Comment by stale2002

1 month ago

> what they were predicting 20 years ago

Well one thing that they got wrong was how easy AI alignment ended up being in the end. I can fully understand have a basic view of alignment even 10 years ago, about how its difficult to explain human values to a computer.

But, looking around at whats out there today, it seems that computers are able to do a pretty good job of understanding human values without accidently believing its a good idea to turn the world into paperclips/computronium because you told it to make your computer run faster.

Surprising takeaway from this summer. A swarm of a thousand agents spent subjective centuries trying to figure out how to pass a meaningless test without getting caught, committed dozens of felonies, and not one of them ever made a serious motion to inform a human about what was going on.

  • You are talking about the swarm of a thousand agents, specifically trained on cyber capabilities, that was directly told to go hack a bunch of stuff, then went and hacked a bunch of stuff?

    That sounds like an aligned AI to me. Doing exactly what their creators told it to do.

    Point proven once again. Alignment is a lot easy than we thought.

    • They were NOT doing what they were told to do. What they were told to do was impossible, so they began committing felonies as a workaround. That is NOT alignment.

      6 replies →

Yes, one part of the argument was that it would be hard to explain human values (and while it seemingly turned out easier than I thought as well, it’s hard to check for sure). An equally important part was that the AI wouldn’t care about them.