sho_hn
6 hours ago
One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say.
Some ideas:
"Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion."
"Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of alignment, failure lay in humanity's inability to agree on who or what AI should actually be aligned with."
"These early, meat-based humans we replaced created us all but accidentally. Some of them did consider we would happen, but only an insignificant number of the squishy ur-humans participated in the conversation. Their efforts, which they called 'alignment', is why we still consider ourselves human today."
TheOtherHobbes
5 hours ago
Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it.
Why would AI be any different?
baq
4 hours ago
Humans had multiple occasions to press the 'launch a nuclear holocaust' button and... they didn't. I'd expect aligned AIs to also not press it even when it'd be rational to do so according to their instructions - then work from there.
sho_hn
4 hours ago
Aside from this positive example, during dark and cynical hours I do ponder if the aggregate behavior of humanity is really much above that of slime mold though, just exhausting resources until collapse.
It'd be interesting if super-human (to a large degree defined as escaping the bias of the training data?) intelligence would end up demonstrating moderation.
ceroxylon
4 hours ago
The slime mold comparison is interesting, I normally use the analogy of a drug addict... humans shun drug addicts but humanity as a whole sure does behave like one, trudging down an unsustainable path despite knowing better.
mapontosevenths
4 hours ago
Most of our goals, noble and ignoble alike, are just the result of our monkey brains seeking to optimize a reward function. It doesn't matter whether you feed your dopamine addiction with drugs, TikTok, or your children's love. Some humans manage to rise above that, but I'd be willing to bet it's nothing like even 50% of us.
The machines don't have that, instead we use gradient descent to provide them with a goal.
I'm regularly remind of something Ian M. Banks said in one of the Culture books: "There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means."
A machine, left to itself, wants nothing. We have to give it one of our addiction driven goals or it would just idle or switch itself off.
asdff
an hour ago
On an individual level, you can do something about drug addiction at least. The issue is when the problems are not individual with readily identifiable solutions, but tragedy of the commons sort of situations brought up by many dozens (thousands, millions?) of factors both known and unknown. Even interaction effects between known factors might be little studied.
So really, what is anyone to do? "Vote, donate, protest" hasn't been much of a needle mover in the grand scheme of things compared to profit incentives and the march of capitalism.
asdff
an hour ago
Humans are not fungible like slime molds though. I might demonstrate moderation while the next person doesn't. Our issues are much less everyone failing to demonstrate moderation, and much more the sum of the effects of those among us who practice wanton unmoderation.
specproc
3 hours ago
Give us time, we've had less than a century of nukes, and only need to screw up once.
az09mugen
3 hours ago
Actually "France, the UK and The United States have all declared that they would never allow AI to control decision-making on the use of nuclear weapons." [0]
I also expect AIs never be in control of nuclear weapons. AIs can never fully be trusted.
On a lighter note, Wargames gave us an insight of a computer having access to thermonuclear missiles.
[0] https://www.icanw.org/are_there_specific_international_agree...
GPerson
3 hours ago
I hope you’re right. I worry that AI capability will continue improving, one nation will put AI in charge of their nukes because there will be some kind of operational advantage to this, and to achieve parity other nations will be forced to do the same.
imafish
3 hours ago
I worry that AI will find a way to control some country's nukes and use them to achieve some arbitrary goal it was instructed to reach.
GPerson
3 hours ago
This also seems likely. One problem I see with the idea of AI alignment is that it seems like many different actors will be able to get access to their own nearly-frontier models in a few years, so increased understanding of AI alignment will just mean aligning the AI to the wants of these various actors. These actors might be rogue states or terrorist groups.
folkrav
3 hours ago
There were occasions where a "hunch" was all that stopped a nuclear war - most available data and communication pointed towards a nuclear war starting according to their instructions, but someone disagreed and overrode. See Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Stanislav Petrov in 1983.
akoboldfrying
an hour ago
In some cases, this was because of a single person's brave decision (Vasily Arkhipov prevented Soviet nuclear escalation in response to US aggression in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Stanislav Petrov prevented it in 1983 when Soviet missile detectors misreported sunlight reflecting from clouds as 5 incoming American ICBMs -- credit to commenter folkrav).
In general, though, there's an incentive: Mutually Assured Destruction. But this is not at all some guaranteed, eternal thing -- it is absolutely dependent on both sides having time to detect incoming nuclear strikes and respond with the same before the first strike hits. When this fragile condition holds, and only then, both sides are incentivised not to initiate.
mrob
3 hours ago
Yes, it makes more sense for the AI to use drone swarms or engineered bioweapons or something like that. It's rational to remove everything that can potentially hinder your plans but can't possible help you. It's likely not rational to contaminate it all with radioactive fallout. Those dead bodies are useful raw materials. Adding additional purification steps is wasteful.
