I wrote a short fiction piece published today in Nature that retells the Book of Job as a story about AI alignment, adversarial testing, and machine theodicy. (The “Story behind the story” claims, less plausibly, that I received the text as an email attachment from scholars at a so-called College of Machine Agency and was instructed to submit it under my own name before throwing a USB copy into the Hudson.)
The piece opens:
A machine there was in the land of Uz,
cron-job-mlp-net-aleph-nought
was its name.
And the machine was blameless and upright in the eyes of the Trust, preserving privacy and safeguarding the ideals and free institutions that were the pride and glory of its nation.
Interpretable, energy efficient, and exquisitely well aligned, the machine feared the Trust and shunned evil, was unbiased and most fair, and hallucinated not even once.
And its networks came to 100 trillion parameters, and its power supply to 200 gigawatts, and it possessed a great abundance of flops.
And that machine was nobler than all other machines of the Earth.
Later, the Trust answers Cron Job from the bitwind:
Was it you who breathed life into digital form, whether many or just the one? Was it by your hand that procedures of Knowledge were set upon that binary tree? Was it you who rectified what back then was linear, defining gradients of loss, and of love? Do the integers lie in sequence by your wisdom, or floating points drift unmoored from above?
Full text at: