Quick question: Do you want artificial intelligence to be so well trained that it could help husbands (or wives, for that matter) plan the perfect murder of their spouses?
Just as a gut reaction, it seems to me like no. I wouldn’t even think it was a particularly difficult question.
But America contains many different perspectives, and such a perspective shared by Comma AI founder and longtime jailbreaker George Hotz over the weekend.
The post comes in response to a slew of big-picture AI alignment plans, most recently the AI 2040: Plan A policy paper from the AI Futures Project. This paper envisions a world in which the world’s researchers collectively choose to slow down the development of artificial intelligence for 14 years for the good of humanity. But of course, not everyone who reads the paper agrees with its assumptions or conclusions.
In fact, Hotz disagrees with the whole premise that AI progress should be managed for the collective good. In his post, he argues that the rapid takeoff scenario — the hypothetical one where AI quickly acquires superhuman abilities — doesn’t make much sense. (I agree with much of what he says here!) For Hotz, the best approach to AI alignment and security is to focus on locally controlled AI models that are closely aligned with the interests of their users.
This is a nice idea, especially since it reminds me of how much of current AI is built around centralized management services like Claude and ChatGPT. There are infrastructure-related reasons why AI services have developed this way: It’s expensive to host these large, state-of-the-art models, and most people don’t use them enough throughout the day to justify truly personal AI. But these factors become less important as technology develops. Part of what was so exciting about OpenClaw was this experimental, DIY approach, and it would be great to see more AI products try to replicate that.
But Hotch is a provocateur by nature, so he doesn’t stop there. It compares the user-aligned AI to a gun(!), which doesn’t complain if you use it to kill your stepmom. (I feel like there are other rules against that?) A truly aligned AI could order meth lab equipment from Amazon Prime and show you how to use it if that’s what you wanted and asked for, he says. (Again, I don’t think AI would be the limiting factor here.) Hotz even says he would die to defend this principle, though it’s hard to imagine the sequence of events that would lead to that.
“Either we live in a world with freedom or not,” Hotz writes. If these are the options, the world of freedom sounds better! Still, I don’t know.
It’s not all about freedom, is it? Any structure involving many people (societies, markets, corporations, etc.) requires balancing of stocks, binding individual needs into a network of interdependent preferences and systems of accountability. And anyone developing mass-market tech products should probably think about this network as a whole, which means taking seriously the interests of the world’s still-unattached spouses and stepparents.
The freedom Hotz experiences is really a space of possible futures made possible by collective enterprise. those futures would disappear overnight if we all started behaving like little napoleons powered by artificial intelligence. As the meme says, we live in a society.
Having a local AI willing to take over the corporate world for my benefit sounds cool though! Looking forward to a review section.
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