🤘ai is not a teenager
daily
AI is not a teenager.
The idea behind this metaphor is that AI alignment is similar to aligning a teenager to social norms.
On the surface, it makes sense. You explain the rules, reinforce adherence and punish deviance. The rules are complex and conditional and often open to interpretation. You want to encourage originality and reflection.
But AI is not a teenager. The metaphor only goes so far.
There are neurological ruts built into our biology. We’ve evolved to understand social norms. We’ve evolved to see the world in certain ways. There might be diversity of social norms and points of view, but it’s diversity underpinned by a very basic predisposition to social interaction.
AI has none of the predispositions humans are born with. It’s trained on human-generated data (for now), but training data is not instinct.
It’s easy to map teenager on to AI and come away less worried - teenagers almost always turn into adults capable of operating in society, so if you carry the metaphor forward, the likelihood of a positive outcome feels high for AI too.
But it’s just a metaphor. And AI can do a lot worse than wreck your car.