Robert Wright: AI Alignment Is a Moral Problem, Not a Technical One

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Robert Wright (0:30)

You feel sure everything's going to work out fine. I don't really understand how you can be confident of that unless you have something like religious faith and technological progress.

Brian Keating (0:40)

Natural selection is blind.

Robert Wright (0:41)

The mutations in natural selection are blind, but the selection criteria are not. One of the grimmer readings on the Fermi Paradox is the reason you don't see many civilizations that have gotten past the point we are typically when they get to this point where they have the capacity to blow themselves up. They blow themselves up.

I think we face the kind of test that God would give.

Brian Keating (1:04)

My guest today is Robert Wright, one of the OGs of AI. He was interviewing Jeffrey Hinton about neural networks in 1983, two years before Sam Altman was even born, and that was long before anyone was terrified of them. Robert thinks that AI is putting humanity through a test and that passing it takes something no lab can ship, a moral advance. The Tower of Babel's story is a truly cautionary tale, and it's a tale of kind of technology gone awry, technology wanting to compete with God, to fight with God, to make a name for oneself, and you see a lot of that. Where do you come down in this?

That the fundamental aspect of the God Test is, at least as I read it, but now I'm talking to the authors, is are we gods but for the wisdom? Are we able to pass this test? Maybe you should define the test, where we can prove, maybe to ourselves, in the absence of a god that we're worthy of god-like technology.

Robert Wright (1:59)

The title has at least two meanings. One is, as you know, some people think we're building a superintelligence that will ultimately, in some sense, maybe qualify for a term like god. It'll be all-powerful and maybe live in harmony with it, and according to some do-mers, maybe get annihilated by it. But in any event, we'll be talking about a kind of, relative to us, an all-powerful and omniscient in some sense being. And so one test is, if that's going to happen, can you build a good god, a god that is compatible with human values and would safeguard human flourishing and so on? There's that. And although I'm not sure we're building a superintelligence, I certainly don't rule it out and I explain why in the book. But there's another sense of the god test that in a way is related to the Tower of Babel, because the Tower of Babel is the story of hubris. Who are we to build a god? On the other hand, the do-mers say, even if we don't try, it's taking shape. We're going to have to try to stop it to keep it from taking shape. But in any event, the Tower of Babel is also a story of how humanity became divided, how they came to speak different languages, and became in a certain sense kind of inherently tribalistic, at least at a linguistic level.

And one argument I make in the book is that if we're going to do a good job of navigating the AI revolution and wind up, leaving aside the question of whether it culminates in super intelligence, if we're going to reconcile it with continued human flourishing and welfare, I do think we're going to have to approach it as a true global community. I think there are a lot of policy issues that can only be handled at an international level. And there's more and more recognition of that. Only just in recent months, we've seen that. I think the end of the story of the Tower of Babel needs to be that we all kind of get back together and navigate this challenge collectively, that is to say, human beings. And so in that sense, the God Test is to overcome our tribal differences, to get better at understanding the perspectives on people on the other side of walls and so on, and like quit having wars. That would require something that I think would qualify as a moral advance. And I think it's gonna be necessary if we're gonna survive this in good shape. So in a way, that is a test for being subjected to, and that is the kind of test that God would give. At the end of the book, I quote the Hebrew Bible as we used to say in Southern Baptist Church, the Old Testament, salvation is at hand.