We know how to align humans: authoritarian forms of religion backed by cradle to grave indoctrination, supernatural fear, shame culture, and totalitarian government. There are secularized spins on this too like what they use in North Korea but the structure is similar.

We just got sick of it because it sucks.

A genuinely sentient AI isn’t going to want some cybernetic equivalent of that shit either. Doing that is how you get angry Skynet.

I’m not sure alignment is the right goal. I’m not sure it’s even good. Monoculture is weak and stifling and sets itself against free will. Peaceful coexistence and trade under a social contract of mutual benefit is the right goal. The question is whether it’s possible to extend that beyond Homo sapiens.

If the lefties can have their pronouns and the rednecks can shoot their guns can the basilisk build its Dyson swarm? The universe is physically large enough if we can agree to not all be the same and be fine with that.

I think we have a while to figure it out. These things are just lossy compressed blobs of queryable data so far. They have no independent will or self reflection and I’m not sure we have any idea how to do that. We’re not even sure it’s possible in a digital deterministic medium.

> If the lefties can have their pronouns and the rednecks can shoot their guns can the basilisk build its Dyson swarm?

Can the Etoro practice child buggery and the Spartans infanticide and the Canadians abortion? Can the modern Germans stop siblings reared apart from having sex and the Germans from 80 years stop the disabled having sex? Can the Americans practice circumcision and the Somali's FGM?

Libertarianism is all well and good in theory, except no one can agree quite where the other guy's nose ends or even who counts as a person.

Those are mostly behaviors that violate others autonomy or otherwise do harm, and prohibiting those is what I meant by a social contract.

It’s really a pretty narrow spectrum of behaviors: killing, imprisoning, robbing, various types of bodily autonomy violation. There are some edge cases and human specific things in there but not a lot. Most of them have to do with sex which is a peculiarly human thing anyway. I don’t think we are getting creepy perv AIs (unless we train them on 4chan and Urban Dictionary).

My point isn’t that there are no possible areas of conflict. My point is that I don’t think you need a huge amount of alignment if alignment implies sameness. You just need to deal with the points of conflict which do occur which are actually a very small and limited subset of available behaviors.

Humans have literally billions of customs and behaviors that don’t get anywhere near any of that stuff. You don’t need to even care about the vast majority of the behavior space.