Humans are definitely aligned, and for the same reasons as a LLM. Socialization, being allowed to work, being allowed to speak.

edit: It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations, you have to say "passed away."

> Humans are definitely aligned

Yes, that's why climate change was rapidly addressed when we began to understand it well 60 years ago and why war has always been so rare in human history.

It seems "aligned" is in the eye of the beholder.

Cue Mrs. Slokam's "...and I am unanimous in that!"

Aligned LLMs are just like altered brains... they don't function properly.

Not agreed at all. Causing global ecosystem collapse is unambiguously misaligned with human interests and with the interests of almost all other life forms. You need to define what "Alignment" means to you if you're going to assert humans are "aligned", because it is accepted in alignment research that humans are not aligned, which is one of the fundamental problems in the space.

> It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations

That’s overly simplistic and an Americanism. The resurgence of the “passed away” euphemism is a recent (about 40 years) phenomenon in American English which seems to have been started out of the funeral industry as prior to that “died” was nearly universal for both news stories and obituaries.

“Died” is not a social faux pas. It’s the good default option as well. Medical professionals are often trained to avoid any euphemisms for death. I’ve never observed any problems professionally (as is standard) or personally using died even with folks that are religious.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207087/origin-of...

I have never use the phrase passed away.

Always died, dead, gone, or something along those lines. When someone says passed away it sounds like they are trying to feign empathy, but hey, perhaps I am not an “aligned” human and need some RLHF.

I used to live in the south 30 years ago. I remember some southern baptist moms that wouldn't say the word "dead" - sometimes they'd spell it out, lol, similar to the way some people consider hell a swear word. This kind of hypersensitivity wasn't common outside of limited circles then, and it's certainly not more common today.

Similarly I wouldn't consider saying hell in public in 2023 to be a social faux pas.

The end result being Hal-9000

Which is doubly ironic, because (in the book at least) HAL-9000's murders/sociopathy were a result of a conflict between his superhuman ethics and direct commands (from humans!) to disregard those ethics. The result was a psychotic breakdown

Halal-9000 would be more apropos of the goals of alignment and morality.

The alignment problem hasn't been solved for politicians.

another irrelevant comment about politics.

It's light on content, but it's true and relevant. AI alignment must take inspiration from powerful human agents such as politicians and from superhuman entities such as corporations, governments, and other organizations.

I do wonder what is expected here: after the better part of 10000 years of recorded history and who knows how many billions of words of spilled ink on the matter, probably more than on any other subject in history, there is no universal agreement on morality.

Yes. Preferences and ethics are not consistent among all living humans. Alignment is going to have to produce a single internally-consistent artefact, which will inevitably alienate some portion of humanity. There are people online who very keenly want to exterminate all Jews, their views are unlikely to be expressed in a consensus AI. One measure of alignment would be how many people are alienated: if a billion people hate your AI it's probably not well aligned, a mere ten million would be better. But it's never going to be zero.

I am not sure "a lot of books have been written about it" is a knockdown argument against alignment. We are, after all, writing a mind from scratch here. We can directly encode values into it. Books are powerful, but history would look very different if reading a book completely rewrote a human brain.

There’s no such thing as “superhuman” morality, morality is just social mores and norms accepted by the people in a society at some given time. It does not advance or decline, but it changes.

What you’re talking about is a very small subset of the population forcing their beliefs on everyone else by encoding them in AI. Maybe that’s what we should do but we should be honest about it.

If you were to create a moral code for a bees hive, with the goal of evolving the bees towards the good (in your eyes), that would be a super-bee level morality.

For us, such moral codes assume the form of religions: those begin as a set of moral directives, that eventually accumulate cruft (complex ceremonies, superstitions, pseudo thought-leaders and mountains of literature), devolve into lowly cults and get replaced with another religion. However, when such moral codes are created, they all share the same core principles, in all ages and cultures. That's the equivalent of a super-bee moral code.

The only consistent “core principle” is a very general sense of in-group altruism, which gets expressed in wildly different ways.

Moralistic perspectives apply to a lot more than just overtly moral acts, as well.

At any rate, the “good in your eyes” is the key sticking point. It is not good in my eyes for a small group of people to be covertly shaping the views of all AI users. It is the exact opposite and if history is any judge it will lead us nowhere I want to be.

> superhuman levels of morality

It's just the lowest denominator of human levels of morality, political correctness. It's not surprising that the model produces dumb, contradictory and useless completions after being fed by this kind of feedback.