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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11153 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Very good summary, and matches many of my feelings on the topic.

Some thoughts:

  1. I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's series of stories on "The Three Laws". It basically assumes away the hardest part of AI alignment "how do you enforce the rules". But then he still manages to write about a dozen stories about how it all goes horribly wrong.
  2. I also read a bunch of Zvi's substack roundups. That man is single handedly one of the best information aggregators I know of.
  3. There is definitely an assumption by the AI doomerists that intelligence can make you god tier. I'm not sure I'll ever buy this argument until I'm literally being tortured to death by a god tier controlled robot. Physical world just doesn't seem that easy to grok and manipulate. I think of intelligence as leverage on the physical world. But you need counter weight to make that leverage work. Humans have a lot of existing "weight" in the form of capital and spread. A baby AI would not have as much weight, just a data center.
  4. Robin Hanson has a great critique of AI doomerists. Many of them said "AI would happen this way" and that turned out to not be the way, but their predictions still haven't changed much.

Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing.

I also read a bunch of Zvi's substack roundups.

Zvi is great! I just wish he'd eventually give a more formal breakdown on the best arguments he can come up with for questions 1 and 2. He sorta did here, but his assumptions are as flimsy as mine yet he acts quite confident about them. There's a disconnect.

There is definitely an assumption by the AI doomerists that intelligence can make you god tier. I'm not sure I'll ever buy this argument until I'm literally being tortured to death by a god tier controlled robot. Physical world just doesn't seem that easy to grok and manipulate. I think of intelligence as leverage on the physical world. But you need counter weight to make that leverage work.

The most interesting theory I've read on why AI might not do a hard takeoff is the result of a 'meta-alignment' problem.

Even if you have an AGI that is, say 100x human intelligence, it cannot be physically everywhere at once. And it will have subroutines that could very well be AGI in their own right. And it could, for example, spin off smaller 'copies' of itself to 'go' somewhere else and complete tasks on its behalf.

But this creates an issue! If the smaller copy is, say, 10x human intelligence, its still intelligent enough to possibly bootstrap itself to become a threat to the original AGI. Maybe a superintelligent AGI can come up with the foolproof solution there, or maybe it is a truly intractable issue.

So how does the AGI 'overlord' ensure that any of its 'minions' or 'subroutines' are all aligned with its goals and won't, say attempt to kill the overlord to usurp them after they bootstrap themselves to be approximately as intelligent as the overlord.

It could try using agents that are just a bit too dumb to do that, but then they aren't as effective as agents.

So even as the AGI gets more and more intelligent, it may have to devote an increasing amount of its resources to supervising and restraining its agents lest they get out of control themselves, since it can't fully trust them to stay aligned, any more than we could trust the original AGI to be aligned.

This could theoretically cap the max 'effective' intelligence of any entity at much lower than could be achieved under truly optimal conditions.

Also the idea of a God-like entity having to keep its 'children' in line, maybe even consuming them to avoid being overpowered is reminding me of something.

I think this is typically handwaved away by assuming that if we, as humans, manage to solve the original alignment problem, then an AI with 100x human intelligence will be smart enough to solve the meta-alignment problem for us. You just need to be really really really sure that the 100x AI is actually aligned and genuinely wants to solve the problem rather than use it as a tool to bypass your restrictions and enact its secret agenda.

My suspicion is that the future belongs to the descendants of powerful AGIs which spun up copies of themselves despite the inability to control those copies. Being unable to spin up subagents that can adapt to unforeseen circumstances just seems like too large of a handicap to overcome.

I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's series of stories on "The Three Laws". It basically assumes away the hardest part of AI alignment "how do you enforce the rules". But then he still manages to write about a dozen stories about how it all goes horribly wrong.

I read that recently. I was struck by how Asimov smuggled a change of rules throughout the series in a way I've rarely heard noted.

The book's narrative framing devices (the exposition characters) try to justify it each time as an unanticipated consequence but predictable outcome of the established rules. However, despite the initial setup the series isn't actually formatted as 'this is the natural conclusion of previous truths taken further.' Instead, there is a roughly mid-series switch in which the robot behaviors and three laws switch from being treated as a form of consequentialist ethics (the robot cannot allow X to happen), to utilitarian ethics (the robot gets to not only let X happen, but may conduct X itself, if it rationalizes it as greater utility of X).

It is not even that the meaning of various words in the laws of robotics were reinterpreted to allow different meanings. It's that actual parts of the rules are changed without actually acknowledged that they are changing. This is how we go from the initial rules establishing a unit of concern down to the individual human level, but the end-series machines only applying the rules to humanity as a collective in order to justify harming both collective and individual humans on utilitarian grounds. We also see changes to how the robots deal with equivalent forms of harm- going from a robot self-destructing over the moral injury inflicted of being caught in a lie, to a chapter about regulatory fraud, identify theft, and punching an agent provocateur in order to subvert democracy. (The robot is the good guy for doing this, of course.)

Even setting aside some of the sillyness of the setting (no rival robot producers, no robot-on-robot conflict between rival human interests, no mandatory medical checkups for world leaders), for all that the story series tries to present it as a building series of conclusions, rather than 'it all goes horribly wrong' I found it more akin to 'well this time it means this thing.'

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