The Alignment Problem

The world is combinatorially weird and fractally interesting. And therefore, omnivorous curiosity is the only proper response. ... let’s optimize instead for the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.

In a series of experiments begun in the 1980s, Schultz and his colleagues showed that when monkeys first get something pleasant—in this case, fruit juice—their dopamine neurons fire most intensely when they drink the liquid. But once they learn that a cue like a light or a sound predicts the delivery of delicious stuff, the neurons fire when the cu... See more