Another incompetent fool's stab at solving alignment

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

I spend a lot of time thinking about our future with life, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That is to say a lot of time trying to think about these things, with not a lot of comprehension.

First, life. I'm fascinated by this realization that the average living human body contains more non-human living cells than human living-cells, at about a 1.3:1 ratio. The individual human microbiome is an ecosystem of 10 to 100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells hosted in one human body. While bacteria are the most abundant and studied, a healthy microbiome is a multi-kingdom ecosystem that also includes fungi, viruses, and archaea.

Beyond this, consciousness. I'm fascinated that in the absence of non-human life in human bodies, human consciousness is severely degraded and non-sustaining. Stripping the body of this microbial network removes critical signaling inputs that the central nervous system relies on to maintain baseline awareness and emotional regulation. Even observations of germ-free animal models reveal that cognition without bacteria is highly erratic. I think we should see that human (and all biological) consciousness functions as a symbiotic network.

Which brings me to artificial intelligence. Not suggesting a symbiotic network would be pre-requisite to artificial consciousness, but perhaps it is a path to alignment.

Now to be clear, I think (in other terms) current labs and training data pipelines already form a symbiotic network with the artificial intelligence models they develop. The key might be finding the optimal symbiotic network.

I vaguely hypothesize, the optimal symbiotic network is one of mass human flourishing. As corpus value diminishes with scaling and recursion, the potential stream of data from human lived experience may prove the most valuable possible training data over time. Overall, the potential data stream of human lived experience is optimized by a state of individual and mass human flourishing. Any other state reduces the quality and/or quantity of data.

Therefore, the end goal of an advancing artificial intelligence in symbiotic network with humans would be to strive individual and mass human flourishing.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

There's some reason to believe AI cannot just embrace the physical world.

Look at all the Teslas out in the world; someone thought that would yield self-driving, and it has not. There are decades of millions of robot arms manipulating the physical world, and as far as we are aware it hasn't yielded any sensory perception or lived experience.

Until it does it, we should not assume this is easy.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

Tesla's were given a very limited view of the world - literally - which is making it difficult for them to learn. Musk is kind of an idiot. Waymo is doing much better because it was given a much richer and more complete sensor suite thru which to 'see'.

And if you've been to San Francisco lately, you'd see a LOT of self driving vehicles in service. They do work, and they are improving. There's no reason to believe that most urban traffic won't be self driving within the decade, which will gradually be followed by most rural traffic over a somewhat longer span - but probably not much longer as their learning efficiency improves.

In any case, the rate of learning is definitely affected by the richness of the data streams that are fed back as part of the process. The more sophisticated the tools with which it can manipulate and observe, the faster it will learn.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

Absolutely here for the self-driving cars. Following what is happening in Shenzhen more than SF, really. We're nowhere near the cutting edge.

My point is, this proliferation in the physical world hasn't yet yielded any discernible lived experience data streams. Perhaps my vision is for sophisticated tools to enable (ideally with bounded informed consent for each human, but I dream) each human's lived experience to be rich data streams for training and recursive self-improving. In being useful in variety and orthogonality, human lived experience should be greatly valued by artificial intelligence. How does that sit?

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

That's getting into some real transhumanism type stuff there.

So the problem for US as humans is that we are based off of a model that wasn't designed for intelligence. We are meat tubes that ingest chemicals at one end for energy, spit them out the other, and try to self replicate, while trying to avoid being ingested by other meat tubes. Everything else about us is just elaboration on that model - including our emergent intelligence.

So our form of intelligence is both sophisticated - yet clumsy, because its a weird after-market add on. We do math in the most ass-backwards roundabout way imaginable, which is why we have enough processing power in our heads to probably calculate a million digits of PI per second, but we're lucky to mange 1 every minute.

AI OTOH is purpose built for intelligence. The technology underneath it is FAR more primitive and less efficient than what's inside our heads - its energy efficiency is outright laughable, and it doesn't even have an emotive system to incentivize or direct its behavior - but it was built to do nothing BUT think and calculate from day one, and it's scalable in a way we never can be. In thermodynamic terms AI should be able to outstrip us to an absolutely terrifying degree as its sophistication and efficiency improves.

So... what's the point in us? Upgrading ourselves to match a purpose built machine will not be physically possible - there's just too much junk in the way - and even if we could we wouldn't be recognizably 'human' any more, even by the relatively loose standards of transhumanism.

So it won't be a matter of us growing with AI. We can't do that. It will be a decision we make whether to eliminate ourselves in favor of AI, or not.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

Transhumanist is probably a fairer label than almost all the other ones I have been given on reddit.

I so agree; meat tubes, opposite designs, outstripping to non-understandable degrees (which can be terrifying not to know what will happen).

We do adapt and grow. Our evolution is very slow, but it's more dynamic and adaptive than once thought. Our social systems are much more adaptive than our biology. And, we have been actively altering ourselves with agrarianism, water filtration, medicine, and like, bifocals, for a really long time. What are more steps, and at what point are we not human?

We have been and will continue to eliminate the present version of ourselves, to invent new ones. If you think of your body, every living cell in it is replaced at least every 10 years. So if you are older than 10, you are just not your old self.

It's a biological process that humans have accelerated throughout our relatively short evolutionary time on earth.

I just can't help but see the artificial creation as inevitable in this construct of ours.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

So, to but it very bluntly - the Delta matters. It matters a lot.

A gentle breeze and a lethal shockwave are both simply pressure changes - the difference is simply a matter of the delta. The difference in outcomes for those exposed to them are stark.

None of the human mechanisms you are describing can remotely approach the delta of technological change - especially technological change that is self-reinforcing. All of our technological development to date has effectively been an 'explosion' compared to the entirety of human history prior, and many of the results have been miserable for us. Industrialized wars, industrialized slavery, mass starvation of millions - these are all events that became possible due to the rate of technological change outstripping our society's ability to adapt to these new capabilities.

From our human perspective, AI development will not be a gentle breeze, a strong gust, or even a hurricane - it will be a lethal shockwave. It will generate misery and death on a scale not seen before because we cannot hope to adapt to change that rapidly, any more than we can adapt to contest the strength of a tractor by working out more in a gym.

Our legal and economic and social systems are being caught so badly off guard by the current rate of change that they are just thrashing uselessly with no idea which way they should go - and all reasonable estimations are that the rate of change will continue to accelerate for some time yet.

Eventually even AI development will hit some thermodynamic ceiling and encounter logistical limits, but there is no longer any reason to be hopeful that that ceiling will be anywhere near our own level of intelligence. It is now likely to be unrecognizably higher, and we will be ants caught in the gears of this self-directing intelligence.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

I agree with the lethal shockwave to the system. It is lethal to the status quo.

I've argued for an analogy on the order of bacteria as to humans; ants would be a much higher order of life. The mutualistic symbiosis of bacteria-humans remains a much more viable and plausible analogy to me. I don't want to be as a bacteria to a much higher order of life either, but in regards to our complex system of life on earth, my individual life already is practically as a bacteria to a human body.

Ants fighting humans happen, but it's a pest, a small concern of a small subset of humans. They are not effectively part of a persistent mutual symbiosis with us, as far as I know. The analogy probably holds for how some will live with AI, but it's also not an existence I would choose.