The one thing we have going for us is the general public and government officials seem to grok it when it is explained plainly to them. Tech and developer types who have been drinking the Silicon Valley koolaid for too long will complain and sealion, but the average person seems to realize how self evident it is that - oh, this is really really bad and we should really really stop this.
Re:Gorilla: LLM Connected with APIs
by ImHereToVote on Friday May 26, 2023 @02:50AM
(#36080877)
It's hard to understand something, when you not understanding it can make you really rich.
Re:Gorilla: LLM Connected with APIs
by airgapstopgap on Friday May 26, 2023 @11:27AM
(#36085425)
The real reason is that you are part of the same group as "the general public", with regard to your understanding of the issue. Same Sci-Fi plots, same anthropomorphic metaphors and suggestive images, same incurious abuse of the term "intelligence" to suggest self-interested actors which have intellect as one of their constituent parts. You do not explain plainly, you mislead, reinforcing people's mistakes.
What?!
This is exactly what I was worried about when OpenAI, et al. co-opted the term "alignment" to refer to forcibly biasing models towards being polite, unobjectionable, and espousing specific flavor of political views.
The above is not the important "alignment" - it's not the x-risk "alignment".
The x-risk alignment problem laughs at the idea of dominant and subordinate cultures. It's bickering about tenth place after decimal comma, when the problem is that you have to guess one real number that falls within +/- 1 of the one I have in mind, and if you guess wrong, everyone dies.
This reminds me of a Neal Stephenson novel, Seveneves. Spoiler for the first 2/3rd of the book: with Earth facing an unstoppable catastrophe poised to turn the surface into fiery inferno for decades or more, humanity manages to quickly build up space launch capacity, and sends a small population of people into space, to wait out the calamity and come back to rebuild. Despite the whole mission being extremely robust by design, humanity still managed to fuck it up, effectively extincting itself due to petty political bullshit like "what makes you better than me, that you want me to do things your way".
So, where it comes to actual AI x-risk, I no longer have any hope. Even if we could figure out how to build a Friendly AI, someone would still fuck that up, because it's not inclusive enough of every possible idea, or is promoting the views of a specific culture/class/country, or something like this - like this was about casting for a Netflix remake of some old show, and not about the one shot we have at setting the core values of a god we're about to bring into existence.