Artificial Superintelligence & Why the Alignment Problem Can't Be Solved
An excerpt from the AI and Jewish Mysticism event at Shabtai, the Global Jewish Leadership Society based at Yale University, with Rabbi Simon Jacobson.
The problem with AI alignment is that alignment is impossible when the people doing the alignment are not aligned.
It’s not the algorithms. As many of the scientists realize, it's much more disturbing.
The algorithms are great. The data is the problem. What is the data? It's what humans have said and done. The data of human action is what creates the alignment problem. The data sets create the horrendous bias in AI that have caused many, many people of color, for example, to be arrested based just on data.
If you feed human history into a system that can process it, you get an absolute set of contradictions. All of the problems in alignment, particularly the problems around so-called super-alignment related to the issue of so-called superintelligence, are actually forms of philosophical anthropology that are existentially urgent in tech, policy, global governance and computer science.
AI is confronting us with ourselves.
If your idea of your society and culture is that you are basically okay, and then you put all of your data into AI, guess what you are going to find out?
Humans are not basically okay. We are systematically oppressing certain groups. We are systematically misrepresenting people. We see through the alignment problem that the history of humanity is an elaborate story of gaslighting people who are not in power.
We are a contradictory species, and the hope that we can use computers to iron out our contradictions is actually belied by the beauty of science and philosophy, which, in pursuit of truth, leads us to discovering realities that destroy our Ego’s idea of ourselves.
So the core scientific and policy problems today are actually part of the history of philosophy. If we want to approach those problems, not simply in their current forms but actually place them in a context where we have the hope of resolving them meaningfully, then we have to see a larger picture of the human species.
These are are very serious problems. They require all the smartest people working at the level of the computer science and the algorithms, of course, but they also require people like Rabbi Simon Jacobson and others from traditions who are deeply informed about the fundamental issue and crisis we are facing: What is a human?
This is an excerpt from the AI and Jewish Mysticism event at Shabtai, the Global Jewish Leadership Society based at Yale University with Rabbi Simon Jacobson.
Watch or listen:
to the entire event at this link (about an hour), which I highly recommend.
to my talk (about 15 minutes).
Related Reading
Loncar, S. “Science and Religion: An Origins Story,” ZYGON
BIOS
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. is a Yale-trained philosopher and scholar of religion and science. He is a Fellow at the Gulbenkian Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting scholar at the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning, Boston College. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books and the Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science. The Institute’s current project, Meanings of Life: The New Biology, is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. His book, Philosophy as Religion and Science: From Plato to Posthumanism, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. As a speaker and consultant, he has worked with global leaders and organizations like the United Nations, Trinity Church Wall Street, and Flagship Pioneering.
Rabbi Simon Jacobson is the author of Toward a Meaningful Life ( William Morrow, 2002) that has sold more than 500,000 copies and a world renowned Jewish intellectual and mystic. Through his lectures and writings, he is a mentor to thousands. In 1979, Jacobson began directing a team of scholars that memorized and transcribed entire talks that the Lubavitcher Rebbe OBM gave during the Sabbath and holidays (when writing and tape recording are not permitted under Jewish Law). This team published more than 1,000 of the Rebbe's talks. Jacobson heads The Meaningful Life Center, profiled by The New York Times.