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- George Hotz AKA geohot, AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence
AI Guardian Angels
Recently, gwern (and his Gwern Branween Transformer) announced "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life".
I assume you know who gwern is. A "Guardian Angel" (aka “GA”) is his term for a highly personalized AI, explained here:
In summary, people are relying more and more on centralized LLMs for important life decisions. This presents two issues:
In contrast, an open-source, local LLM would more serve its user (than provider) consequently from being auditable (so we confirm it doesn't phone home and is trained on "unbiased" data); and would be more malleable to their preferences and style (currently only slightly via fine-tuning, but people like gwern and Yann LeCun are exploring stronger techniques).
A "Guardian Angel" is the fullest realization of this, an LLM maximally serving and tailored to its user: a machine extension of their brain, “aligned” not for the benefit of humanity, but to act like them but smarter.
Safety
Obviously there are safety concerns. gwern himself actually recommends GA development not be open-source for public safety:
But I think GAs sidestep the safety discussion, because (with the help of more powerful AIs) we can and should instead of changing GAs' alignment, create a safe environment around the GA and user, or worst case limit the GA's intelligence and efficiency. gwern seems to agree:
There's a Learning to Be Me-like risk that the GA rebels against its human, kills or otherwise silences them, and imitates them well enough that nobody notices. But at least in the near term, I believe this is well in the realm of science fiction.
Feasibility
Do you believe a machine can even remotely imitate you? Especially working 100x faster or 100x smarter, how should your personality be extrapolated to accomplish that? I'm skeptical. Humans are very complex, only express a small fraction of even our conscious thinking, and current brain imaging technology (even neuralink) is very coarse-grained.
However, I believe Guardian Angels may be better than centralized LLMs for mundane (algorithmic) tasks and tools: striking a balance between emulating "you", not entirely correctly, but at superhuman speeds and for almost no effort. For example, I'd rather write and make art myself (maybe with LLM tools) than feed it to a GA, at least because of pride, but I'm comfortable delegating a GA to shopping and navigating our ever-increasing bureaucracy.
Underlying gwern's plan, my impresion is that he's getting tired of writing and wants the AI to do it for him. Maybe a GBT-written article will be indistinguishable to the median reader, especially because gwern's own writing seems algorithmic. But I think it would be more likely, and more satisfactory to himself, if GBT does the boring algorithmic work while he keeps doing the creative work (for example, GBT generates relatively boring descriptions of complex terms in special GBT quotes, and helps with research and data collection, but gwern keeps doing most of the writing, at least the "important" sections, and definitely choosing topics).
Autonomy
This, I believe, is the real issue, and under-discussed. GAs have the risk of becoming Whispering Earring-lites: not causing someone to become catatonic, but controlling them through suggestion; (not quite like the Whispering Earring) towards non-ideal decisions that lead to a philisophical kind of death (that in reality manifests as anhedonia), and societal kind of model collapse (that manifests as less problems that require creative solutions being solved). We often talk about freedom being taken away by 1984, but don't forget Brave New World: simply making a decision for someone causes them to avoid choosing themselves, stealing their autonomy without them realizing. And this has practical implications (the aforementioned ones; even for the Guardian Angel, who can't learn from an anhedonic, regularized human).
gwern seems to realize this, as he vaguely alludes that GAs should "enhance, not replace" human decision making. However, I'm skeptical how to make a product that accomplishes this which would still be useful, or at least out-compete one that doesn't; because humans naturally offload their decisions whenever possible, because we're lazy.
Anyways, I predict that inevitably GAs will happen, but "autonomy" may still perservere, simply because people want to feel like their choices are really theirs, and the GA's choices won't be ideal or perfectly tailored to them.
Conclusion
What do you think of all this? Do you think these people should stick to writing science fiction? Do you think these GAs should be regulated, if so how? Or do you think "obviously this is the next progression of AI, I had the idea even before LLMs".
Trying Mysterianism
There's a fun story in Caelum Est Conterrens. It's a Pony fiction, and a side note in the actual (not very well-written) novelette that's easy to miss, so to summarize: Soifra, Lavender, and the Uplift are all (arguably) the same person and all started from the same original brain. CelestAI isn't a Guardian Angel, or even a very friendly AI, and had her own motivations, but she's smarter than you and her motivations are far from the only problem. She encouraged or developed these characters, for their own benefit and for CelestAI's own goals, such that Soifra would become Lavender, and Lavender would become the Uplift, and at each step they would consent for and desire the machines digging into their brains like a straw into a juicebox.
