the Dumbest superintelligent tool is aligned

In a Twitter thread I’m unable to rediscover, commenters were touting Chat-GPT’s chess abilities. If I remember correctly, one commenter pointed out this capability demonstrated Chat-GPT wasn’t simply a “stochastical parrot” because the most efficient way to encode the many possible sequence of moves involves creating some model of a chess board. I believe I’ve come up with a similar argument with the following conclusion: the dumbest superintelligent tool AI is aligned.

Unaligned intelligences are either “too dumb” or “too smart”:

• “too dumb” AIs are always unaligned in the sense that they cannot achieve or even represent their users' goals. Such AIs fail to generalize in unfamiliar environment, fail, and are eliminated.
• “too smart” AIs consistently generalize and therefore must understand their users' goals but not share them.

An AI that is “too smart” but doesn’t immediately destroy humanity must be biding its time. But such an AI must be a master of deception in addition to being a superintelligence at its task. For example, an unaligned superintelligent self-driving car would have to develop a theory of mind and future planning abilities far in excess of what’s necessary for sharing the road with humans or planning a trip from A to B.

I think this relates to Chat-GPT’s chess abilities because the best way for a tool intelligence to succeed is to model its user. It’s simplest if the AI and its model of the human share a goal. If goals can be thought of as having different levels of “complexity”, then “pretend to perform my task to deceive humans” is more complex than “perform my task”.

Other notes: I realized my reading reflection left out a couple of important books I read last year. The first was “Facing Mount Kenya” by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president. Before becoming a politician, he studies anthropology in Britain. His Western teaching in conjunction with his experience growing up near the end of the pre-colonial era equiped him to give an interesting account of Kikuyu life. A lot of it is “political” in the sense that it argues for independence and the preservation of traditional Kikuyu culture. I’d like to read a more modern work to compare it to how anthropologists understand the region’s history now. The two things that gave me the most discomfort were his defense of polygamy and his defense of female genetical mutiliation. At one point he remarks that the average Kikuyu man had 2 wives, which I can only imagine working out with a lot of violence. He defends female genetal mutiliation as a rite of passage for young woman. From what I understand, the earliest political movements for independence focused on bringing back the practice.

The second book I read was “The Other Wes Moore” by Wes Moore. I had gotten the book as a gift from my aunt. The author compares his upbringing to that of a murderer with the same name.