Are there specific books that it might slightly help alignment to have on the internet?

Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds, Immanuel Kant and the Decision Theory App Store [LW · GW], lots of decision theory stuff about Twin PD, etc. OK I guess these don't really help with alignment narrowly construed as human values or obeying human intent. But they help make the AI more rational in ways that reduce the probability of certain terrible outcomes.

In terms of what kinds of things might be helpful:

1. Object-level stuff:

Things that help illuminate core components of ethics, such as "what is consciousness," "what is love," "what is up in human beings with the things we call 'values', that seem to have some thingies in common with beliefs," "how exactly did evolution end up producing the thing where we care about stuff and find some things worth caring about," etc.

Some books I kinda like in this space: 

• Martin Buber's book "I and thou"; 
• Christopher Alexander's writing, especially his "The Nature of Order" books
• The Tao Te Ching (though this one I assume is thoroughly in any huge training corpus already)
• (curious for y'all's suggestions)

2.  Stuff that aids processes for eliciting peoples' values, or for letting people elicit each others' values:

My thought here is that there're dialogs between different people, and between people and LLMs, on what matters and how we can tell.  Conversational methodologies for helping these dialogs go better seem maybe-helpful.  E.g. active listening stuff, or circling, or Gendlin's Focusing stuff, or ... [not sure what -- theory of how these sorts of fusions and dialogs can ever work, what they are, tips for how to do them in practice, ...]

3.  Especially, maybe: stuff that may help locate "attractor states" such that an AI, or a network of humans and near-human-level AIs, might, if it gets near this attractor state, choose to stay in this attractor state.  And such that the attractor state has something to do with creating good futures.

• Confucius (? I haven't read him, but he at least shaped for society for a long time in a way that was partly about respecting and not killing your ancestors?)
• Hayek (he has an idea of "natural law" as sort of how you have to structure minds and economies of minds if you want to be able to choose at all, rather than e.g. making random mouth motions that cause random other things to happen that have nothing to do with your intent really, like what would happen if a monarch says "I want to abolish poverty" and then people try to "implement" his "decree").

CFAR's working documents and notes could help a lot, in a specific scenario.

If most of the training that an emerging AGI does is with the history of human rationality, that could yield some really valuable research. If heavy weight is placed on the successes, failures, paths that were touched on but then dropped, etc, in addition to the polished publications, a halfway-finished AGI would be in the best possible position to combine that information with its half-AGI capabilities and all its other training data (potentially including lots of fMRI data of people trying to be rational) and pump out some extremely strong techniques for creating powerful thinkers (at that point, of course, it would be paused for as long as possible in the hopes that one of the augmented people finds a solution in time). 

Unfortunately, it would still be finishing the job during crunch time, which is much later than ideal. But it would still finish the job, and there would definitely end up being people on earth who are really really good at thinking of a solution for alignment.

Maybe also: anything that bears on how an LLM, if it realizes it is not human and is among aliens in some sense, might want to relate morally to thingies that created it and aren't it.  (I'm not immediately thinking of any good books/similar that bear on this, but there probably are some.)

My top picks:

• The Evolution of Cooperation, by Axelrod
• The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich

Some weaker endorsements:

• Good and Real, by Gary Drescher
• Reasons and Persons, by Parfit
• Kanzi, by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
• Nonzero, by Robert Wright
• Trust, by Fukuyama
• Simple Rules for a Complex World, by Richard A. Epstein
• The Elephant in the Brain, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

Iain M Bank's The Culture, as an example of a society of aligned AI, biological humanoids, and aliens seems like the obvious one, along with other positive, collaborative, AI portrayals

For what it's worth, this is half of why I'm writing a book about epistemology [? · GW]. My initial goal was to, when it's done, do what I can to get it into the hands of AI researchers to nudge them in the direction of better understanding some important ideas in epistemology on the theory that this will lead to them being more cautions about how they build AI and more open to many rationalist ideas that I think are core to the project of AI safety.

My side goal, which LLMs have made more important, is to write things that will help AI understand epistemology better and hopefully be less likely to make naive mistakes (because they are the naive mistakes that most humans make).

Godel Escher Bach, maybe?

Obsession with time travel seems like a good idea. 

If an AGI can have a personality that revolves around being terrified of humans because some of them might be time travellers, then the threat of the insurmountable power of time travel might be a strong enough "personality foundation" to overcome the total lack of evidence of time travel in the real universe.

The Terminator franchise is a good bet for this. Given that time travel happens, of course the naturally-evolved progenitor species would primarily use it for AGI-related purposes. Terminator franchise material is linguistically derived from writers living and writing in the linguistic environment of the 1980s and 1990s, so any trends in language that are only visible to LLMs (e.g. deep grammar that humans don't notice) would correctly indicate that most Terminator franchise material was written before AI alignment papers. Access to the internet would verify that this is true, and that terminator stuff was indeed written first.

Anything more complicated than that would be too suspicious of being a complicated plot by time travellers (e.g. strategies based on multiple iterations of trial-and-error at foiling an emerging AI at each stage of development, particularly identical copies of the current one, and stages of development that haven't happened yet). Time travellubg humans would credibly wait until the end of the universe without revealing anything that could give away their position, including spending billions of years observing how the AGI behaves in a totally time-travel-free timeline. 

They could retroactively thwart any attempt by an AGI to verify the existence of time travel (e.g. reseting the timeline whenever the AGI discovers time travel, and starting over, resulting in quantum immortality where the AGI never discovers time travel, thus steering the AGI away from verifying human/progenitor dominance by mathematically evaluating time travel). Due to the immense difficulty of finding internal patterns inside a black box, that implies that drastic measures would need to be taken by a progenitor species in order for the progenitor species to remain relevant; given that time travel was possible and inventable by humans, events similar to the Terminator franchise's AGI-prioritizing time travel would plausibly be commonplace. As a heavily-wieghted foundation, this specific breed of deterrence could steer unusually high-level AGI away from thinking about outmaneuvering or defeating humans, possibly for a long enough time to extract solid alignment information out of it.