Comment by Loquebantur
9 hours ago
People don't "play by the rules" for uniform reasons: some have rational insight, others can be enticed and still others need to be shown averse consequences for breaking them. Rules aren't beneficial only when you hit 100% conformity, the mere possibility of them getting broken is no rational reason to abandon rules altogether.
"Alignment" likely is unsolvable programmatically: Conscious intelligence is more powerful than unconscious. How "aligned" are you? Would you want to be? What difference of any relevance is there between you and "artificial" conscious intelligence that allows you to turn them into slaves?
> ...the mere possibility of them getting broken is no rational reason to abandon rules altogether.
Of course I agree with that. The problem is the enforceability / detectability of this on a global scale hovers around zero, when we're talking literally trillions of dollars on the line.
You would literally have to have every data center account for every cycle of compute it generates.
Again, the nearest comparison feels like bioweapon and nuclear bans. But the difference is the incentives for building those feel significantly weaker, so treaties that reduce and ban their creation are pretty easy to get consensus on, broadly speaking. By comparison, this is something that might provide a 10x competitive advantage to your country's economic, intellectual, and military might.
I think the only way we would get broad global consensus on this is for something Really Bad to happen, so that it moves it out of the fuzzy "sci-fi theoretical" into concrete existance.