EA - EA’s brain-over-body bias, and the embodied value problem in AI alignment by Geoffrey Miller

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA’s brain-over-body bias, and the embodied value problem in AI alignment, published by Geoffrey Miller on September 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. 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 EA 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 where I'm trying 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 sure we’ve done that until we test it on the whole range of relevant values, and demonstrate alignment success across that test set – not just to the satisfaction of AI safety experts, but to the satisfaction of lawyers, regulators, investors, politicians, religious leaders, anti-AI activists, etc. Previous essays in this series addressed the heterogeneity of value types within individuals (8/16/2022, 12 min read), the heterogeneity of values across individuals (8/8/2022, 3 min read), and the distinctive challenges in aligning with religious values (8/15/2022, 13 min read). This essay addresses the distinctive challenges of aligning with body values – the values implicit in the many complex adaptations that constitute the human body. Future essays may address the distinctive challenges of AI alignment with political values, sexual values, family values, financial values, reputational values, aesthetic values, and other types of human values. The ideas in this essay are still rather messy and half-baked. The flow of ideas could probably be better organized. I look forward to your feedback, criticisms, extensions, and questions, so I can turn this essay into a more coherent and balanced argument. Introduction Should AI alignment research be concerned only with alignment to the human brain’s values, or should it also consider alignment with the human body’s values? AI alignment traditionally focuses on alignment with human values as carried in human brains, and as revealed by our stated and revealed preferences. But human bodies also embody evolved, adaptive,...