This is the second of three posts (part I) about surveying moral sentiments related to AI alignment. This work was done by Marius Hobbhahn and Eric Landgrebe under the supervision of Beth Barnes as part of the AI safety camp 2022.

TL;DR: We find that the results of our first study, i.e. that humans tend to agree with conflict resolution mechanisms hold under different wordings but are weakened in adversarial scenarios (where we actively try to elicit less agreement). Furthermore, we find that people tend to agree much less with a mechanism when the decision-maker is a smart benevolent AI rather than a smart benevolent human. A positive interpretation of these findings is that humans are fine with giving power to a conflict resolution mechanism as long as humans are ultimately in control.

Introduction

In the first post, we surveyed 1000 US respondents about their moral beliefs, the conditions under which they would change their moral beliefs and how they felt about mechanisms to resolve moral disagreements such as democracy or debate.

Our main findings of the first survey were

Unsurprisingly, people have very different moral beliefs, e.g. on the morality of abortions, immigration or eating meat.
They very rarely report to changing or wanting to change these beliefs, e.g. most participants (>80%) report having not changed them in the last 10 years and do not expect to change them in the next 10 years.
However, they mostly think that mechanisms to resolve moral disagreements, such as democracy or debate, are good even when they disagree with the outcome. In other words, people are willing to accept outcomes that are different from their beliefs if they trust the process by which it was derived.

We think this finding has some implications for AI alignment. Most importantly, we think that the alignment target of an AI should be a mechanism to resolve moral conflicts such as democracy or debate rather than a set of individual beliefs, e.g. about abortion or veganism. This is more likely to lead to decisions that can be accepted by most people and prevent a race from “aligning an AI to your personal beliefs at the cost of other people’s beliefs”.

We think the main weakness of our first result was that it could have been a result of confounders or randomness. We asked people for their opinions on multiple scenarios, ...

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