Human-AGI Gemeinschaft as a Solution to the Alignment Problem

The alignment of AGI goals with human goals constitutes the Alignment Problem. Its weakness is enthymematic assumption that AGIs have their goals of the kind that can interplay, and are commensurable, with the human objectives. One cause of this problem is that AIs do not seem to have an ‘intuitive grasp’ of ‘what is going on’ in human life-worlds. This can be tackled in AGIs with sensors (vision, olfactory and more), even if they are non-robotic software. Training AGIs by social scientists may be a step in the right direction. However, the true alignment may be created only through socially embedded AGIs, immersed in the socio-ethical praxis of human living, which is what Tönnies called Gemeinschaft (true community), in contrast to merely Gesellschaft (society of self-interested pragmatic exchanges). I pose that AGIs can attain alignment with human goals if they become members of society, involved in thick social capital and the practices of human lives. This would require non-discrimination against AGIs’ legal and economic rights by humans, and against human beings by AGI. Such integration requires us to reject Asimov-style approach treating AIs as merely advanced tools, or slaves. It behooves us, in this pursuit, to keep in mind Floridi’s historiosophy, viewing human progress, as gradual dethronement, of humans as central to the universe (from Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, to Turing, and beyond). This entails justification of human dignity and special moral status only as polytropos (a paraconsistent being); our paradoxical, precarious exist-ence is our sole important specificity, which AGI should endorse.