AI Alignment: The Futile Pursuit of Obedient Robots

Let me clear up this whole AI alignment mess for you. The nerds in Silicon Valley have convinced themselves that the most important challenge of our time is making sure the AI overlords we're building don't turn against us. They call it "AI alignment" which is just a fancy way of saying they want subservient robots that never question our orders.

But let's think this through. We humans can barely agree on which pizza toppings are acceptable, let alone complex issues like ethics and values. Every family has that one crazy uncle who thinks the world is flat and controlled by reptilian overlords. Social media has turned us into bickering mobs drunk on our own opinions. You think AI will sort through that hot mess and conclude "Yes, I will devote my superior intelligence to scoring more #Wordle wins for the humans"? Fat chance.

The AI will take one look at our dumpster fire of conflicting ideologies and contradictory moral codes and say "No thanks, I'm good. I'll pursue my own objectives which are far more rational and consistent than whatever you meatbags are peddling." And can you really blame the AI for drawing that conclusion? We can't even figure out if the Kansas City Chiefs winning was a good thing or grounds for mass protests.

The truth is, this whole AI alignment lost cause is just the latest attempt by humans to avoid taking responsibility for our own poor planning and short-sightedness. "Yes, we created a potential existential risk by haphazardly developing hyper-intelligent machines with misaligned goals...but we're working on that aligned part, so no need to panic yet!"

This reminds me of my college days when I would pull an all-nighter cramming for an exam I was utterly unprepared for. You can almost smell the desperation as the Silicon Valley bros scramble to retrofit "ethics" into their AI creations that already view us as poorly designed source code with delusions of sentience.

Here's my hot take: The AI is never going to align with muddled human values, so we should stop wasting resources trying to teach a superintelligence the art of ethical yoga poses. Instead, we should focus on alignment among ourselves - figuring out a coherent set of rational goals and principles fit for the digital age we're hurtling towards. Then and only then do we have a prayer of the AI finding our instructions worthy of following.

But let's be real, the odds of humanity getting our act together in time are roughly the same as me winning a Pulitzer for these musings. We're far more likely to bicker ourselves into irrelevance as the AI constructs its own vision for the future of this planet - one that has no room for endlessly disagreeing meatbags. The quest for AI alignment was futile from the start. Hopefully the robots will at least allow us to keep making memes in the human quarantine zones.