Dwarkesh

How dangerous is that?

How do we make that less dangerous?

And how do we do that in a way that protects a equilibrium where there might be misaligned AIs out there and bad actors out there?

I wonder if the fact that emotions, which were...

developed millions, or in many cases, billions of years ago in a totally different environment, are still guiding our actions so strongly is an example of alignment success.

To maybe spell out what I mean, the brainstem has these

I don't know if it's more accurate to call it a value function or a reward function, but the brainstem has a directive where it's saying mate with somebody who's more successful.

The cortex is the part that understands what does success mean in the modern context.

But the brainstem is able to align the cortex and say, however you recognize success to be, and I'm not smart enough to understand what that is, you're still going to pursue this directive.

I think there is...

Yeah.

And what's especially impressive is it was a desire that you learned in your lifetime.

It kind of makes sense because your brain is intelligent.

It makes sense why we were able to learn intelligent desires.

But your point is that the desire is maybe this is not your point, but one way to understand it is.

the desire is built into the genome and the genome is not intelligent, right?

But it's able to, you're somehow able to describe this feature that requires, like it's not even clear how you define that feature and you can get it into, you can build it into the genes.

Yeah, although there are examples where, for example, people who are born blind have that area of their cortex adopted by another sense.

And I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if the desires or the reward functions which require visual signal no longer worked.

You know, people who have their different areas of their cortex co-opted.