What do we want to achieve?

Engaging in a discussion around if AI generated images should be allowed to be used in news media, or if grades should be introduced earlier in school, both become very hard unless you’ve first agreed what you want to achieve with news media and school. As a society we need to create ways of working that enables us to better align what we want to achieve. The importance of this will accelerate with the growth of AI, since if we are not clear about what we want to achieve, what will we tell AI to do?

When reading news, when observing debates, when participating in discussions, the question top of mind for me is always “What do we want to achieve?”.

A recent example: A discussion around if AI generated images should be allowed to be used in news media. Great topic of discussion, but very hard unless we first discuss, and hopefully agree on what we want to achieve with news media. Unless we agree on that, it will probably be very hard to agree on if AI generated images should be allowed.

Another recent example: Should we introduce grades earlier in school? Again, it depends on what we want to achieve with school. Reading through page after page about the goals with school it’s still unclear to me. As such, we would probably benefit from taking a renewed discussion about what we want to achieve before we are ready to discuss when and where grades should be used.

When people perceive the world to move faster, when complexity grows, when tensions increases, my observation is that we try to jump fast to solutions. That sometimes work, but my guess is that we would benefit from spending more energy first discussing and aligning what we want to achieve.

The rapid development of AI is what I believe will force more of these discussions. The so called AI alignment problem, where the challenge is to align what we want to achieve with what AI wants to achieve, is probably one of the biggest challenges we will face over the coming century. If you want more context about the challenge I can recommend reading the book called The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian.

There are several challenges I observe with regards to defining what we want to achieve:

We don’t invest time in it - As mentioned already, we often jump to solutions without investing proper time in defining what we want to achieve specific enough, especially for a computer to understand.

We don’t agree - Even if we invest time in defining values, we will probably often find ourselves disagreeing. It may be due to political beliefs, religion, culture, history, experiences, biases etc. Aligning values is very difficult, but very important.

We debate instead of empathize - Many people are not amazing at first seeking to understand before seeking to get understood. We go into debate clinches instead of empathizing with each other. This makes understanding each others values very hard.

Values change - We develop as human beings, and what was considered okay a hundred years ago may be completely different today.

We don’t live in-line with our expressed values - This is a very hard one. A person may express a value and be quite passionate about it, but then still not live consistently in-line with that value. One example is that they may express the importance of reducing biases in society, but then still not invest the energy in doing so. Self awareness gaps is one of the most challenging things to discuss and coach.

So how can we go about exploring what we want to achieve? There are many ways, here are some thoughts:

Invest time in self-reflection - It may be hard to engage whole heartedly in a discussion about what you want to achieve with for example school education unless you’ve thought through for yourself first what you want to achieve.

Research - Explore what other people are saying about the topic around the world in terms of what they want to achieve. Internet has made it rather easy to do the research.

Discuss - Enter discussions with others about what you want to achieve so that you increase the probability of aligning amongst you.

Propose - Once you have a collecting understanding of what you want to achieve, recommend for it to become a commonly adopted goal/value. For example, regarding school education, you can recommend for the official goal of school education to be simplified and updated with the outcome of a broader societal discussion.

Over time I hope that we will leverage digital technology to better harness every person’s perspective on what we want to achieve and what values to strive for so we get a more diverse and democratized perspective on it.

So, if you write about something, engage in a debate, or work for something, ensure that you and everyone else who participates have made it clear what you want to achieve, and ideally that you have aligned that amongst yourselves. Otherwise it’s going to get increasingly challenging down the line.

Thank you 🙏