“How do parts form a whole?”
The goal? Unblock alignment on all scales.
Consider coordination in these four domains:
How do groups of humans make a decision?
How do parallel predictions in the mind decide what to do?
How do multiple biological cells act as one organism?
How do parts of AI systems work together?
All of these systems have similar structure:
Decentralized information integrating.
Parts forming a whole.
This is what I think alignment is: the cooperation of smaller parts to build bigger agents.
This unifies my two primary interests in the last 2y: AI alignment and Human alignment. Because Human alignment ⇔ AI alignment ⇔ Alignment.
The goal? Unblock alignment on all scales.
A recursive process of parts forming ever larger wholes:
How does it work?
Thanks to Alex Zhu, Adam Goldstein, Ivan Vendrov, Xiq, and Stag Lynn for conversations.
Terms discussed in this post: superagent, subagents, collective intelligence, hivemind, feeling like part of a greater whole, community feeling; boundaries, autonomy, causal distance; scale-free alignment, multi-scale alignment.
Further Reading
Hierarchical Agency: A Missing Piece in AI Alignment by Jan_Kulvet
Towards a scale-free theory of intelligent agency by Richard Ngo
Michael Levin, e.g.: Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME) framework:
See all posts tagged “AI” on this blog, especially:
Alignment First, Intelligence Later: A Teleological Turn in AI
Now that Softmax—my favorite new AI company—is public, I can finally share this. They’ve funded my research and I’m very excited about what they’re doing!
Let me know additional resources in the comments.
I really dig this question... It has been, in one form or another, something very close to my heart / soul as well over the years. My hunch is that whatever "force" (causal mechanism??) exists that performs that alignment, we (humans) still do not understand it well enough to bridge the gap between our understanding of physics and what we perceive as "natural behavior" of much more complex systems. The physical force I have probably the most experience with is gravity. It occurs naturally to me that (without effort or intention of mine), I simply "am" glued to this planet. As a template (for my patterning my experience), I also feel a similar process is going on when I "align" with a group (process). There seems to be a "center of gravity" towards which I (and other people) hurtle. But there are also noticeable differences: some people seem to be exerting much more "pull" than others (and some even exert a "push" away from them), so it is maybe a bit more like magnetism, where people have different poles (and field strengths). My hunch is that the navigation and negotiation processes on all levels share important similarities, and that if I can well enough characterize them, I will be less and less surprised by the "causal effects" I observe over time, in my own alignment outcomes, and the alignment of other parts of reality as well.
Jordan Peterson has an interesting concept of "nested frames" that's similar. It's not specifically applied to groups, but it's more about how individuals break down their own lives into atomic units that exist within nested frames, and that this structure defines our motivations and actions. The relationship of these units to each other is very similar to the Michael Levin diagram you linked to.
Few images / diagrams that display the idea better:
- https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Biblical-6-4.jpeg
- https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1200/1*M4O1buLzwRmakeiHtvrsow.png
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jordan-Peterson-9/publication/242914013/figure/fig4/AS:669463842156556@1536624026817/b-Emergence-of-between-determinate-world-complexity.png