Alignment is Missing a Causal Account

“The science of aligning general-purpose AI agents is very new and underdeveloped. In fact I’d say that the field is more like psychology than engineering.” Daniel Kokotajlo [1] Alignment is missing a causal account of what leads to suffering and flourishing. In this post I propose one based in psychology. I am coming from an unconventional background compared to most in this community. I was an engineer before becoming a psychotherapist. Every day I use talk therapy to help people restore function and reduce suffering. I’ve noticed that most of the alignment community has technical backgrounds in computer science, mathematics, engineering and physics. The contributors here are incredibly intelligent and capable. The gamble this post is going to make is that the problem of alignment is also a psychology problem, not just a technical one. The applications alignment utilizes are technical (training methods, interpretability tools, evaluations and benchmarks, etc.) but the principles the field is deriving those applications from (Anthropic’s constitution [2] and OpenAI’s Model Spec [3] ) are not technical. The principles are philosophical positions about what a good AI looks like and what matters, written in English. My work is aligning people toward flourishing instead of suffering. In this post I will argue that a causal account of what aligns people is required to sufficiently align AI systems. Despite the advances we have made in the applications, the roadblock is that we s…