[bbor]

What if this author doesn’t care about intentionality? AFAICT you’re assuming they do because they use the active verb “ignore” for a machine, but that says little to me. We use language like this all the time for non-intentional systems: “the plant reached skyward”, “the economy soared”, etc etc etc.

I really really don’t think this is an article about convincing robots to be nice to us (AKA alignment); I think it’s an article about how we need stricter regulations for software that controls physical machines. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?

[gcanyon]

The difference is that no one (very few people) would ever consider a plant to be sentient. So the metaphor works as intended. Since many (most?) people are willing to entertain the notion that AI can be intentional, the metaphor is ambiguous and fails.

I’m not arguing against the underlying point, I’m just disagreeing with how it’s presented.