict rather than erasing it. This ideal, if embraced, means that AI Alignment is essentially a conservative movement. To get to that argument, the overarching question isn’t just the technical question of “how do we control AI?” It’s “what kind of world are we trying to create?” Eliezer’s fun theory tried to address this, as did Bostrom’s new “Deep Utopia.” But both of these are profoundly liberal viewpoints, and see the future as belonging to “future humans,” which often envisions a time when uploaded minds and superintelligence exist, and humanit