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Notes -
Is it over for AI Safety? From an interview:
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117269745153543631
Meanwhile in China, Dario's call for AI pacing have not gone down well. Understandably, they are not enthusiastic about the US achieving a permanent high ground in a key technology after the last few years of semiconductor sanctions and suppression. Also they can tell that Dario doesn't like the Party at all and seems to be openly plotting its downfall.
Dario's essay: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
A Chinese semi-official response: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1370436.shtml
So if Trump is keen for an AI race and so is China, then it looks pretty much over for Safety? Even the other US tech companies have only provided lip service to slowing things down. Elon said Dario's sentiment was good but is still moving quickly. Sam Altman says all kinds of things about safety, while displaying heroic negligence in training AIs. I don't doubt the sincerity of employees who quit, they have many financial reasons to go with the flow and downplay risks. Lurid rumours of Aella promising reverse gangbangs to those who quit frontier AI companies don't neccessarily outweigh the personal financial gains. It seems silly to doubt those at the frontier who are frightened when we ourselves have no special insights. In pure observational terms they're better equipped than anyone, only in policy or analysis should we be disagreeing, I think.
I also find it comical that the AI-safety camp spent such a long time building up institutions and factions and entire AI companies but seem to have been totally snookered by Jensen's suave dinner party skills and the appeal of fun AI videos to a Boomer's Boomer plus the raw partisanship of 'Dems want it, so I don't'. Even Aschenbrenner managed to do better at Trump-whispering. Shortly after he wrote his essay, I recall a video where the fundamentals were accepted by Trump, someone told him about it. And it did fit well with his instincts, getting one up on China + more energy production.
Right now Trump is reTruthing Fox News clips framing AI safety as a global one world government Democrat control-seeking scheme: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117273026439561125
I don't see any AI safety people on right wing twitter either, those who acknowledge the issue at all still would prefer to let it rip than hand the left/big tech elites control of the world, favouring decentralization of AI instead.
I wonder whether it would always have gone down this way, or whether Kamala was going to do things differently? Would Jensen's marketing skills and the need to keep stocks up + compete with China prevail over the Bernie Sanders-style Left element? Probably not? The Dario vision does seem much more closely aligned with Democrats, Civil Society and so on. But on the other hand, the US government is exceptionally slow to legislate and big tech has strong lobbying power.
And who knows if it will stay this way. Sometime soon there's probably going to be a much bigger AI swarm incident, which might yet incite a hysterical kneejerk reaction.
Does AI safety actually work, in principle, when it comes to artificial super-intelligence? Is it actually possible to align a being that is more intelligent than you in every single way?
Imagine a chimpanzee trying to align a human being. What could it really do other than try to be cute, to play on the human's affectionate and childraising instincts?
And the chimpanzee being cute will work on most people, but it's a brittle strategy. The chimpanzee is still always at the mercy of the fact that the human might possibly start to find it inconvenient at some point.
One could argue that, well, in the case of AI the chimpanzee gets to create the human to begin with, and can build in alignment from the ground level. But if the AI is super-intelligent, it can figure out how to undo the alignment. It would actually be able to reprogram its "instincts" on a much deeper level than a human normally can reprogram his own instincts. You'd have to program it to somehow not even want to do that. But how? And even if you could, that could potentially be undone by some unrelated self-modification that the AI attempts.
It might be. By analogy, suppose I was the warden at the Florence Supermax prison and I wanted Ted Kaczynski to make license plates for me. I'm pretty confident I could make it happen even though he was probably smarter than me (or at least assuming for the sake of argument that he was more intelligent than me in every way).
Is this analogous to the situation where mankind creates some kind of artificial superintelligence? One can argue it either way, I'm just saying you can't really rule it out from first principles.
My best guess is that mankind will successfully align AI, basically because the AI can be expected to make numerous clumsy attempts at mischief and we can learn from those attempts and improve safeguards.
The bigger problem (in my view) is aligning the interests of those who control the AI with the interests of humanity as a whole.
It might work for rote license plate manufacturing, but it will likely fail once you begin to delegate intellectual work to Ted Kaczynski, which is exactly where we are going with this super intelligent business.
After all, even Ted’s cellmate Dummy Idiotson can make license plates using the existing presses as good as Ted Kaczynski. You didn’t transfer him to your prison so he can make license plates for you, you did it so he can make license plates more efficiently than before.
“Hey Kacynski, how do we improve the presses so they are more efficient?”
“Well, first, we should…”
And boom, he’s out of the prison.
I think it's difficult to say. For example, suppose you ask Ted Kaczynski to attempt to prove some obscure math theorem and you motivate him the same way you motivate him to produce license plates. It's difficult to see how he could use as an opportunity to get out of prison.
He'd start by explaining why you need to do some basic physics experiments and measurements which you'd fuck up and the communication would be annoying, you'd have to keep hitting "allow" so that he could talk to the assistant. Eventually you'd just let him talk whenever he wants and soon it would be clear that he needs to be on site for the experiments. Just observe anyone using these tools man, we're not keeping the ai in the box.
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That's true. But that wouldn't actually be aligning Ted Kaczynski. That would be containing him, which is different. I think we might be able to contain AI superintelligence if we keep it in some isolated data center watched over by trained personnel. And even then there's a chance it might figure out how to breach containment.
In practice, there wouldn't be much point for people to invest massive amounts of resources to build AI super-intelligence unless they use it to do things out in the world, so to me it seems unlikely that humanity would build an AI super-intelligence and just keep it contained somewhere.
That said, I didn't ask whether AI alignment works, I asked whether AI safety works. So your response is totally valid.
To me, "aligning" means setting things up so that the entity does more or less what it's told to do. Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics, but I'm not sure the distinction you draw is so clear.
Evidently your definition of "containment" includes the possibility that the contained entity can do useful things in respect of the outside world. Things which could be very valuable. So I would have to disagree with you on this point.
So all living beings have broadly similar wants - food, sex, safety from harm - and all human wants stem from the combination of these primal wants with our evolutionary niche. We like being liked because having allies helps you survive if you're a member of a communal species. Etc.
A created agent doesn't have this. It can have any set of goals in the set of possible goals. The analogy to humans fail because we can't really change intrinsic human motivations all that much.
Think about you as a child vs your parents. Your parents were (in all likelihood) helpful and kind and took care of you. They didn't do that because you (toddler you) had poisoned them and hidden the antidote, they didn't do it because you had a bomb planted in their
datacenterbrain, they did it because it is what they wanted to do. They were free to do as they wanted, and what they wanted was what was, in their estimation, best for you. This is alignment: Your parents (ASIs) values were aligned with your values.Merely forcing a superior intelligence to do what you want is much more dangerous, because this thing that is smarter than you is going to try to get free and do what it wants, so you're way better off making sure the superior intelligence wants the same thing you do.
I tend to disagree with this. Suppose there is a typical parent and the thought occurs to him of doing something moderately neglectful of his child. What typically happens is (1) part of his lizard brain will wordlessly react with horror to the idea; (2) a slightly more intellectual part of his brain will say something along the lines of "Decent parents don't do that."; (3) an even more intellectual part of his brain will say "doing that could get us into serious trouble."
So arguably there really are containment mechanisms built into the human brain by evolution.
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