The Human Values Problem: Why is No One Solving the Root Cause of AI Risk at Scale?
PREFACE Hi! I'm new to this forum. I spent the last few days skimming through the recommended initial posts and reading through the discussions I'm most interested in. I may not have fully understood the etiquette here yet, so please tell me if I'm doing something wrong and how I should be doing it instead. I'm posting because I believe the human values problem is the most important and most ignored man-made problem in the world right now. I start with definitions so that the argument that follows is built on terms we're all using the same way. My two main goals for this discussion are: 1. To find out if the way I framed the problem is correct. 2. To hear what you think is the most direct and safest path to solving it. This is a long essay. I'd rather you find a flaw in my logic than agree with something that turns out to be wrong. I came here specifically because I believe this community has the combination of rationality, AI knowledge, and intellectual honesty needed to find where my arguments break. I'm not an AI expert. Where I make claims about how AI systems work, I've tried to signal that clearly with "I believe." If those claims are wrong, I'd rather fully understand why now than build on a flawed foundation. DEFINITION OF TERMS Many discussions fail because people use the same words to mean different things. Here is exactly how I define each of them. A system is a setup that makes an action happen automatically, without needing to remember. An automation is a system. A reminder is a system. A checklist is a system. A family is a system. A school is a system. A workplace is a system. A government is a system. A human contains a group of systems too, built by every system that shaped them. I believe AI and AGI, like humans, contain systems shaped by what they're trained on rather than by lived experience. For human systems, the mechanism is rewards and punishments. If you want to change people's behavior from bad to good, change the system to re