(Recently I’ve been using “AI safety” and “AI x-safety” interchangeably when I want to refer to the “overarching” project of making the AI transition go well, but I’m open to being convinced that we should come up with another term for this.)
I’ve been using the term “Safe And Beneficial AGI” (or more casually, “awesome post-AGI utopia”) as the overarching “go well” project, and “AGI safety” as the part where we try to make AGIs that don’t accidentally [i.e. accidentally from the human supervisors’ / programmers’ perspective] kill everyone, and (following common usage according to OP) “Alignment” for “The AGI is trying to do things that the AGI designer had intended for it to be trying to do”.
(I didn’t make up the term “Safe and Beneficial AGI”. I think I got it from Future of Life Institute. Maybe they in turn got it from somewhere else, I dunno.)
Some researchers think that the “correct” design intentions (for an AGI’s motivation) are obvious, and define the word “alignment” accordingly. Three common examples are (1) “I am designing the AGI so that, at any given point in time, it’s trying to do what its human supervisor wants it to be trying to do”—this AGI would be “aligned” to the supervisor’s intentions. (2) “I am designing the AGI so that it shares the values of its human supervisor”—this AGI would be “aligned” to the supervisor. (3) “I am designing the AGI so that it shares the collective values of humanity”—this AGI would be “aligned” to humanity.
I’m avoiding this approach because I think that the “correct” intended AGI motivation is still an open question. For example, maybe it will be possible to build an AGI that really just wants to do a specific, predetermined, narrow task (e.g. design a better solar cell), in a way that doesn’t involve taking over the world etc. Such an AGI would not be “aligned” to anything in particular, except for the original design intention. But I still want to use the term “aligned” when talking about such an AGI.
I’ve been using the term “Safe And Beneficial AGI” (or more casually, “awesome post-AGI utopia”) as the overarching “go well” project, and “AGI safety” as the part where we try to make AGIs that don’t accidentally [i.e. accidentally from the human supervisors’ / programmers’ perspective] kill everyone, and (following common usage according to OP) “Alignment” for “The AGI is trying to do things that the AGI designer had intended for it to be trying to do”.
(I didn’t make up the term “Safe and Beneficial AGI”. I think I got it from Future of Life Institute. Maybe they in turn got it from somewhere else, I dunno.)
(See also: my post Safety ≠ alignment (but they’re close!))
See also a thing I wrote here: