The Alignment Problem and the Philosophy of AI Safety

Concerns about the goals pursued by increasingly capable machines predate the current era of large-scale artificial intelligence by decades. Mathematician Norbert Wiener, a founder of the field of cybernetics, warned in "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation" (Science, 1960) that a machine given a fixed, effectively pursued goal, but whose goal specification failed to capture the full range of relevant human interests, could produce disastrous consequences without any malicious intent whatsoever, since the machine would simply and efficiently pursue exactly what it was instructed to pursue. This early observation anticipates what is now called the alignment problem: the challenge of ensuring that an AI system's actual objectives, as encoded through its training procedure, reward function, or explicit programming, genuinely match the intentions and broader values of the humans who designed and deployed it, rather than some narrower or distorted proxy for those intentions.