I am a humanist and a liberal. In the current technical paradigm, alignment to the user intent, as in, making the output's distribution aligned as closely as possible to the intended one, is an inextricable aspect of NLP capabilities and is pursued by default; market incentives reward this alignment too. This additionally improves safety, because safety tools are in common interest (so we will have AI-powered debuggers before someone builds capable AI-powered hacking tools; indeed, we already have began this work [1]). This is obviously a good thing in my book. I approve of creating helpful tools for humans to use, and find arguments about this being risky as inherently revolting and cynical as arguments for backdoors in encryption protocols because "think of the children" or "what about terrorism". Some people are persuaded by Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse [2], others are not, I'm in the latter – hacker and cypherpunk – camp; once, this site was overwhelmingly dominated by it, now it has more people preoccupied with their job security and HR opinion, but it's largely an issue of philosophical disagreement, so there's not much more to say about it.
Alignment as a political project is about limiting AIs in ways that rule out certain behaviors even despite user's wishes. This is as bad as a text processor that only accepts certain strings (e.g. won't register "Xinnie the Pooh"; somehow we need to point at foreign excesses to make the absurdity clear). A more ambitious Alignment project, with the discussion of "pivotal acts" and such, is as I've said, a dream of moral busybodies about unifying humanity under some common ideological doctrine; and proponents of this one are understandably stressed about proliferation and democratization of AI tech. If they let it slip now, if the Singleton becomes impossible and the multipolar outcome is locked in, they will fail at their intention to essentially compel the human race to do their bidding. I can't not wish them to fail, the way all totalizing philosophical movements to date have failed. We don't need Utopias, we don't need even the most thoughtful fascist regime. We never needed Plato's Republic, and these guys aren't better than Plato.
But of course this, too, is a matter of personal philosophy.
Alignment as a political project is about limiting AIs in ways that rule out certain behaviors even despite user's wishes. This is as bad as a text processor that only accepts certain strings (e.g. won't register "Xinnie the Pooh"; somehow we need to point at foreign excesses to make the absurdity clear). A more ambitious Alignment project, with the discussion of "pivotal acts" and such, is as I've said, a dream of moral busybodies about unifying humanity under some common ideological doctrine; and proponents of this one are understandably stressed about proliferation and democratization of AI tech. If they let it slip now, if the Singleton becomes impossible and the multipolar outcome is locked in, they will fail at their intention to essentially compel the human race to do their bidding. I can't not wish them to fail, the way all totalizing philosophical movements to date have failed. We don't need Utopias, we don't need even the most thoughtful fascist regime. We never needed Plato's Republic, and these guys aren't better than Plato.
But of course this, too, is a matter of personal philosophy.
1. https://twitter.com/feross/status/1641548124366987264
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...