alignment

Premature of our current climate politically & technologically, the poet Robert Frost wrote this haunting line:

Society can never think things out:
It has to see them
acted out by actors
Devoted actors at a sacrifice.

After writing about & following the peaks and (many) troughs of culture the past decade, this truth resounds.

Postman always mused that “the inventor of a technology is the least equipped to predict its impacts,” and Frost gives the reason why— innovation isn’t intuitive, it’s in a hurry. The fastest way to see if a technology works is to release it. So too is the fastest way to become trapped in the externalities of your premature proposition.

America is an empire built on the assumption that things have to be acted out. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (for those white, male, and close to the center of the bell curve) have to be actualized to test their mettle. War and death were a necessary evil we can justify in hindsight because of the technology of liberty that just had to be implemented. All the philosophizing & eloquence in their musing failed to reach the proper method that work like MLK or Mandela’s were able to find.

We sit as the complicit inheritors of this kind of recklessness, building a system of prosperity and production on the idea that we needn’t consider second order effects for long (or in equal proportion to the first order “gains” of invention). As companies race to align large language models to society, we fail to rightly adjudicate whether society is aligned to virtue.

This question, are we aligned with the virtues we want to see in society, should be at the heart of the alignment project.