#CHANGE ALIGNMENT IA WRITER SERIES#

Our question is: in what ways is the difficulty of alignment of AI systems different from that of non-AI systems? Example: Aligning an economic society by establishing property rights Successfully taking an action that steers the future in the direction of our true terminal values by influencing the part of an intelligent system that dictates its equilibrium behavior. Therefore we will adopt the following working definition of alignment: In contrast, although plucking a single hair from a human head or adding a single barrel of oil to a market does have an impact on the future, the self-correcting mechanisms of the respective intelligent systems negate rather than propagate such changes.įurthermore, we will take alignment in general to be about utilizing such interventions on intelligent systems to realize our true terminal values. These are the aspects of the respective intelligent systems that persist through time and dictate their equilibrium behavior. A general property of intelligent systems seems to be that there are interventions one can execute on them that have robustly long-lasting effects, such as changing the genome of a bacterium, or the trade regulations of a market economy. One particular approach to steering the future is to take actions that influence the constitutions of some intelligent system in the world. In general, we take actions in the world in order to steer the future in a certain direction.

#CHANGE ALIGNMENT IA WRITER SERIES#

We begin with a series of examples of aligning different kinds of systems, then we seek explanations for the relative difficulty of AI and non-AI alignment. Clarifying which difficulties are shared should clarify the difficulties that are truly unusual about AI alignment. Our goal is to provide a frame for importing and exporting insights from and to other fields without losing sight of the difficulties of AI alignment that are unique. In this essay we attempt to clarify which difficulties of AI alignment show up similarly in non-AI systems, and which do not.

What exactly is difficult about AI alignment that is not also difficult about alignment of governments, economies, companies, and other non-AI systems? Is it merely that the fast speed of AI makes the AI alignment problem quantitatively more acute than other alignment problems, or are there deeper qualitative differences? Is there a real connection between alignment of AI and non-AI systems at all? Thanks to Adam Shimi, John Wentworth, and Rob Miles for comments on this essay. Financial status: This work is supported by individual donors and a grant from LTFF.Įpistemic status: This post contains many inside-view stories about the difficulty of alignment.

Change alignment ia writer