alt Hacker NewsOne 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."
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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.
This would be a fun website - you should have an AI build it!
I asked GPT Astra to make this: https://sayyss.github.io/human-archive/
It's a little unsettling.
The museum will have a scrap of paper that will say "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels bring home for Emma".
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.
"the humans thought their singularity wasn't just another blind god to worship: surprise, just another golden calf"
"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"
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.
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?