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(No this is not a post about commercialization of AI)

It occurred to me today that there is an interesting parallel between AI and capitalism. They're both tools that can be used to accomplish things very effectively. And they both have "alignment" issues.

Capitalism provides incentives and a free market, and that can result in extremely efficient action because people are trying to maximize profit. However, left unchecked, this can produce all kinds of negative externalities which are not really what we want. This is the alignment issue - we need to be diligent in "aligning" capitalism so that it incentivizes and produces outcomes that are actually what we want. Primarily governments do this with the use of taxes and subsidies - make bad behaviour (produces negative externalities) more expensive, and make good behaviour (produces positive externalities) less expensive. In my view, this is the primary function of a government (at least in a capitalist society). However, I think most people would agree we haven't yet perfected this part of things, and we still suffer from all kinds of negative externalities.

AI/AGI is very similar - it can produce extremely efficient action, but suffers from an alignment problem in that what it does may not be exactly what we want it to do. Lots has already been written about the AI alignment problem.

My main point here is that we, as a society, haven't even figured out how to align capitalism reliably. Which makes me a bit worried about how we're going to handle AGI. We should probably think hard about why we haven't been able to align capitalism perfectly (e.g. maybe because not all subsets of people want the same thing?) and see if those reasons carry over to AGI as well.

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