Do you have the intuition that absent further technological development, human values would drift arbitrarily far? It’s not clear to me that they would—in that sense, I do feel like we’re “losing control” in that even non-extinction AI is enabling a new set of possibilities that modern-day humans would endorse much less than the decisions of future humans otherwise. (It does also feel like we’re missing the opportunity to “take control” and enable a new set of possibilities that we would endorse much more.)
Relatedly, it doesn’t feel to me like the values of humans 150,000 years ago and humans now and even ems in Age of Em are all that different on some more absolute scale.
Do you have the intuition that absent further technological development, human values would drift arbitrarily far?
Certainly not arbitrarily far. I also think that technological development (esp. the emergence of agriculture and modern industry) has played a much larger role in changing the world over time than random value drift has.
[E]ven non-extinction AI is enabling a new set of possibilities that modern-day humans would endorse much less than the decisions of future humans otherwise.
I definitely think that’s true. But I also think that was true of agriculture, relative to the values of hunter-gatherer societies.
To be clear, I’m not downplaying the likelihood or potential importance of any of the three crisper concerns I listed. For example, I think that AI progress could conceivably lead to a future that is super alienating and bad.
I’m just (a) somewhat pedantically arguing that we shouldn’t frame the concerns as being about a “loss of control over the future” and (b) suggesting that you can rationally have all these same concerns even if you come to believe that technical alignment issues aren’t actually a big deal.
FWIW, I wouldn’t say I agree with the main thesis of that post.
However, while I expect machines that outcompete humans for jobs, I don’t see how that greatly increases the problem of value drift. Human cultural plasticity already ensures that humans are capable of expressing a very wide range of values. I see no obviously limits there. Genetic engineering will allow more changes to humans. Ems inherit human plasticity, and may add even more via direct brain modifications.
In principle, non-em-based artificial intelligence is capable of expressing the entire space of possible values. But in practice, in the shorter run, such AIs will take on social roles near humans, and roles that humans once occupied....
I don’t see why people concerned with value drift should be especially focused on AI. Yes, AI may accompany faster change, and faster change can make value drift worse for people with intermediate discount rates. (Though it seems to me that altruistic discount rates should scale with actual rates of change, not with arbitrary external clocks.)
I definitely think that human biology creates at least very strong biases toward certain values (if not hard constraints) and that AI system would not need to have these same biases. If you’re worried about future agents having super different and bad values, then AI is a natural focal point for your worry.
A couple other possible clarifications about my views here:
I think that the outcome of the AI Revolution could be much worse, relative to our current values, than the Neolithic Revolution was relative to the values of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But I think the question “Will the outcome be worse?” is distinct from the question “Will we have less freedom to choose the outcome?”
I’m personally not so focused on value drift as a driver of long-run social change. For example, the changes associated with the Neolithic Revolution weren’t really driven by people becoming less egalitarian, more pro-slavery, more inclined to hold certain religious beliefs, more ideologically attached to sedentism/farming, more happy to accept risks from disease, etc. There were value changes, but, to some significant degree, they seem to have been downstream of technological/economic change.
Really appreciate the clarifications! I think I was interpreting “humanity loses control of the future” in a weirdly temporally narrow sense that makes it all about outcomes, i.e. where “humanity” refers to present-day humans, rather than humans at any given time period. I totally agree that future humans may have less freedom to choose the outcome in a way that’s not a consequence of alignment issues.
I also agree value drift hasn’t historically driven long-run social change, though I kind of do think it will going forward, as humanity has more power to shape its environment at will.
I also agree value drift hasn’t historically driven long-run social change
My impression is that the differences in historical vegetarianism rates between India and China, and especially India and southern China (where there is greater similarity of climate and crops used), is a moderate counterpoint. At the timescale of centuries, vegetarianism rates in India are much higher than rates in China. Since factory farming is plausibly one of the larger sources of human-caused suffering today, the differences aren’t exactly a rounding error.
I do agree that quasi-random variation in culture can be really important. And I agree that this variation is sometimes pretty sticky (e.g. Europe being predominantly Christian and the Middle East being predominantly Muslim for more than a thousand years). I wouldn’t say that this kind of variation is a “rounding error.”
Over sufficiently long timespans, though, I think that technological/economic change has been more significant.
