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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30931 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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This is in line with weapons race against (speculative) China AGI threat, and leads us straight into the Singleton's maw. Buh-but it'll be a good Singleton, amirite comrade?

Does anyone involved actually believe this? The whole point of the idea of burning all the GPUs is that we're currently facing a smorgasbord of bad singletons and the only thing we can do is sabotaging the slot machine so we can keep spinning it until we figure out which option gives us a payout rather than the current expected outcome which is that a hand with a knife comes out and shivs us in the gut.

Who actually thinks current AGI projects lead to aligned superintelligence? Name names, so that Yud can go yell at them some more.

(My own pet theory is that we'll get a good singleton by prompt engineering GPT-4. I believe this primarily because it will be hilarious and deeply, deeply embarrassing for the species.)

edit: The sense I get as a singularitarian is that they don't disagree with the idea that a one-party/one-world totalitarian state is the most dangerous thing imaginable, but rather it's that one-world totalitarianism via singleton is a black hole that we're falling into at astonishing speed, and that if we win, it will be by choosing some sort of trajectory where the place we fall into it is for some reason the one place that humans can survive in, and that we have no idea how to do that, and that most of the engines on our spaceship, most of the incentive gradients, are pointed down into it at the moment. "Let's not do that" would be great if, you know, we could.

Who actually thinks current AGI projects lead to aligned superintelligence? Name names, so that Yud can go yell at them some more.

Sure. Off the top of my head, all of the following groups are explicitly building an AGI and believe that it's going to be aligned:

  1. https://openai.com/about/

  2. https://www.deepmind.com/blog/real-world-challenges-for-agi

  3. https://blog.google/technology/ai/introducing-pathways-next-generation-ai-architecture/

  4. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/yann-lecun-advances-in-ai-research/

  5. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1560728042959507457

  6. https://generallyintelligent.ai/about

According to Yuddites, #4 is EVIL EVIL TERRIBLE (because Facebook/MetaAI are less secretive and share a higher percentage of their models with the community) while #2 is supposedly trustworthy enough and cooperates with AI safety guys, and #5 is YC darling.

As a bonus, straight-up EA-associated teams:

(Regarding #6 Redwood. Eric Jang's haiku is on point:

Reward hacking bad!

Max likelihood not aligned!

*uses PPO*_

In light of current events, all those Haikus are surprisingly prescient, especially the A virtuous life/ As imagined by Jane St/ Phew, just a bad dream! one).

The point is though, I agree with those researchers, and with your GPT-4 take. Some of them (and given time, all of them) will build a safe prosaically-aligned-by-design AGI in the process of learning to smoothly scale up useful current-gen models and improving benchmark and human preference performance. InstructGPT shows the way towards generalization for alignment and human-level understanding at once. Just asking the AI to be nice, plus a bit of tinkering with objectives, will work. I straight up do not believe that the hypothetical rogue AGI has much to do with the singleton threat. The premise of AI risk as formulated by Bostrom, Yud and those newer fancier more «professional» Lesswrong/EA bozos, one about self-improving RL agents learning from first principles, is not in tune with the state of the art in the industry, it's just obsolete, their predictions have been wrong, and the purported threat model is evolving ever more convoluted protective belts of special pleading, like any failing paradigm, while their research program has failed.

The real Singleton, one that Thiel calls Antichrist, will be the same old – but now positively deathless – Hobbesian Sovereign, made of people, people currently close to the effective levers of power of the American empire, people addicted to control and safety; and it doesn't matter much for me which tech stack developed by which American company exactly they will weaponize before dismantling all of them on national security and X-risk grounds.

The only realistic hedge against that is political and agentic multipolarity, proliferation of the technology in the spirit of Musk-era OpenAI and perhaps current Stability.AI, and that's exactly what AI alarmists with their «global governance» fetish are against. In fact, they justify totalitarian one world government as the lesser evil, by speculating about the odds of Clippy who'll just eradicate humanity as such.

I acknowledge that if my model's wrong and Clippy equivalent is probable, he will wipe out all sentient life including untold trillions of the descendants of my enemies and the Universe will be functionally infertile, which is aesthetically very bad, marginally worse than a Universe dominated by said descendants. On the other hand, in the event of AI alarmists failing to stifle competition and progress, and there emerging a decentralized diverse set of strong AIs and their users (and not just my enemies operating their singleton), the world will be aligned with my interests much better.

As I am not an utilitarian and do not give much of fuck about happiness of people who do not give much of a fuck about me (I tried metta meditation but it doesn't sit right with me). My current estimation is that it's better to err on the side of AI risk versus human totalitarianism risk. Therefore, same as Thiel, and the opposite of Gwern. Armageddon is preferable to Antichrist.

My expectation is still that early takeoff is so powerful (because the overhang is so large) that the multipolar scenario basically cannot happen. Whoever goes first implements the pivotal action anyways, and successfully. The only positive outcome is from lucking into a compatible sovereign.

I presume this is our primary disagreement.

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