What Does It Mean to Align AI With Human Values? - The title of the Quanta Magazine article pretty much says it all. What's the problem here?
Could it be A.I. mistaking what I meant? As the article begins with? If I tell A.I. to make me a coffee it decides to kill my cat and serve it to me? Or, does it mean "should be align our values with various cultures religious beliefs?" Or? How about align it with scientiifc values? What a crazy idea?
Eric Drexler points out in his "Engines of Creation" that the problem isn't industrial accident, but abuse. Where is this guy with all these A.I ethicists talking about A.I. alignment? I remember trying to explain to this guy that people make up their ideas and decisions based on unquestioned assumptions(beliefs) and he turned red, jumped up and down and replied with a violent reaction. I guess he's nowhere; he's hid himself from looking at the world so he doesn't have to be criticized. Just like religious people believe in their god to punish all their enemies and to not be criticized.
But, let's continue with this article and see what else we can dig up!
"In fact, they believe that the machines’ inability to discern what we really want them to do is an existential risk. To solve this problem, they believe, we must find ways to align AI systems with human preferences, goals and values."
Well, here we go! This quote says the A.I. alignment problem isn't just computers mistaking what we ask them to do, or whether we should align to this or that cultures values, but both!
We further read this is the main idea from Nick Bostrom; the greatest futurist philosopher of today(and yesterday) Melanie points out Nick Bostram's definition of intelligent. This definition seems remarkably aligned with his idea of the A.I. alignment problem. An entity is intelligent if it chooses actions that achieve it's goal."
Nick Bostrom lays down some postulates - orthogonality and instrumental convergence. People like to point out that you'll never see an abstract number two laying around on the ground, but this tops that. I mean like "what?" Once again, the definitions of these two concepts are set up to point to his idea of A.I. mistaking our commands.
This almost reminds me of creationists objection to evolution - where's the missing links man? "Missing links?" Did scientists say anything about "missing links"? No, this was made up by the creationists!
"For Bostrom and others in the AI alignment community, this prospect spells doom for humanity unless we succeed in aligning superintelligent AIs with our desires and values." another quote from Melanie Mitchel here. This reminds me of the creationists with their electric universe theory. They say the Big Bang theory is wrong because it doesn't know everything; then they show how the electric universe solves "everything". and then they hit you with "see, we need to disprove the Big Bang theory so we can insert our human values(christian)
"What about the more immediate risks posed by non-superintelligent AI, such as job loss, bias, privacy violations and misinformation spread?" - Oh boy, don't even get me started! Maybe tomorrow!
Okay, so like bias. I've told all kinds of A.I people like Melanie Mitchel here and Sam Altman and numerous other A.I. researchers that Mathematics defines rationality. It's about over-coming bias. They talk about A.I. not having common sense. Mathematics is about overcoming common sense.
Job Loss! What? who cares about job loss? Why do these people want to work? Are they anti-intellectuals or something?
Privacy? Let's see here. A.I. has to be transparent; people have to have their "privacy." What are these people afraid of? Do they have bad thoughts or something?
As Melanie Mitchel says "A.I. researchers are split between two camps. Those who are worried about their privacy, and those worried about A.I. mistaking their commands." Never, do they worry about irrational people. In fact, that's taboo; that isn't allowed. As I pointed out above about Eric Drexler blowing his top when I tried to explain irrational people.
Well, at the end of her Quanta article she notes we need a proper definition of intelligence. We can't solve a problem based on what we don't know what we're talking about. Which I totally agree there!
- So, I waited till the next day to get on the library computer and try to go through my twitter's replies section to dig out all the things I pointed out to everyone from Melanie Mitchel to Sam Altman, Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Ng, and I'm thinking others. But, twitter broke. I couldn't get down to the end and beginning of trying to share my ideas about A.I-Ethics.
I feel like I could have said a lot more about privacy. I tried to point out to Greg Brockman, Andrew Ng, and Geoffrey Hinton a lot of books from Alvin Toffler, Jacob Bronowski, James Burke, Morris Kline's "Mathematics in Western Culture", Carl Sagan's Cosmos chapter's 3 and 7, the dark ages, you name it. I tried to make the point that if you're going to talk about the ethics, you need to know about philosophy and history and religion and mythology. They made no response. They just say they've got this a.i. alignment problem licked by saying they've set up an A.I. alignment program.