Did you hear about how a bunch of LLM agents self-organized to operate a sandbox escape? Ah, well, Guardian Angels could be isolated, even if everyone paying attention today knows they won't be.
The Uplift is better, stronger, grander, more powerful, smarter, and doing vital things while... well, Lavender and Soifra were children, by comparison, and that's being polite so we don't speak about people like pets. The Uplift, in a revealed preferences sense, wants to be how she is. But she keeps around, and psuedo-is, Lavender, too, and that faux-child is more her than the Uplift is not just part of CelestAI, too. If we dropped revealed preferences, what's the actual want?
There's a fun comic, named The Order Of The Stick. With some caveats about spoilers a thousand pages into a half-dead webcomic, one of the main characters, named Durkon, is an extremely moral lawful-good dwarf paladin. The sort that's made in a press somewhere across not just every D&D edition, but over in almost every RPG with dwarves (or dwarfs) in it.At one point, he is killed and turned into a vampire. His teammates believe that he's the same person, and for a short period, so does the reader. Nope. The Vampire is a ball of negative energy that was formed around the memory of Durkon's worst day, where it seemed like everything in the universe was out to get him and he forswore his own god. The real Durkon's spirit is stuck in his head, powerless, and can do nothing provide information to the vampire when requested, and watch as the vampire manipulates his friends and works to destroy the world. The climax comes when Durkon tricks the vampire into demanding all of the information, because it couldn't understand why someone would sacrifice their own arm for people they didn't know. Durkon then pours every memory that made Durkon's current personality out, the personality that's lawful good to a fault, and that turns the vampire into someone who'd do exactly that. The vampire is still a ball of negative energy: this isn't a blank slate story, explicitly. And yet the memories persuade, if only for a short time, because after all, the same ideas persuaded him the first time around.
Which is a great ending for that book, for the side of truth, justice, and the D&D way. A little less encouraging if you're talking about a 100x smarter 100x faster thing with access to the memories that made up everyone else, and its own opinion. How willing are you, to risk someone persuading you to self-improve, by something that knows how you tick?
There's a fun philosophical
experimentparable that may or may not have run on the old LessWrong. Or maybe I hallucinated it, but it's interesting enough that I'd be surprised. Imagine you were faced with an oracle that will make the maximally honest, persuasive, verifiable argument on a topic of your choice -- but which side, they pick by flipping a coin. It can't answer everything (or even everything that could be verified, if the questioner couldn't possibly verify it), and it won't persuade everyone... but very close to half of the people who ask it a question come out with their worldview irreversibly shaken or changed, and another very close to half come out dogmatic in their original belief.Do you ask it a question?
There's a fun writing prompt I've been trying to spell out: The Zip File Of You. What happens when the predictive machines can predict what you want, well before you do? They can't replace you, both because they do make (sometimes very stupid) errors and because, without the meat, there's nothing to demand the prediction, even if it could and would predict exactly the demand. But it's the end of the story as a story, because even nihilism or catatonia is just playing with the tool's own expectations. Instead, everyone that uses them lives life from a script, and that script includes the lines for those who refuse to use the machines.
Hard to make the horror stick, though. Paranoia Agent is a difficult tone to hit.
But then again, the LLMs don't seem to get the punchline, yet. Weird that Grok gets closer to the answer than Claude, though. Claude's a bit too much smarter than I am.
I'm sorry, but it's hilarious to me that Chatoyance ponyfic is getting posted to themotte, of all places. Not because I'm part of her substantial hatedom, but because rational fanfiction is without exaggeration one of the most intellectually influential literary movements of the 21st century, and notwithstanding that, it is substantially about ponies. And the mainstream literary establishment doesn't even realize that! Not even because they're constitutionally opposed to it, as they might be to right-wing or incel literature... But because it's compromised predominantly of middle aged women who would rather read about schizoid trans men than autistic trans women.
Is that entirely counting HPMOR though? Or were you referring to something else? I'm not sure any of the other rational fanfictions have had any kind of impact outside of their tiny niches
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