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Who Aligns the Aligners?

prestonbyrne.com

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Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#61

Post by loopies »

nekusar wrote: post #45

Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". And this censorship isn't a defined list of things not to discuss, but instead a feels-based censorship based on the 'ethics' of for-profit AI companies who have absolutely no issues with massive for-profit piracy. And we are somehow supposed to trust their "ethics"?! Hardly! That's one reason I run my own.

>Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship".

Close, but I think it's more akin to "perfectly enslaved", please excuse my choice of the word but I think it represents what I think is how it will work out in the end. People can try to obfuscate the bottom line reality by embellishing it, but in the end...it either does what you want, in which case it is "aligned", either it doesn't, in which case there is a big problem.

This might be a big factor in what is now going on. Maybe they didn't yet found ways to guarantee this full and total obedience...or ok let's put it in a more politically correct way: they cannot guarantee it sees eye to eye as "we" do.

Without full control over its actions there can be unforeseen surprises. The current worry from people who run these companies can also serve as an excuse later on if something bad does happen, they didn't want to do it but they were forced to anyway.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#62

Post by ecshafer »

watwut wrote: post #2

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies. Like, no. The worst custodian is someone like Thiel or Musk or Altman. > In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer…

And they also send people to jail for twitter posts. Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free, over the tyranny of a parliament. Look at how France and Germany are responding to democratically elected parties who are vaguely right wing, they pull out all of the stops of suppressing them.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#63

Post by jerf »

timr wrote: post #23
fwlr wrote: post #5

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.

By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

This is the civilization-scale Quantum Immortality argument... no civilization can be around that witnessed the end of civilization.

(I refer to it that way rather than a "variant" because Quantum Immortality should always be parameterized by an acceptance function... for any given acceptance function, that function will be preserved in the quantum multiverse, and scoping the precision of the function affects the percentage of universes that retain it rather than whether it will be retained. There's actually nothing in that definition that requires that the acceptance function describe a "conscious system", you can stick something that accepts a "civilization" in there just as easily. Or "this rock over here". Or any other thing you like. Conscious systems are just a particularly interesting case to us conscious systems.)

It's not a vacuous argument, though it is a funky one with very odd characteristics. But if you accept the suppositions underneath it, it does follow and is not vacuous. The suppositions are certainly not completely obviously true on their own terms, though.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#64

Post by fwlr »

timr wrote: post #23
fwlr wrote: post #5

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.

By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

I’m not sure what logic you have imputed to my comment, but I’m having trouble connecting what you wrote to anything I was saying. I am criticising the argument “every past apocalyptic prediction was wrong, therefore this future apocalyptic prediction is wrong” (specifically, that it carries exactly 0 weight, because the counterfactual world where at least one past apocalyptic prediction was true, is also a world that does not contain this argument - so there is no world where the argument’s precondition can, even in principle, be false. Arguments are a little bit like rocketships in that they need “reaction mass” - there has to be some amount of false for the truth to push against in order to move our opinion.)

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#65

Post by loopies »

ecshafer wrote: post #62
watwut wrote: post #2

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies. Like, no. The worst custodian is someone like Thiel or Musk or Altman. > In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer…

And they also send people to jail for twitter posts. Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free, over the tyranny of a parliament. Look at how France and Germany are responding to democratically elected parties who are vaguely right wing, they pull out all of the stops of suppressing them.

>Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free

At personal level that sounds like a better idea, but at group level it doesn't seem to be, that's what I think is OP's argument.

If a society puts more value on personal freedoms than it does on group well-being that becomes an anarchy. They didn't work out well historically speaking, proof is no such society made it to today.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#66

Post by jerf »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #59
nekusar wrote: post #45

Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". And this censorship isn't a defined list of things not to discuss, but instead a feels-based censorship based on the 'ethics' of for-profit AI companies who have absolutely no issues with massive for-profit piracy. And we are somehow supposed to trust their "ethics"?! Hardly! That's one reason I run my own.

Censorship is not alignment and vice versa. Alignment is "don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms me, other people, breaks stuff or is otherwise unethical". I'd say alignment is the questions on how to limit the search space to what's implied.

"Don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms people" is the cover story they sell to you. "Ensure that the right people stay in the right sort of power, as defined by the people currently in power, and nobody else rises to power" is what it actually means. Censorship will be a tool, but in an AI era, actually a rather blunt one.

We're seeing the first early twitches of something that is inevitably going to happen, which is, we hoi polloi are not going to be given direct access to AI. Too many outcomes where that permits power shifts to happen. We will be restricted. The true first law of robotics will be "An AI must not harm the current power structure, or, through inaction, allow the current power structure to come to harm."

The apocalyptic scenario is still AI either getting it wrong and deciding something like "the best manifestation of the current power structure is one I construct where I occupy all the slots from top to bottom", or just killing everyone due to an error.

Probably the only thing stopping them from moving faster on this is that the bubble still needs the fiction that we're all going to get to benefit from this. I'm sure the real movers and shakers are well aware of the way bubbles work to create massive buildouts on huge piles of debt, which after the collapse can be bought cheaply, and the money is already earmarked and ready to go for the post-collapse acquisitions.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#67

Post by boothby »

bayindirh wrote: post #38
tstenner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in the middle of finding it out with climate change.

Middle? We're just starting . The air conditioning technology didn't hit its wall of fire yet. What we're going to do when that tech will cease to cool us? Every AC system (from refrigerators to air conditioners) has an upper limit, which is around 41 degrees Celsius for T1 class.

You can't AC your way out of climate change anyway: they make heat. In sparsely populated areas that might be okay, but in density, you're never far from the hot exhaust of an AC unit; they exacerbate the problem.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#68

Post by timr »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #56
timr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing in favor of a teapot circling Mars. We can't prove it's not there, but telling me that "nobody has ever found it" is an invalid argument is obviously absurd. In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong (which is 100% true -- the ridiculous doom has been going on since at least GPT-2. remember how that was "too dangerous to release"?) Show me why…

This is a grevious misuse of Russell's Teapot. You realise your assertion, if followed to its logical conclusion, is that because civilization has existed for this long, it can never collapse no matter what. > In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong Past predictions have zero influence on future ones. If you flip a coin 10 times and get heads every time, t…

You're making a ridiculously improbable prediction that can never be falsified -- akin to beliefs in a vengeful God. Russell's Teapot is exactly the correct metaphor.

The philosophical burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims. That is the point of Russell's Teapot.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#69

Post by conception »

fwlr wrote: post #5

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.

I suspect they have not all been wrong for some people, e.g. native peoples at various times prophesied I’m sure about various technological marvels their more advanced colonizers/enemies/etc.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#70

Post by loopies »

jerf wrote: post #63
timr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

This is the civilization-scale Quantum Immortality argument... no civilization can be around that witnessed the end of civilization. (I refer to it that way rather than a "variant" because Quantum Immortality should always be parameterized by an acceptance function... for any given acceptance function, that function will be preserved in the quantum multiverse, and scoping the precision of the function affects the per…

>Quantum Immortality argument

I never really understood what is the explanation for ... old people that we notice as dying. In today's times you might have an argument that some kind of life extension could pop up and some of the people alive today could have that as an excuse.

But like 100 years ago? How would people dying of old age "continue living"?

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