As an attempt to operationalize this claim: The average human society in 1000AD was obviously very different than the average human society in 10,000BC. I think that the difference would have been less than half as large (at least in intuitive terms) if there hadn’t been technological/economic change.
I think that the pool of available technology creates biases in the sorts of societies that emerge and stick around. For large enough amounts of technological change, and long enough timespans (long enough for selection pressures to really matter), I think that shifts in these technological biases will explain a large portion of the shifts we see in the traits of the average society.[1]
Do you have the intuition that absent further technological development, human values would drift arbitrarily far? It’s not clear to me that they would—in that sense, I do feel like we’re “losing control” in that even non-extinction AI is enabling a new set of possibilities that modern-day humans would endorse much less than the decisions of future humans otherwise. (It does also feel like we’re missing the opportunity to “take control” and enable a new set of possibilities that we would endorse much more.)
Relatedly, it doesn’t feel to me like the values of humans 150,000 years ago and humans now and even ems in Age of Em are all that different on some more absolute scale.
Certainly not arbitrarily far. I also think that technological development (esp. the emergence of agriculture and modern industry) has played a much larger role in changing the world over time than random value drift has.
I definitely think that’s true. But I also think that was true of agriculture, relative to the values of hunter-gatherer societies.
To be clear, I’m not downplaying the likelihood or potential importance of any of the three crisper concerns I listed. For example, I think that AI progress could conceivably lead to a future that is super alienating and bad.
I’m just (a) somewhat pedantically arguing that we shouldn’t frame the concerns as being about a “loss of control over the future” and (b) suggesting that you can rationally have all these same concerns even if you come to believe that technical alignment issues aren’t actually a big deal.
Wow, I just learned that Robin Hanson has written about this, because obviously, and he agrees with you.
And Paul Christiano agrees with me. Truly, time makes fools of us all.
FWIW, I wouldn’t say I agree with the main thesis of that post.
I definitely think that human biology creates at least very strong biases toward certain values (if not hard constraints) and that AI system would not need to have these same biases. If you’re worried about future agents having super different and bad values, then AI is a natural focal point for your worry.
A couple other possible clarifications about my views here:
I think that the outcome of the AI Revolution could be much worse, relative to our current values, than the Neolithic Revolution was relative to the values of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But I think the question “Will the outcome be worse?” is distinct from the question “Will we have less freedom to choose the outcome?”
I’m personally not so focused on value drift as a driver of long-run social change. For example, the changes associated with the Neolithic Revolution weren’t really driven by people becoming less egalitarian, more pro-slavery, more inclined to hold certain religious beliefs, more ideologically attached to sedentism/farming, more happy to accept risks from disease, etc. There were value changes, but, to some significant degree, they seem to have been downstream of technological/economic change.
Really appreciate the clarifications! I think I was interpreting “humanity loses control of the future” in a weirdly temporally narrow sense that makes it all about outcomes, i.e. where “humanity” refers to present-day humans, rather than humans at any given time period. I totally agree that future humans may have less freedom to choose the outcome in a way that’s not a consequence of alignment issues.
I also agree value drift hasn’t historically driven long-run social change, though I kind of do think it will going forward, as humanity has more power to shape its environment at will.
My impression is that the differences in historical vegetarianism rates between India and China, and especially India and southern China (where there is greater similarity of climate and crops used), is a moderate counterpoint. At the timescale of centuries, vegetarianism rates in India are much higher than rates in China. Since factory farming is plausibly one of the larger sources of human-caused suffering today, the differences aren’t exactly a rounding error.
That’s a good example.
I do agree that quasi-random variation in culture can be really important. And I agree that this variation is sometimes pretty sticky (e.g. Europe being predominantly Christian and the Middle East being predominantly Muslim for more than a thousand years). I wouldn’t say that this kind of variation is a “rounding error.”
Over sufficiently long timespans, though, I think that technological/economic change has been more significant.
As an attempt to operationalize this claim: The average human society in 1000AD was obviously very different than the average human society in 10,000BC. I think that the difference would have been less than half as large (at least in intuitive terms) if there hadn’t been technological/economic change.
I think that the pool of available technology creates biases in the sorts of societies that emerge and stick around. For large enough amounts of technological change, and long enough timespans (long enough for selection pressures to really matter), I think that shifts in these technological biases will explain a large portion of the shifts we see in the traits of the average society.[1]
If selection pressures become a lot weaker in the future, though, then random drift might become more important in relative terms.