Brain-computer interfaces and brain organoids in AI alignment?

By freedomandutility @ 2023-04-15T22:28 (+8)

From my understanding, AI alignment is difficult because AI models would struggle to understand human values.

Could progress in technology like brain-computer interfaces that Neuralink works on and brain organoids (essentially human brains grown in a lab) allow us to connect AI models to human brains, which could help them understand human values?

Is anyone working on this as a research direction for AI Alignment?

niplav @ 2023-04-16T10:39 (+2)

I am personally not convinced of their usefulness, Robert Long has an alternative take here.

The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that

  1. Giving unaligned AI systems access to your neural state is bad™, and
  2. "Merging" with AI systems is under-defined.

I'd love to see an actual explanation for how brain-computer interfaces would be useful for alignment.

Additionally, I object to "AI alignment is difficult because AI models would struggle to understand human values". Under my best understanding, AI alignment is about making cognition aimable at all.

InquilineKea @ 2023-09-30T02:39 (+1)

Brain organoids are a way to quickly get functional/morphological significance readouts of intelligence-related genes (or genes related to other functions), so they are useful as a way of studying intelligence.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1148127/full

As a huge, huge moonshot, one could investigate avian brain organoids as an alternative substrate for intelligence (they are way more space-efficient than mammalian brains, and potentially could do way more compute in a small (manageable) volume if appropriately cultured and unbounded...