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The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To Do About It — LessWrong

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A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is". Over the past few years, a major source of my relative optimism on AI has been the hope that the field of alignment would transition from pre-paradigmatic to paradigmatic, and make much more rapid progress. At this point, that hope is basically dead. There has been some degree of paradigm formation, but the memetic competition has mostly been won by streetlighting: the large majority of AI Safety researchers and activists are focused on searching for their metaphorical keys under the streetlight. The memetically-successful strategy in the field is to tackle problems which are ea

x The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To Do About It — LessWrong Best of LessWrong 2024 AI Alignment Fieldbuilding AI Frontpage 334 The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To Do About It by johnswentworth 26th Dec 2024 9 min read 176 334 A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks wh

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