Mad Max: Fury Road is a great movie. I was thinking of it again today in relation to our current economy.
Westworld is a science-fiction film (1973) and TV series (2016-2022) that is based on the premise of a theme-park populated by AI robots role-playing the setting of the American “West”.
The term AI Alignment, like many new concepts associated with AI, is very broad and fuzzy. It means something like the techniques and processes to ensure that a LLM is aligned with human interests. It is usually discussed within the context of AI Safety, which can mean anything ranging from “content moderating LLM outputs” to “let’s not develop an AGI that takes over the planet and enslaves us.”
In 1967, Roland Barthes published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”. The essay was a key reference point in the structuralist and post-structuralist movements and called for the abandoning of the idea of the ‘author’ as the focal point for meaning when interpreting a text. According to structuralist theories of language, meaning arises through a variety of factors (grammar, culture, history, etc.). Seeing the meaning of the work as the product of a single mind (the ‘author’) misses this diversity of perspectives at the heart of language.