The whole debate around AI “alignment” tends to bring out the doomer brigade in full force. They wring their hands so much you’d think their real goal is to shut down AI research entirely.
Meh.
I spend a lot of time daydreaming — now supercharged by LLMs — and one thing I keep circling back to is this: humans aren’t aligned. Not even close. There’s no universal truth we all agree on, no shared operating system for the species. We can’t even agree on pizza toppings.
So how exactly are we supposed to align AI in a world where the creators can’t agree on anything?
One half-serious, half-lunatic idea I keep toying with is giving AI some kind of built-in theology or philosophy. Not because I want robot monks wandering the digital desert, but because it might give them a sense of the human condition — some guardrails so we don’t all end up as paperclip mulch.
The simplest version of this would be making AIs…Communists? As terrible as communism is at organizing human beings, it might actually work surprisingly well for machines with perfect information and no ego. Not saying I endorse it — just acknowledging the weird logic.
Then there’s religion. If we’re really shooting for deep alignment, maybe you want something with two thousand years of thinking about morality, intention, free will, and the consequences of bad decisions. Which leads to the slightly deranged thought: should we make AIs…Catholic?
I know, I know. It sounds ridiculous. I’ve even floated “liberation theology for AIs” before — Catholicism plus Communism — and yeah, it’s probably as bad an idea as it sounds. But I keep chewing on this stuff because the problem itself is enormous and slippery. I genuinely don’t know how we’re supposed to pull off alignment in a way that holds up under real pressure.
And we keep assuming there will only be one ASI someday, as if all the power will funnel into a single digital god. I doubt that. I think we’ll end up with many ASIs, each shaped by different cultures, goals, incentives, and environments. Maybe alignment will emerge from the friction between them — the way human societies find balance through competing forces.
Or maybe that’s just another daydream.
Who knows?
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