Inspired by Mark Xu's Quick Take on control. 

Some thoughts on the prevalence of alignment over control approaches in AI Safety. 

• "Alignment research" has become loosely synonymous with "AI Safety research". I don't know if any researcher who would state they're identical, but alignment seems to be considered the default AI Safety strategy. This seems problematic, may be causing some mild group-think and discourages people from pursuing non-alignment AI Safety agendas. 
• Prosaic alignment research in the short term results in a better product, and makes investment into AI more lucrative. This shortens timelines and, I claim, increases X-risk. Christiano's work on RLHF^[1] was clearly motivated by AI Safety concerns, but the resulting technique was then used to improve the performance of today's models.^[2] Meanwhile, there are strong arguments that RLHF is insufficient to solve (existential) AI Safety.^[3] [4]
• Better theoretical understanding about how to control an unaligned (or partially aligned) AI facilitates better governance strategies. There is no physical law that means the compute threshold mentioned in SB 1047^[5] would have been appropriate. "Scaling Laws" are purely empirical and may not hold in the long term. 
  In addition, we should anticipate rapid technological change as capabilities companies leverage AI assisted research (and ultimately fully autonomous researchers). If we want laws which can reliably control AI, we need stronger theoretical foundations for our control approaches. 
• Solving alignment is only sufficient for mitigating the majority of harm caused by AI if the AI is aligned to appropriate goals. To me, it appears the community is incredibly trusting in the goodwill of the small group of private individuals who will determine the alignment of an ASI. ^[6]
  My understanding of the position held by both Yudkowsky and Christiano is that AI alignment is a very difficult problem and the probability is high that humanity is completely paperclipped. Outcomes in which a small portion of humanity survive are difficult to achieve^[7] and human controlled dystopia's are better than annihilation^[8].
  I do not believe this is not representative of the views of the majority of humans sharing this planet. Human history shows that many people are willing to risk death to preserve the autonomy of themselves, their nation or cultural group^[9]. Dystopias also carry substantial S-risk for those unlucky enough to live through them, with modern history containing multiple examples of widespread, industrialised torture. 
  Control approaches present an alternative in which we do not have to get it right the first time, may avert a dystopia and do not need to trust a small group of humans to behave morally.
• If control approaches aid governance, alignment research makes contemporary systems more profitable and the majority of AI Safety research is being done at capabilities companies, it shouldn't be surprising that the focus remains on alignment. 

1. ^{^}

   https://openai.com/index/learning-from-human-preferences/

2. ^{^}

   https://openai.com/index/finding-gpt4s-mistakes-with-gpt-4/

3. ^{^}

   An argument for RLHF being problematic is made formally by Ngo, Chan and Minderman (2022).

4. ^{^}

   See also discussion in this comment chain on Cotra's Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover (2022)

5. ^{^}

   models trained using 10²⁶ integer or floating-point operations.

6. ^{^}

   https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DJRe5obJd7kqCkvRr/don-t-leave-your-fingerprints-on-the-future

7. ^{^}

   "all I want is that we have justifiable cause to believe of a pivotally useful AGI 'this will not kill literally everyone'" 
   - Yudkowksy, AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities (2022)

8. ^{^}

   "Sure, maybe. But that’s still better than a paperclip maximizer killing us all." - Christiano on the prospect of dystopian outcomes. 

9. ^{^}

   There is no global polling on this exact question. Consider that people across cultures have proclaimed that they'd prefer death to a life without freedom. See also men who committed suicide rather than face a lifetime of slavery.