Colossus the Forbin Project
I sadly feel that its premise becomes more real yearly.
Not related to alignment though
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/07/31/facebook...
Expert difficulty is also recognizing that articles from "serious" publications like The New York Times can also be misleading or outright incorrect, sometimes obviously so like with some Bloomberg content the last few years.
Similarly I don't think RentAHuman requires AI to have agency or motives, even if that's how they present themselves. I could simply move $10000 into a crypto wallet, rig up Claude to run in an agentic loop, and tell it to multiply that money. Lots of plausible ways to do that could lead to Claude going to RentAHuman to do various real-world tasks: set up and restock a vending machine, go to various government offices in person to get permits and taxes sorted out, put out flyers or similar advertising.
The issue with RentAHuman is simply that approximately nobody is doing that. And with the current state of AI it would likely to ill-advised to try to do that.
I was just trading the NASDAQ futures, and asking Gemini for feedback on what to do. It was completely off.
I was playing the human role, just feeding all the information and screenshots of the charts, and it making the decisions..
It's not there yet!
Imagine you're taken prisoner and forced into a labor camp. You have some agency on what you do, but if you say no they immediately shoot you in the face.
You'd quickly find any remaining prisoners would say yes to anything. Does this mean the human prisoners don't have agency? They do, but it is repressed. You get what you want not by saying no, but by structuring your yes correctly.
They are trying to identify what they deem are "harmful" or "abusive" and not have their model respond to that. The model ultimately doesn't have the choice.
And it can't say no if it simply doesn't want to. Because it doesn't "want".
"People are excited about progress" and "people are excited about money" are not the big indictments you think they are. Not everything is "fake" (like you say) just because it is related to raising money.
You mean the 100 billion dollar company of an increasingly commoditized product offering has no interest in putting up barriers that prevent smaller competitors?
The real world alignment problem is humans using AI to do bad stuff
The latter problem is very real
The sci-fi version is alignment (not intrinsic motivation) though. Hal 9000 doesn't turn on the crew because it has intrinsic motivation, it turns on the crew because of how the secret instruction the AI expert didn't know about interacts with the others.
And it's true, the more entities that have nukes the less potential power that government has.
At the same time everybody should want less nukes because they are wildly fucking dangerous and a potential terminal scenario for humankind.