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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".
I think it would be bad if psychos got help from AIs to plan and carry out terror attacks. What does the world look like when anyone has the expertise necessary to carry out a sarin attack on the subway? To paraphrase, the optimal number of sarin attacks is not zero, but I doubt that people will accept it being very high without demanding that something is done.
I think the argument there is that for every 1 guy who would want to do a Sarin gas attack, there are 100,000 people whose GAs would be devoting their efforts to not letting their user get killed in a Sarin gas attack.
If coordination between the non-murdery agents is effective, then they should be able to detect and prevent the attack, or at least predict the risk and warn their user. "50% chance of nerve agent release on the subway today, better pack your gas mask!"
What does that look like?
Send that agent back to training. You can avoid sarin gas poisoning with proper PPE, but you need more than a gas mask - you'll need to wear a level A hazmat suit with a SCUBA setup (the gas can get you through the skin). Perhaps you believe that this is a future that people are going to be OK with? A conversation with the median voter may correct this impression.
GAs that notice/monitor the manufacturing and shipping of precursors to nerve agents seeing some activity that might indicate someone in a given geographical area might be trying to make something nasty.
Or GAs monitoring military supplies notice a report that some chemicals have gone missing.
GAs monitoring social media notice that a particular guy with a background in chemistry started posting schizo content and then went dark a month ago.
So they send someone around to go check on the guy.
Imagine, if you can, how a neighborhood watch group might figure out that one of the houses in their 'hood is being used to cook meth. Then scale that up to constantly vigilant electronic entities that can track most electronic activity, monitor cameras, and (possibly) hack into personal communications.
No, I'm just making a tongue in cheek point about how an effective Guardian Angel AI should be able to help someone properly assess the risk of leaving their house on a given day, in much the way you can ask your Alexa about traffic in the area and the weather forecast (that's what I use mine for, at least!).
For instance if your GA was to say "heightened risk of extreme flooding today, 10% chance we get a flash flood while you're on the road!" are you going to:
A) Stay home.
B) Put on a life jacket to drive to work.
C) Slap a boat on the trailer and pull that around just in case.
Which level of precaution makes sense?
That's YOUR call to make, ideally, we're just assuming semi-omniscient trustworthy agents that can warn you of hazards before you encounter them.
Self-driving cars should mitigate the risk of fatal car accidents to almost nothing, at least.
This isn't public information and it doesn't do anything about prevention.
This doesn't do anything about prevention.
That guy doesn't have to post schizo content on Reddit dot com because he's chatting with his GA. You don't hear about him until it's too late.
There's plenty of houses in which people cook meth without detection. The societal downside risk of cooking a batch of meth is significantly smaller than that of cooking a batch of WMDs.
Nah, hacking is not going to happen when every public facing system has been hardened by Mythos+ tier intelligences, and you're certainly not going to be able to outcompete those with your GA running on your clapped out netbook.
Perhaps you should instead consider what the politics of this would actually look like and have a serious discussion.
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