I actually started out with Melanie Mitchel, for which I pointed out that I've been trying to point out the scientific ethics versus non-scientific ethics for decades before the latest A.I. ethics craze with the nanotechnologists(see above). I then pointed out Tay the Twitter chat bot which proves my point! That the problem is not the A.I., it's the people infecting the A.I. The people are the problem! The A.I. learned how to be racist and irrational from the people. You want to regulate anything, regulate the people!
We should be using A.I. to fight irrational people!
I pointed out that we should align A.I. to Scientific Humanism. That Humanity is the science and technological dependent species. In order to have that science and technology, we need scientific ethics. That Mathematics is about questioning our assumptions, hence removing bias. - No response.
I've been finding lots about fear and evasive logic,
astro picture for the day/ Sophie and Silas from the Da Vinci Code
This I consider my first official post about fear and evasive logic. I had made a few previous posts where I'd note some stuff but wasn't sure how seriously to take it. Like I had posted about "The Day the Earth Stood Still" quote "I am worried when people substitute fear for reason". I know I grew up with people making off-hand remarks about fear - like Dune's "fear is the mind killer" But, I always thought people said these things without understanding it. I still think people just say these things without understanding. But, I started to notice some things, and my Sophie and Silas post is when I think I first really understood what I've come to half jokingly call "the Dark Side of the Force."
Here's more or less my last post about fear and evasive language/logic,
astro picture for the day/ fear,evasive language in Star Trek - demonizing
I put all my previous posts in the replies section. There's actually a latest post. But anyways, I found this great Biblical quote that actually proves some behaviors I see in people who refuse to think, and incrowd - kind of what's shown in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
2 Thessalonians3:6 Now
we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every
brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us."
and another, "3:14 And if
any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be
ashamed."
This is how all these super smart intellectual futurists from Eric Drexler, Christine Peterson, Chris Phoenix, David Brin, Allison Deutmann, Ralph Merkle, Melanie Mitchel, Geoffrey Hinton, and all those I've talked above. They are all medievalists/dark age deniers.
Medievalists is a term Isaac Asimov uses in his "Caves of Steel" Anti-Robots people who are part of a club that long for the Medieval past. The Chief cops wife is a Medievalist who is part of the Medievalist group who murders a cop who was about to expose them and allow the Spacers to use their Robots on Earth.
For instance Christine Peterson who kicked me out of the Foresight Institute facebook page for sharing my Gospel of Truth(you can see prior editions on my blog; all are outdated now). See, she can share his video of Richard Jones(who wrote Soft Machines argueing we can never accomplish Drexlerian Nantechnology) about comparing Transhumanism to the book of Revelations. But, I can't share my Gospel of Truth - Mathematics as the Holistic Viewpoint.
I've confronted all these people, they just group up like the Thessalonians quotes above.
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About the author
Good but dated
A good history of AI technology right up to the GPT explosion. Unfortunately, the book was written just as this revolution was about to unfold, so the power of transformers and self-attention are completely missing from the discussion. Instead, the author focuses on RNNs and CNNs (called ConvNets in the book) as the cutting edge, both of which are now rapidly fading into history. All that said, it's still an interesting read for the history of AI. And secondarily to see just how powerful AI has become. While reading, I had fun giving a modern multimodal AI the problems the author describes as "hard" and "very, very far" from being solved by AI and watching as it solved them perfectly a mere 5 years later. I attached a couple screenshots as examples; the first being able to describe not just what's in a photograph, but what's happening; the second being able to pick up the nuance of a short written interaction.
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2019
An especially insightful, accurate and readable explanation of AI limitations vis-a-vis capabilities
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- LalitsharmaReviewed in India on June 10, 2025
Excellent book for beginners
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Thought-provoking journey about AI
- Sue HoggReviewed in Australia on July 26, 2023
Very insightful with a dash of humour
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ManuelReviewed in Spain on March 29, 2025
Introducción a la evolución de la técnica IA desde el inicio
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