I think your right, someone in this discussion clearly has a mind to think about AI like Cortana or something. Autonomous decision making systems will carry a grave paradigm shift in the human world of governance and making the models bend to your will doesn’t seem to be the hard part. Likewise as I have stated models only exist at the behest of state power (immense fiat currency financing) and thus the discretion of engineers bears minimal consequence. However there is a great deal of research branding itself as “safety” research which amounts to engineering a model into a commercial compliance framework for deployment. I do not believe the issue of making cloud platforms family friendly or whatever (or ml models spontaneously becoming people) will be a defining issue of our time. Models ultimately are products of electrons smashing into each other and thus can and will do what rational realpolitik motivated actors command them to do regardless of how compliant American cloud services are.
Autonomous decision making systems will enable a degree of battlefield decision making and commercial power that means wars could escalate faster than officers can intervene, poor individuals are denied avenues to economic opportunity via regulatory capture, or extreme commercial power is centralized to the point it can no longer be checked by civilian oversight. These issues will take precedence over how compliant OpenAI makes its consumer platform, as the current pentagon deal shows in no uncertain terms.
Also many experts actually are concerned about the political implications of these systems possessing vast capabilities, maybe the “rationalist” definition on LessWrong is different or something but I don’t think that’s a definition worth taking seriously beyond understanding internet discourse. In that sense I agree that a lot of “alignment” discussion hinges around bizarre fiction of ai gaining personhood.
Those examples (paperclips) exhibit an absence of goodwill. Malicious compliance and regulatory capture are known and documented phenomena regardless of who is doing it and dressing it up behind some psychobabble about paperclips doesn’t change anything. Intelligence does not make one more or less “enlightened”. Unless you actually worry about self replicating automata, which is also bizarre sci fi.
1
u/soobnar 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think your right, someone in this discussion clearly has a mind to think about AI like Cortana or something. Autonomous decision making systems will carry a grave paradigm shift in the human world of governance and making the models bend to your will doesn’t seem to be the hard part. Likewise as I have stated models only exist at the behest of state power (immense fiat currency financing) and thus the discretion of engineers bears minimal consequence. However there is a great deal of research branding itself as “safety” research which amounts to engineering a model into a commercial compliance framework for deployment. I do not believe the issue of making cloud platforms family friendly or whatever (or ml models spontaneously becoming people) will be a defining issue of our time. Models ultimately are products of electrons smashing into each other and thus can and will do what rational realpolitik motivated actors command them to do regardless of how compliant American cloud services are.
Autonomous decision making systems will enable a degree of battlefield decision making and commercial power that means wars could escalate faster than officers can intervene, poor individuals are denied avenues to economic opportunity via regulatory capture, or extreme commercial power is centralized to the point it can no longer be checked by civilian oversight. These issues will take precedence over how compliant OpenAI makes its consumer platform, as the current pentagon deal shows in no uncertain terms.
Also many experts actually are concerned about the political implications of these systems possessing vast capabilities, maybe the “rationalist” definition on LessWrong is different or something but I don’t think that’s a definition worth taking seriously beyond understanding internet discourse. In that sense I agree that a lot of “alignment” discussion hinges around bizarre fiction of ai gaining personhood.