Yes, a nice intro to where the heck all this AI alignment stuff came from. But also an interesting look at how accelerated progress at-scale quickly gets entangled with sociocultural dynamics.

More generally, one touchstone I’ll be referring to throughout this sequence is the idea that scientific progress proceeds by developing insightful new concepts, which link together to form a whole new ontology that replaces the previous ontology. Kuhn, Feyerabend, Koestler, Chang and various other philosophers of science have described a range of past breakthroughs which fit this pattern. Importantly, this view of science isn’t prescriptive about how to develop new concepts—it can be done via naturalist, experimental, mathematical, philosophical, or even mystical thinking.

What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment — LessWrong ↗