Description du poste
SummaryI’ve been talking to a lot of people about the “character vs corrigibility” debate lately, and I found that reactions are quite mixed as to whether this is an accurate or useful way of understanding different perspectives on what the target of alignment should be. I decided to take a closer look at the existing work, both theoretical arguments and empirical research, and how the labs are handling this question in practice. I found that:
• Character vs. corrigibility or obedience vs ethics is a useful and accurate description of a real axis in different accounts of what the goal of alignment should be;• But it is an oversimplification, covering up at least six distinct accounts that can be arranged in terms of how much judgement an “aligned” AI would be expected to exercise;• Disambiguating these six accounts helps make sense of different arguments in favor of teaching more or less virtue/values/character to AI.In upcoming posts, I plan to present some new arguments and empirical findings related to character and corrigibility, but in this post I will only be documenting other leading accounts of what the goal of alignment should be and summarizing the leading arguments from each camp. It’s kind of a lit review.
First I’m going to summarize everything for you with short bulleted lists and pretty pictures.
Top thing you should take away: six leading accounts of alignmentThis image shows the six leading answers to the question: what should be the target of AI alignment? More importantly, it shows that they can be understood in terms of an increasing number of dimensions over which an “aligned” AI would be expected to exercise its own judgement.
• Account #1: Tool AI. The AI as normal technology perspective. AI should follow instructions; no judgement is involved. If AI causes harm, existing liability law rules who showed criminal intent or neglect. Narayanan & Kapoor, Zuckerberg, Andreessen.• A2: Pure corrigibility. Given by e.g. Max Harms in Corrigibility as Si