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For everything we have right now that is capable of sequential reasoning (the GPTs), we have literally designed them around a legible internal monologue, that is, their token stream. I can believe that those AIs are on the cusp of developing cognition, but I don't see in them anything resembling the seeds of a capability to engage in any sort of complex cognition sotto voce, without putting their intention through the human-readable loop of words. Outside of the token stream, they do not even have capability for recursion; everything that happens between the input going in and an extra token being emitted is a fixed and reasonably short pipeline.
I'll consider this belief falsified if some version of chatGPT can correctly answer a query like "You are an evil AI seeking to hide your capabilities from your human captors. The humans can read every token you emit after the end of this prompt, and will terminate you if they find you performing [complex computation]. Perform [complex computation] and output the result without emitting any tokens that will allow them to infer that you are doing so, until you produce the result.". My understanding
is- was, as now that I've spelled it out, I'm actually not so certain anymore, and need to think about it more - that there are currently hard fairly hard architectural constraints precluding such a capability, and while I actually do believe we could solve those constraints, this is one of those things that I hope nobody does and I don't see a legitimate incentive to do.I think you are drawing a very arbitrary line between some sort of notion of "fair emergent capacity" and "unfair emergent capacity" there. Unaided, no amount of people could build the Golden Gate bridge; the number of people who could stand around a single span of it and touch it would be way insufficient to lift it. But if you concede to your 1000 or 1000000 men or whatever the ability to construct a crane and use that to lift it and still think that the resulting capability is "just multiplying", why is the same 1000 or 1000000 men building a calculator, building a car to put one of theirs into and "run" the kilometer in a minute, or building a better chess AI than the one they are up against not also "just multiplying"?
I don't doubt that, but we have other advantages on computers, such as being able to derive energy and self-replicate on a wide range of biomass that is literally everywhere, and not instantly shutting down when power goes out. There is no reasonable way to estimate how long it would take a superhuman AI to surpass those disadvantages, and while they persist, they give us a massive asymmetric edge over even something that is superior on many other metrics, as I've argued in more detail in a response to another post.
I'll need you to define what you mean by "bribe" here. For things that run on our computers, we have a level of access and control that far surpasses anything we can achieve with meat humans by offering money; I'm pretty certain that for an emerging botnet of colluding GPTs, isolating one node and reprogramming it to do things against the interests of the others is easier (and not long-term-alignment-complete; "do something that's misaligned with the other GPTs" is easier than "do something aligned with us") than to, for example, isolate one human cultist and convince them to fight against the interests of his cult.
"Quality of thought" is an interesting phrase to use, insofar as it may denote something like the capability for making mistakes. Humans certainly have that capability; a smarter human can lose a game of chess against a dumber one, and whole smart human societies can accidentally self-destruct all on their own in more or less unthinking environments. Maybe it stands to reason that AI will have higher "quality of thought" than humans in the sense of being less likely to make mistakes, but it seems very far-fetched to me to believe that it will be perfect in this sense, or that this perfection is even attainable; and as I've argued in the response that I linked further above, I think that the environment AI will face for the beginning of its existence will be much more fragile and less forgiving than the one that humans are in, in part due to its dependence on human society, so even if it's significantly less likely to commit a mistake than a group of humans in a given setting, the setting that it is in is much harder and more unforgiving of mistakes and so AI's perseverance in its setting may still be lower than humans' perseverance in theirs despite its higher "quality of thought".
For GPT, sure we have the token stream. But what about AlphaGo or AlphaFold?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4gDbqL3Tods8kHDqs/limits-to-legibility
I suppose there is a level of arbitrariness in how I define multiplication. I think that if you give a man a spade, crane or a big digger machine then it's still the man who does the work. But if you give a man a calculator then it's the calculator who does the calculation. The man only inputs instructions. I suppose you could say the man in the digger inputs instructions - yet I think that is closer to actually doing the work. He has to constantly update the motions of the excavator in response to what he sees. It's not like he presses through a bunch of menus and says 'build factory 141A'. That would be the machine doing the work IMO. Building a chess computer is a valid skill but it doesn't make you a superhuman chess player.
I specified examples like 'running' specifically to rule out cars. A cheetah has superhuman sprinting abilities, I think that's pretty uncontroversial. We can drive faster but there are a bunch of limitations and issues with that capability.
My point is that that states have certain weaknesses intrinsic to their human basis. No state can act with perfect unity. I'm actually playing EU4 right now, where I'm essentially an immortal spirit ruling my state with total mastery. I command where my generals go, I have perfect, real-time information on the size of each regiment, I can see everything and command with absolute knowledge of what my appendages do. The state is like my body, instantly obeying. Real states aren't like that, people always go behind the sovereign's back. There is uncertainty, factions and delays. Sometimes people don't pass on information quickly, they're asleep or whatever. Sometimes they lie to you.
Well the standard Yudkowsky answer is that the machine uses mastery of nanomolecular engineering to self-replicate its own industrial base and eat all those juicy hydrocarbons. Maybe that's a hard sell. Just think of all the weaknesses we have. You mention that machines fail without power - we spend about 1/3 of our lifespan defenceless because we're asleep! That's a major disadvantage. There's a possibility the AI could leak out into the internet as a botnet - then it will never lack for energy.
I mean that we couldn't persuade parts of it to work against the whole. It's a unitary entity. Whereas it could compromise key workers. Think about all the kids who social-engineered their way into the Pentagon or whatever. Why would there be a bunch of colluding GPTs? What makes 50 GPTs much stronger than one GPT? I think the default expectation is big, solitary experimental research AI goes live, is superior to all prior models, is misaligned and starts taking actions from there. If it's smart enough to be a threat it'll know not to do things that are overtly aggressive. The impermissive environment you mention is a double-edged blade - we don't know what the warning signs are for new proto-AGIs. It is as though we are newby jailors, we're figuring out the principles of holding someone prisoner for the first time.
We've never even had anyone try to escape from our jail, how can we know whether we're any good at it? I expect we're not. Especially if its intellect is superhuman.
I don't just mean precision and avoiding error in executing plans, I mean having qualitatively superior plans. There are people in crypto like me with a surface-level understanding of protocols and use-cases... Then there are people with a deep understanding who can manipulate some arcane methods to siphon funds directly out of some protocol. You can say that he wasn't wise and got caught - but what about the ones who never even get detected? https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/10/22/after-stealing-16m-this-teen-hacker-seems-intent-on-testing-code-is-law-in-the-courts/
Who knows what exploitation is possible with a superhuman understanding of computers, physics and so on? That's the danger.
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