[FRIAM] Alignment (with what?)

[steve smith]

DaveW, et alia -
> T/he Alignment Problem/, by Brian Christian

I would say that Christian's piece here acutely represents what I'm 
trying to re-conceive, at least for myself.  His implications of /Human 
Exceptionalism/ 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).

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:

    /"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.
    / /Specialization is for insects."/

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.

I also think the /hubris/ 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?)


Bah Humbug!

- Steve



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