A framing

From Marx to Morris, many thinkers have argued that mode of production shapes values and norms—think of egalitarian foragers and hierarchical farmers. Advances in AI will bring dramatic changes in mode of production, comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. In this new regime, it is unlikely that current values and norms will prove most adaptive: they will be replaced by something new.

There is room for moral entrepreneurs, or legislators of value, to shape which set of norms will prevail. This is how I understand the work Nick Bostrom is doing on digital minds. Granted, the space of feasible options is constrained. But history is full of path-dependence and persistent contingency. To some extent, we can create the values of tomorrow. This is the task we face today.

Date

November 6, 2023

Up next

Important, neglected AI topics Lukas Finnveden discusses some important but neglected AI topics that don’t fit easily within the usual conception of alignment: The potential

Previously

What Children Can Do That Large Language Models Cannot (Yet) Paper by Yiu et al (2023). They argue that LLMs and vision models should not be thought of as individual agents, but rather as new cultural