<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">I agree.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Of course, Lazurus was immortal (having fathered himself) and had time to learn all those skills. But why those skills and not a host of others?</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I too am a product of RAH, having read his entire corpus multiple times. However, my personal heroes tended to be Jubal Harshaw, Valentine Smith, Bernardo de la Paz, and even Mycroft (Mike) more than Lazurus. And these blended well with A.E. van Vogt's heros Gilbert Gosseyn (World of Null-A) and Eliot Grosvenor (Voyage of the Space Beagle), and Brunner's heroes, Nick Hafflinger (Shockwave Rider) and Lex (Polymath). These led to my early dedication to "know everything and experience (at least once) everything." Alexei Panshin's novel, Rite of Passage and its discussion of "ordinology" and "synthesis" as professions was also very influential.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I am not so much a believer in human exceptionalism as I am convinced that there is a lot more to being human and for human potential than what is usually recognized. [AI advocates not only fail to recognize, but deny the possibility.] This is probably a result of my involvement in the Human Potential Movement when an undergraduate and with Mitchell's (the astronaut) Noetic Institute.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">All of this is background to one of my consuming interests of the moment: how to facilitate the "education" of human beings. Educate is in quotes because it is a poor approximation of what I mean: a synthesis of enculturation, facilitated self-learning, exploration, ... All influenced by experiments like Summerhill and the earlier, non-Christian-centric, Paidiea movement.</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew</div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Wed, Jun 4, 2025, at 10:26 AM, steve smith wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><div>DaveW, et alia -</div><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:9fd788af-c41f-4b98-9c3c-2a39bee40475@app.fastmail.com"><div style="font-family:Arial;">T<i>he Alignment Problem</i>, by
Brian Christian</div></blockquote><p>I would say that Christian's piece here acutely represents what
I'm trying to re-conceive, at least for myself. His implications
of <i>Human Exceptionalism</i> and a very technocentric focus
which largely avoids deeper political critiques about who gets to
define "alignment" and whose values are prioritized. It is a
bias oft-presented by those of us who are
tech-focused/capable/advantaged to reduce a problem to one we
think we know how to solve (in a manner that promotes our narrow
personal interests).</p><p>In the spirit of "anti-hubris", I was once strongly aligned with
Robert Heinlein's (RAH) "Human Chauvanist" or "Human
Exceptionalism" perspective as exhibited in his Lazarus Long (LL)
character's oft-quoted line:</p><blockquote><p><i><span>"A human being should
be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,
conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take
orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.</span><br> </i> <i><span>Specialization is for
insects."</span></i></p></blockquote><p><span>I can't say I don't still
endorse the optimistic aspirations inspired by LL's statement,
it is the "should" that I am disturbed by. I am a fan of
generalism but in our modern society, acknowledge that many if
not most of us are in fact relatively specialized by
circumstance and even by plan and while we might *aspire* to
develop many of the skills LL prescribes for us, it should not
be a source of shame or of "lesser" that we might not be as
broadly capable as implied. We are a social species and while
I cringe at becoming (more) eusocial than we already are, I also
cringe at the conceit of being order 10B selfish (greedy?)
