7 Weeks AI Alignment Curriculum

Re:7 Weeks AI Alignment Curriculum by abeppu on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:14PM (#35033491)

To be clear, I would claim some of the "obvious" cases where misalignment of existing organizations / institutions and society at large, and where there have been reasonable policy fixes advocated for years include:

- unpenalized externalities, including carbon emissions, and other environmental effects

- clearly broken tax law which allows some enormously profitable companies to pay very low tax rates

- political donations protected as "speech"

- partisan gerrymandering

These are cases where we made systems with rules, in which agents have incentives, and where the combination of the design of the system and the incentives on participants can cause meaningful harm to the public. In many cases, transparency is meaningfully hindered, and "explanations" of particular outcomes are obscured. Several of the structural issues that AI alignment people care about are present, but the harms are already happening, and yet we seem unable (and AI alignment folk seem comparatively uninterested) in addressing them.

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Re:7 Weeks AI Alignment Curriculum by mitthrowaway2 on Sunday March 05, 2023 @03:20PM (#35033547)

I don't think AI alignment folk are uninterested in addressing them. I think they do see as a red flag the fact that it's so hard even for corporations to craft incentive schemes that consistently reward good behavior without being hacked and gamed for bad results, and that's when the incentives are being followed humans who we have a lot of experience with.

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