Note: This essay was published here on EA Forum on Sept 21, 2022. The description of the brain-over-body biases in the EA subculture may or may not apply to the Rationalist subculture in LessWrong. This essay builds upon this essay on the heterogeneity of human value types.

Overview

Most AI alignment research focuses on aligning AI systems with the human brain’s stated or revealed preferences. However, human bodies include dozens of organs, hundreds of cell types, and thousands of adaptations that can be viewed as having evolved, implicit, biological values, preferences, and priorities. Evolutionary biology and evolutionary medicine routinely analyze our bodies’ biological goals, fitness interests, and homeostatic mechanisms in terms of how they promote survival and reproduction. However the Effective Altruism movement includes some ‘brain-over-body biases’ that often make our brains’ values more salient than our bodies’ values. This can lead to some distortions, blind spots, and failure modes in thinking about AI alignment. In this essay I’ll explore how AI alignment might benefit from thinking more explicitly and carefully about how to model our embodied values.

Context: A bottom-up approach to the diversity of human values worth aligning with

This essay is one in a series that tries to develop an approach to AI alignment that’s more empirically grounded in psychology, medicine, and other behavioral and biological sciences. Typical AI alignment research takes a rather top-down, abstract, domain-general approach to modeling the human values that AI systems are supposed to align with. This often combines consequentialist moral philosophy as a normative framework, machine learning as a technical framework, and rational choice theory as a descriptive framework. In this top-down approach, we don’t really have to worry about the origins, nature, mechanisms, or adaptive functions of any specific values.

My approach is more bottom-up, concrete, and domain-specific. I think we can’t solve the problem of aligning AI systems with human values unless we have a very fine-grained, nitty-gritty, psychologically realistic description of the whole range and depth of human values we’re trying to align with. Even if the top-down approach seems to work, and we think we’ve solved the general problem of AI alignment for any possible human values, we can’t be ...

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