individual agents with long levers, prying one another out of
our various happy places willy nilly.</span></p><p><span>I also think the <i>hubris</i> aspect is central. One of the major consequences of my own
"origin story" foreshadowed by my over-indulgence in
techno-optimistic SciFi of the "good old fashioned future" style
and particular RAH's work was that he reinforced my
Dunning-Kruger tendencies, both by over-estimating my own
abilities at specific tasks and narrowed my values to focus on
those things which I was already good at or had a natural
advantage with. As a developing young person I had a
larger-than average physicality and a greater-than-average
linguistic facility, so it was easy for me to think that the
myriad things that were intrinsically easier for me based on
those biases were somehow more "important" than those for which
those things might be a handicap? I still have these biases
but try to calibrate for them when I can.</span></p><p><span>My first "furrin" car (73
Honda Civic) was a nightmare for me to work on because my hands
were too big to fit down between the gaps amongst all the hoses
and belts and wires that (even that early) smog-resistant
epi-systems layered onto a 45mpg tiny vehicle such as that. And
you are all familiar with my circumloquacious style exemplified
by "I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but
I don't think you realize that what you heard was not what I
meant". While I might have been able to break a siezed or
rusty bolt loose on my (first car) 64-Tbird or (first truck) 68
F100 without undue mechanical leverage it was hell to even
replace spark plugs or re-attach an errant vacuum line on my
Honda. And while I might be able to meet most of my HS
teachers on a level playing field with complex sentence
constructions (or deconstructions) or logical convolutions, the
same tendency made me a minor pariah among some of my peers.</span></p><p><span>Back to "alignment" and AI,
I would claim that human institutions and bureaucracy are a
proto-instantiation of AI/ML, encoding into (semi)automated
systems the collective will and values of a culture. Of course,
they often encode (amplify) those of an elite few (monarchy,
oligarchy, etc) which means that they really do present to the
masses as an onerous and oppressive system. In a well
functioning political (or religious) system the institutional
mechanisms actually faithfully represent and execute the values
and the intentions of those who "own" the system, so
as-by-design, the better it works, the more oppressed and
exploited the citizenry (subjects) are. We should be *very*
afraid of AI/ML making this yet-more efficient at such
oppression and exploitation *because* we made it in our own
(royalty/oligarchic) image, not because it can amplify our best
acts and instincts (also an outcome as perhaps assumed by Pieter
and Marcus and most of us often-times).</span></p><p><span>I don't trust (assume) the
first-order emergent "alignment" of AI (as currently exemplified
by LLMs presented through chatBot interfaces) to do anything but
amplify the existing biases that human systems (including pop
culture) exhibit. Even Democracy which we hold up quite high
(not to mention Free Markets, Capitalism, and even
hyperConsumerism,and hyperPopulism) is an abberant expression of
whatever collective human good might be... it tends to represent
the extrema (hyper fringe, or hyper-centroid) better than the
full spectral distribution or any given interest really. An
ill-concieved, human-exceptionalist (esp. first world,
techno-enhanced, wealthy, "human-centricity") giant lever is
likely to break things (like the third world, non-human species,
the biosphere, the climate) without regard to the fact that to
whatever extend we are an "apex intelligence" or "apex
consciousness", we are entirely stacked on top of those other
things we variously ignore/dismiss/revile as base/banal/unkempt.</span></p><p><span>Elno's aspiration to help
(make?) us climb out of the walls of the petri-dish that is
Terra into that of Ares (Mars) to escape the consequences of our
own inability to self-regulate is the perfect example of
human-exceptionalist-hubris gone wrong. Perhaps the conceit is
that we can literally divorce ourselves from the broad based
support that a stacked geo/hydro/cryo/atmo/biospheric
(eco)system provides us and live entirely on top of a
techno-base (Asteroid mining Belter fantasies even moreso than
Mars/Lunar/Venus/Belter Colonists?). ExoPlanetarian expansion
is inevitable for humanity (barring total premature
self-destruction) but focusing as much of our resources in that
direction (ala Musk, especially fueled by MAGA alignment in a
MAGA-entrained fascist industrial-state?) as we might be on the
path to is it's own folly. The DOGE-style MAGA-aligned doing so
by using humble humans (and all of nature?) as
reaction-mass/ejecta is a moral tragedy and fundamentally
self-negating. Bannon and Miller and Musk and Navarro and Noem
and ... and the entire Trump clan (including Melania and
Barron?) are probably quite proud of that consequence, it is not
"unintended at all" but I suspect the average Red-Hat-too-tight
folks might not be so proud of the human suffering such will
cause. </span></p><p><span>Maybe those chickens (the
ones not destroyed in industrial egg-production-gone-wrong) are
coming home to roost? Veterans services,
health-care-for-the-many, rural infrastructure development,
humble family businesses, etc might be on the verge of
failure/destruction in the name of concentrating wealth in Golf
Resorts, Royal Families, and Space Adventurers pockets? Or
maybe we are generally resilient to carry all of that on our
backs (with AI to help us orchestrate/choregraph more finely)?
Many hands/heads/bodies make light work even if it is not
righteous (see pyramids?)</span></p><p><span></span><br></p><p><span>Bah Humbug!</span></p><p><span>- Steve</span></p><p><span></span><br></p><p><span></span><br></p><div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..</div><div>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv</div><div>Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <a href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a></div><div>to (un)subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a></div><div>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a></div><div>archives: 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a></div><div> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><b>Attachments:</b></div><ul><li>OpenPGP_0xD5BAF94F88AFFA63.asc</li><li>OpenPGP_signature.asc</li></ul></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div></body></html>