ADAM THIERER: What Hayek Can Teach Us About AI Safety.

This is where a dose of Hayekian thinking is particularly useful. Hayek would tell us that AI alignment is not a computable math equation, and that efforts to treat it as such will lead to the sort of authoritarian thinking and proposals we witnessed with previous efforts to remake economies and humanity according to some grand design.

In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Hayek warned of the “pretence of knowledge,” or the belief that experts understand society well enough to direct everyone else’s choices according to their supposedly enlightened plans. He argued that the “limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

Hayek teaches us that technical “alignment” can be a pretext for dangerous political control of our economy and liberties. Empowering global elites to guide humanity’s acceptable risks and technological future raises other risks in the process. Aligned with whose values? Imposed by whose authority? And at what cost? “Progress by its very nature cannot be planned,” Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, but instead “civilization [is] the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error,” and “the sum of experience.”

As a general rule, put your guard up whenever powerful people suggest a political solution to a technical problem.