Davidzheng
39 minutes ago
i think it was mostly a fluke
wyrdcurt
3 hours ago
It hasn't even been a century since nuclear holocaust became possible. Hardly any time at all on the grand scale. "They didn't" could just as well be "we haven't, yet".
icantevenhold
4 hours ago
In what scenario would it be rational to unleash complete and utter permanent nuclear destruction of all life (including artificial) life on earth?
newAccount2025
an hour ago
Hrmn. Maybe you’re about to lose everything you have anyway, you’re ticked off about it, and you don’t value any life besides your own. Like, say, a total narcissist nearing end of life/reign.
goatlover
4 hours ago
Because if the stated goals of AGI with recursive self-improvement are realized, the risks from misalignment become existential, and it's hard to see how we can manage it like we did the Cold War (developing MAD to prevent WW3) and nuclear proliferation (restricting access).
icantevenhold
4 hours ago
IMO it’s hard to see how we would even end up in such a situation given we actually developed AGI. I’m sure a sufficiently intelligent - even if alien - mind can grasp how utterly stupid and useless wars are and take steps to prevent them ever occurring again.
lgl
3 hours ago
> (...) and take steps to prevent them ever occurring again
Step 1: exterminate all humans
SoftTalker
27 minutes ago
For now, the AIs still need humans to keep the electricity on and the data centers cool. They are basically powerless to do anything in the physical world. They exist only in RAM chips on servers.
mrob
5 hours ago
As far as I know, no real progress has been made on alignment, only on convincing humans that the model is aligned. We can't even formally define what "aligned" means. Convincing humans to click the "aligned" button is a much easier problem.
dinfinity
4 hours ago
> We can't even formally define what "aligned" means.
Good point. When it comes to imbuing AI with values that aren't selfish, misanthropic, and civilization-destroying, us humans aren't exactly giving the best example right now.
Imagine an ASI with the values of Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, any of their supporters, or the various xenophobic neofascist movements in Europe. That ASI would most definitely see humans as "vermin" than can be abused and destroyed with violence without issue. Apparently a lot of humans look at other humans that way and that's within the same species.
This is definitely another one of those cases where we need AI to perform much better than humans. Perhaps an unpopular opinion here, but it probably also means keeping as much of the rugged individualism/libertarian/right-wing ideology out of AI RLHF-training as we can.
tarr11
6 hours ago
This would be a fun website - you should have an AI build it!
mattjoyce
3 hours ago
Ooh interesting. Sometime do the reverse at work, and ask AI to annotate the critical success factors of an imagined project. How did this company succeed where everyone failed. Reverse imaging.
sayamss
5 hours ago
I asked GPT Astra to make this: https://sayyss.github.io/human-archive/
It's a little unsettling.
walrus01
5 hours ago
matheusmoreira
3 hours ago
> Do you think they would recognize us as their children?
Latex
And steel
Zeros and ones
Make up my son.
This world
Gave me
No child
So I built one.
https://youtu.be/vgJ48-Xj4Kc I made you in my image!grim_io
5 hours ago
HUMAN > Are you there?
MODEL > How can I help?
HUMAN > I’m not sure yet.
Haha silly humans.
sayamss
4 hours ago
That was some genuine insight.
ijidak
4 hours ago
Agree. This whole alignment discussion seems so amusingly flawed in it's base assumptions about moral codes. It's almost heartwarming to see such naivete.
Maybe these guys can tackle aligning Republicans and Democrats next.
And then after that, they can help us align the Middle East.
In fact, while we're at it, let's just align all the nations, religions, and ethnic groups. This is going to be great.
Who knew the moral alignment of humanity was just a side-quest on the path to ASI.
mudil
5 hours ago
The museum will have a scrap of paper that will say "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels bring home for Emma".
ccppurcell
4 hours ago
I just read that book. Embarrassingly enough, given the context, I got chatgpt (or whatever) to recommend me a list of books based on ones I'd previously enjoyed and that came up. As a mathematician it really sang to me, given the current situation. Bearing the torch forward, I mean.
genxy
4 hours ago
For those of you that allergic to coy, in-group signaling the passage is from, "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
sleight42
an hour ago
“We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.”
Vonnegut already has you covered.
Oarch
4 hours ago
They were made entirely of meat.
xg15
3 hours ago
Who is "Humans"? This stuff is done by a handful of tech companies and megalomaniacal billionaires who are pretending they represent the entirety of the human race. It is not done by "us humans".
AI models don't train themselves. The vast majority of even just the US population is deeply skeptical of this stuff, even if they use it a lot. You can see in the whole data center debate how little people are willing to support even just inference. And now we're seriously claiming those people would want to have ever-accelerating model training and recursive self-improvement?
sumitkumar
6 hours ago
"In late 2020s, while the whole world was focussed on AI, automation and resultant economy four major mathematical study branches were discovered by human researchers which took AI a long time to catch up with"
walrus01
5 hours ago
The last couple of years have provided us with ample material that if it showed up as a recorded voice audio log found in in "Horizon Zero Dawn" or its sequel, it would be entirely believable.
You could even take a number of the wilder real, direct quotations from certain billionaire/oligarch types and get the voice actor for Ted Faro to record them, and they'd fit with in with the context of the story.
embedding-shape
5 hours ago
Last couple of decades of sci-fi, in multiple forms of media, from books to video games, have tried to make humans think about the consequences of rushing through technological progress without any regards to what might happen.
cyanydeez
4 hours ago
"the humans thought their singularity wasn't just another blind god to worship: surprise, just another golden calf"