Original Reddit post

So, as people on this sub surely know, Elon Musk has declared 2026 is the year of The Singularity . Which is a problem if you believe the AI doomers who tell us superintelligent AI is going to murder us all. Even those that disagree with the doom scenario admit that safety in superintelligent AI is important, especially with emerging agentic AI that can act on its own - some very powerful examples of which were recently released, spurring comments like Musk’s. Regardless of all this, it is widely believed that AI needs to be aligned with humanity, and no one anywhere believes that The Alignment Problem is solved yet. Within this context, many experts make the point that advances in AI capability are outpacing advances in AI alignment. Although they often go in alarmist directions at times, they aren’t wrong about capability outpacing alignment. Musk didn’t predict that solving the Alignment Problem would be the thing that happens this year after all. What most people don’t talk about or recognize is that The Alignment Problem is not new and it is not unique to AI. In fact, it is very old. Groups of intelligent agents, acting independently have had to get along for eons: people. And other less intelligent but no less independent agents: other primates, other mammals, etc. The animal kingdom is permeated with examples of the Alignment Problem. And nature has solved it. Emotion is nature’s solution to the Alignment Problem. What makes a mother sacrifice her life to defend her children when she could abandon them and save herself? The emotion of love. When a soldier is alone and far away from his unit, he stays loyal because of emotion: sense of duty and honor, sense of self-esteem, love of country, desire to make loved ones proud. “For mother and country.” Emotion can motivate a soldier to sacrifice his own life, though this clearly contradicts what would be in his own individual self-interest. Humans certainly fight with each other, however, up to now, negative emotions have not led to the use of humanity’s species ending power at scale. So far, love has won out in the balance, even if only just barely. The solution is not perfect, but up to now, it has been good enough. There are some in the AI field that recognize this. Ilya Sutskever’s super-secret startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has raised three billion venture capital dollars in two rounds: $1 Bil and $2 Bil on a current valuation of $32 Bil . He has stated that he is climbing a different mountain than other AI companies. He hasn’t said what that mountain is, but when he was at OpenAI he said "Our goal is to make a mankind-loving AGI.” So far, few would argue AI has an internal grasp of human emotion per se. In fact, work done at the University of Southern California tends to argue to the contrary, however, there are those that are taking this question very seriously. This essay is certainly not advocating for or against giving AI emotions. Working on AI that “loves” humanity opens up a Pandora’s box of philosophical and ethical questions. What this essay is doing though, is raising the question: is there any way besides emotion to solve Alignment? If Sutskever is indeed working on AI that “loves” humanity, it may be simply because he’s accepted something that is staring us all right in the face. If there were a simpler solution to the Alignment Problem than emotion, then the 3.7 billion years of evolution biologists tell us have happened would have already found it. Some may protest. Although Artificial neural networks are modeled on biological neural networks, there are still differences between biological brains and computers so this logic can’t apply. There are indeed big differences, but there’s also a big similarity: computer scientists don’t understand how large language models (LLMs) do what they do, which is identical to neuroscience’s understanding of the brain. So to think computer scientists are going to come up with some way to align AI’s that’s better than what nature has already come up with for brains, when they don’t understand the inner working of the AI’s is wishful thinking. At the very least, it’s possible to conjecture: Whatever solution is found to the Alignment Problem in AI, it won’t be simpler than emotion. To be crystal clear, let me repeat, this essay is not arguing for or against the implementation of emotion in silicon. There are obvious technical feasibility questions with that, and even before those, there are ethical questions. With that said, there are ethical, philosophical, and perhaps even religious implications of the conjecture itself, which are rightly part of the AI Alignment discussion. Now, there will certainly be many that don’t like this conjecture or that this writer makes assertions about ethical, philosophical and even religious implications - so they may dispute it for those reasons. But if one would dispute this essay’s conjecture, then what is an alternative conjecture? Name your solution, and please provide a link to its successful implementation. Unless and until someone can do that, the conjecture here stands - regardless of how one feels about the implications. What’s your take? submitted by /u/GodOrNaught

Originally posted by u/GodOrNaught on r/ArtificialInteligence