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by Sharlin
353 days ago
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Real-world systems are more robust than you give them credit for. Otherwise they wouldn't exist in the first place. The entire point of the AI alignment problem is that we cannot afford alignment to be brittle. Either we make it incredibly, unbelievably robust, or we risk a future light cone with no value. |
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There is nothing robust about them. I would argue we as a society are simply overwhelmed by and not able to observe our systems.
Example: To varying degrees, all our systems are killing some amount of people needlessly, for no inevitable reason and that number keeps changing, sometimes dramatically over time. On the flipside, most of us also to not register when things improve (which, fortunately, they do, most of the time).
What I am arguing is: It's not the system that is robust. It's us. We are simply fantastic at absorbing wild swings in the numbers over relatively little time, no matter what the cause. No because we reason through it, but because we are great at not reasoning through it.
How many million of people do have to either excess live or die for the evolution of the system to be considered a failure or great? How much good would it have to do to be a success? The answer, in reality, most of the time seems to be: There is no number. The system bends and there is a new reality we already got accustomed to. We are shit at system evaluation.
> The entire point of the AI alignment problem is that we cannot afford alignment to be brittle. Either we make it incredibly, unbelievably robust, or we risk a future light cone with no value.
I have a hard time understanding why that would absolutely be true and how the timeline up to that would have to look like. Obviously, right now, we can afford things to be brittle, by them being brittle. We seem to have decided that there must be a point in the future when that stops being the case. What is it, exactly?