I think the alignment problem needs to be viewed as overall society alignment. We are never going to get any better alignment from machines, than the alignment of society and its systems, citizens and corporations.
We are in very cynical times. But pushing for ethical systems, legally, economically, socially, and technically, is a bet on catastrophe avoidance. By ethics, meaning holding scalers and profiteers of negative externalities civilly and criminally to account. And building systems technically, etc. to naturally enforce and incentivize ethics. I.e. cryptographic solutions to interaction that limit disclosure to relevant information are the only way we get out of the surveillance-manipulation loop, which AI will otherwise supercharge.
I hear a lot of reasons this isn’t possible.
Unfortunately, none of those reasons provide an alternative.
We all start treating an umbrella of societal respect for ethics as a first class element of security, or powerful elements in society, including AI, will continue to easily and profitably weaponize the lack of it.
Ethics counterintuitively evolved to enhance survival. Seemingly, this is still counterintuitive, but the necessity is increasing.
(Just identifying the terrain we are in, and not suggesting centralization. Decentralization creates organic alignment incentives. Centralization the opposite. And attempts at centralizing something so inherently uncontrollable as all individual’s autonomy, which effectively becomes AI autonomy, would push incentives harder into dark directions.)
Alifatisk•20m ago
Before Moltbot it was Clawdbot.