To some extent, I think it's easy to pooh-pooh finding a flapping wing design (not maximally flappy, merely way better than the best birds) when you're not proposing a specific design for building a flying machine that can go to space. Not in the tone of "how dare you not talk about specifics," but more like "I bet this chemical propulsion direction would have to look more like birds when you get down to brass tacks."
James Mickens is writing comedy. He worked in distributed systems. A "distributed system" is another way to say "a scenario in which you absolutely will have to use software to deal with your broken hardware". I can 100% guarantee that this was written with his tongue in his cheek.
The modern world is built on software that works around HW failures.
I agree that the SW/HW analogy is not a good analogy for AGI safety (I think security is actually a better analogy), but I would like to present a defence of the idea that normal systems reliability engineering is not enough for alignment (this is not necessarily a defence of any of the analogies/claims in the OP).
Systems safety engineering leans heavily on the idea that failures happen randomly and (mostly) independently, so that enough failures happening together by coincidence to break the guarantees of the system is rare. That is:
Section 1, section 10, and section 11 cover the scenario of R&D automation via AI/ML systems that drive more productive R&D automation, resulting in a positive feedback loop, without requiring the typical "self-improving agent" -- it's the R&D system (people + AI/ML products) as a whole that is self-improving, not the individual AI/ML systems.
I highly recommend reading the entire report though. It was released in 2019 and I think it was brushed aside a little bit too easily. The past 3 years have (in my mind) provided sufficient evidence of thi...
I wasn't intending for a metaphor of "biomimicry" vs "modernist".
(Claim 1) Wings can't work in space because there's no air. The lack of air is a fundamental reason for why no wing design, no matter how clever it is, will ever solve space travel.
If TurnTrout is right, then the equivalent statement is something like (Claim 2) "reward functions can't solve alignment because alignment isn't maximizing a mathematical function."
The difference between Claim 1 and Claim 2 is that we have a proof of Claim 1, and therefore don't bother debating it anymore, wh... (read more)