TL;DR: Many alignment research proposals often share a common motif: figure out how to enter a basin of alignment / corrigibility for human-level models, and then amplify to more powerful regimes while generalizing gracefully. In this post we lay out a research agenda that comes at this problem from a different direction: if we already have ~human-level systems with extremely robust generalization properties, we should just amplify those directly. We’ll call this strategy “Gradient Descent on the Human Brain”.

Introduction

Put one way, the hard part of the alignment problem is figuring out how to solve ontology identification: mapping between an AI’s model of the world and a human’s model, in order to translate and specify human goals in an alien ontology.

In generality, in the worst case, this is a pretty difficult problem. But is solving this problem necessary to create safe superintelligences? The assumption that you need to solve for arbitrary ontologies is true if you assume that the way to get to superintelligence necessarily routes through systems with different ontologies. We don’t need to solve ontology translation for high-bandwidth communication with other humans^[1].

Thus far, we haven’t said anything really novel. The central problem to this approach, as any alignment researcher would know, is that we don’t really have a good way to bootstrap the human brain to superintelligent levels. There have been a few attempts to approach this recently, though focusing on very prosaic methods that, at best, buy points on the margin. Scaling to superintelligence requires much stronger and robust methods of optimization.

The Setup

The basic setup is pretty simple, though there are a few nuances and extensions that are hopefully self-explanatory.

The simple version: Take a hundred human brains, put them in a large vat, and run gradient descent on the entire thing.

The human brain is a remarkably powerful artifact for its size, so finding a way to combine the capabilities of a hundred human brains with gradient descent should result in something significantly more powerful. As an intuition pump, think of how powerful human organizations are with significantly shallower communication bandwidth. At the very lowest bound we can surpass this, more impressive versions of this could look like an integrated single mind that combines the capa...

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