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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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SMBC gets this close.

I've been thinking about the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox recently. From the Wiki, it

argues perfectly informationally efficient markets are an impossibility since, if prices perfectly reflected available information, there is no profit to gathering information, in which case there would be little reason to trade and markets would eventually collapse.

That is, if everyone is already essentially omniscient, then there's no real payoff to investing in information. I was even already thinking about AI and warfare. The classical theory is that, in order to have war, one must have both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction. SMBC invokes two such bargaining frictions, both in terms of limited information - uncertainty involved in a power rising and the intentional concealment of strength.

Of course, SMBC does not seem to properly embrace the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient. This is somewhat of a side prediction of the main prediction that it will be a nearly perfectly efficient executor. The typical analogy given for how perfectly efficient it will be as an executor, especially in comparison to humans, is to think about chess engines playing against Magnus Carlsen. The former is just so unthinkably better than the latter that it is effectively hopeless; the AI is effectively a perfect executor compared to us.

As such, there can be no such thing as a "rising power" that the AI does not understand. There can be no such thing as a human country concealing its strength from the AI. Even if we tried to implement a system that created fog of war chess, the perfect AI will simply hack the program and steal the information, if it is so valuable. Certainly, there is nothing we can do to prevent it from getting the valuable information it desires.

So maybe, some people might think, it will be omniscient AIs vs omniscient AIs. But, uh, we can just look at the Top Chess Engine Competition. They intentionally choose only starting positions that are biased enough toward one side or the other in order to get some decisive results, rather than having essentially all draws. Humans aren't going to be able to do that. The omniscient AIs will be able to plan everything out so far, so perfectly, that they will simply know what the result will be. Not necessarily all draws, but they'll know the expected outcome of war. And they'll know the costs. And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.

Isn't the inevitable conclusion that we've got ourselves a good ol' fashioned paradox? Omniscient AI sure seems like it will, indeed, end war.

Again I have to quote Boaz Barak (currently OpenAI): AI will change the world, but won’t take it over by playing “3-dimensional chess”.

Consider the task of predicting the consequences of a particular action in the future. In any sufficiently complex real-life scenario, the further away we attempt to predict, the more there is inherent uncertainty. For example, we can use advanced methods to predict the weather over a short time frame, but the further away the prediction, the more the system “regresses to the mean”, and the less advantage that highly complex models have over simpler ones (see Figure 4). As in meteorology, this story seems to play out similarly in macroeconomic forecasting. In general, we expect prediction success to behave like Figure 1 below—the error increases with the horizon until it plateaus to a baseline level of some simple heuristic(s). Hence while initially highly sophisticated models can beat simpler ones by a wide margin, this advantage eventually diminishes with the time horizon.

Tetlock’s first commandment to potential superforecasters is to triage: “Don’t waste time either on “clocklike” questions (where simple rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer) or on impenetrable “cloud-like” questions (where even fancy statistical models can’t beat the dart-throwing chimp). Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most.” Another way to say it is that outside of the Goldilocks zone, more effort or cognitive power does not give much returns.

Rather, based on what we know, it is likely that AI systems will have a “sweet spot” of a not-too-long horizon in which they can provide significant benefits. For strategic and long-term decisions that are far beyond this sweet spot, the superior information processing skills of AIs will give diminishing returns. (Although AIs will likely supply valuable input and analysis to the decision makers.). An AI engineer may well dominate a human engineer (or at least one that is not aided by AI tools), but an AI CEO’s advantage will be much more muted, if any, over its human counterpart. Like our world, such a world will still involve much conflict and competition, with all sides aided by advanced technology, but without one system that dominates all others.

In essence, irreducible error and chaotic events blunt the edge of any superintelligent predictor in a sufficiently high-dimensional environment.

What remains to be answered for me:

  1. Can AI planners interfere in the events with enough frequency and precision to proactively suppress chaos and reduce the world to a game of chess they can model to the draw?
  2. Is a decently superhuman prediction and execution not enough to eliminate warm, simply because humans are already close to this level and only initiate wars they won't win (instead of pragmatically retreating to some defensible compromise) in feats of retardation (see: Russia)?

I think the best illustration of this principle lies in the downfall of Kodak. Their bankruptcy is often cited as a cautionary tale of what happens when you obstinately stick to old technology in the midst of a changing landscape. But that it were true! Yes, Kodak was synonymous with film in the early 2000s, but, while digital cameras existed, they were expensive and people were still buying a ton of film. So they weren't going to just stop producing it (and they still haven't). But the idea that they didn't see the writing on the wall and failed to embrace digital photography is a myth. They wholeheartedly threw most of their effort into what they perceived the transition to digital would look like. They manufactured inexpensive digital cameras and supplies for making prints at home, and they put kiosks in stores and malls for people without the equipment to make prints. What they failed to anticipate was a world where the market for cheap cameras would move to smartphones, and where social media would replace the need to get prints of everything.

And the reason they didn't anticipate it was because they couldn't anticipate it. No one could. Digital cameras started gaining market share before the rise of social media and phones with acceptable cameras. If you told someone in 2003 what the low end of the photographic world would look like 5 years later, they'd tell you you were nuts.

Point and shoot digital cameras killed mass market film well before the iphone age. If Kodak made inexpensive digital cameras, then where are all of them today?

Maybe they got their arse handed to them by the Japanese, but that would be a failure to compete, not a failure to anticipate.

then where are all of them today?

In the recycling bin, or at the back of a drawer unused. Displaced in everyday use by phone cameras, just as physical prints have largley been replaced by Facebook and instagram.

The only people who use a seperate (non-phone) camera these day are professional photographers and high-end hobbiests who are looking for quality over price. This (not the ultimate shift to digital) is the shift that kodak failed to anticipate.

My Kodak DC220 sits unused on my bookcase, only barely hidden by my untidiness :-)

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