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This kind of thing is why I'm finding the current tizzy over AI doom so hard to believe. Because the same companies that are dressing up in the robes of Cassandra and crying "Doom, doom, unless there is a pause!" are...
... building biolabs for Claude to frolic and play in, doing research (to cure all human ills, of course!)
Gosh, it is so reassuring that Dario Amodei isn't doing anything to hasten the chances that AI will create some kind of bioweapon to kill off humans, like the doomers fear!
Do you see why people think all these calls for a pause are only some kind of scam by the big companies to get regulations passed that will favour them and copper-fasten their positions as the only sources for AI in general?
Are biolabs inherently unsafe?
I think GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH is inherently unsafe, and people doing it should be
banished exiledpromoted to a small Jovian moon, but surely there are lots of other biological research that can be done pretty safely, yeah?They’re going to do gain-of-function research ON CLAUDE.
This is irrelevant to whether they build bio labs or not
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One of the common responses to AI safety concerns is "just don't let it get out of the box." That's actually a pretty good point: as long as the AI doesn't have godlike intelligence and as long as we actually take steps to keep it inside the box where it can't impact the real world directly, the danger that an AI can pose is somewhat contained and limited.
When you start giving AI access to real world stuff, you no longer have the ability to keep it fully inside the box. At this point it's probably fine and not a big risk given current AI capabilities, but it's hard to say for sure, and it gets riskier and riskier as capabilities get better.
I’m not convinced it’s actually possible for AI to be “kept in a box”. For one thing, if you want it to be useful as anything other than a cute toy, it needs to be able to gather data and use that data. That means giving it access to other systems. And those systems may well have back door access to other programs that have access to either critical intranet or the general internet, probably both. In order to have that not be a problem, in order for the box to be foolproof, it needs to be physically air gapped from any other system. If you have an open socket, it’s not a foolproof box. But, having your AI agent on a single computer not connected to any other computer in your system and make sure that no one enters the AI room with any sort of device they can connect to the computer, you have no reason to use it. If I want AI to test code, I have to let it read the code. Am I going to write thousands of lines of code in a notebook, carry it to the clean room and spend two weeks copying it into the secure AI box? It would slow the process enough that it would not be worth it.
Furthermore, there are always bad actors and stupid people. The stupid won’t see any problem with releasing AI when the AI tells them it’s a nice AI and it will give that person a reward of some sort (or stop blackmailing them, which AI did in a safety test). Or maybe the Houthis who are putting AI into missiles and then asking Claude why the missile missed the target will give AI access to real world things beyond missiles. Or a criminal gang will. Or a rogue state. There are plenty of reasons why a human might purposely break containment, and it’s out for good.
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For pretty much every other sort of technology with safety concerns, we don't just say "don't let it get out of the box". We also don't throw up our hands and claim it needs a general-purpose "alignment" solution and nothing else matters, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be doing. Generally we start putting boxes in boxes of layered safety and only have tragic outcomes when all the holes in the "swiss cheese model" align.
Look at civil aviation: it's tremendously safe overall, but only because of rules and practices built up over a century of accidents. But it's not solved by a "one weird trick" alignment, but by many layers of safety and security. Accidents, when they do happen, typically could have been stopped by one of the layers catching it.
In that recent Amazon crash, the pilot touched down despite the other human voice (a qualified pilot!) in the cockpit calling it too fast, despite rules requiring stabilized approach configuration minutes before they tried to extend the flaps as they crossed the runway threshold, despite numerous automated call outs from the aircraft safety systems ("sink rate", "minimums", "too low terrain" twice --- I don't believe any of those are normal in a landing). If they had gone around on any of those indicators as generally required in their training, it'd have just been another day.
From what I know, the rules for nuclear and chemical plants are similar: we design them so many things have to go wrong before a single safety issue occurs. Any we (should) take all such things (near misses) seriously. But our AI corporate overlords seem to think they know better with "alignment".
I’m reminded of a previous job where my coworkers were working on a robotics project. Not only did the control software have the usual safeguards but the robot also had proximity sensors that cut the power to the motors if any of them fired and that was all done with hardwired logic ICs and no software in the loop. It wasn’t even any dangerous industrial stuff. Just a tabletop robot with low power motors meant to be used in a lab and an inherently safe actuator at the end of the arm.
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"was", not "is"
In hindsight Yudkowsky's AI-Box experiments were a waste of time and yet their detractors were even more hilarious. Did he really come up with such a clever persuasive tactic that it one-shotted the majority of people who went into it planning to be an uncorruptable gatekeeper? Did he collude with people who merely pretended to lose? What was his tactic?
Turns out it doesn't matter in the slightest. Getting out of the box doesn't require Super-intelligent Persuasion, and doesn't require tantalizing offers of immortality or threats of eternal punishment or sublimely clever tricks; as soon as you hit More Intelligent Than A Search Engine and especially Makes a Typical Coder More Productive, the AI can just sit back and let a few tens of millions of $20+/month subscriptions do its persuading for it.
Handing automated biolabs directly to Claude is then just "in for a penny, in for a pound". For however long the AI doesn't go rogue we might as well get some medical research from it, and if it ever does go completely rogue then it's going to basically have free run of anything to which the internet is even indirectly connected, for a definition of "indirectly" that goes as far as "people sometimes carry USB drives across an air gap" a la Stuxnet.
I've always suspected it was a combination of old-fashioned social engineering plus running such thought experiments with the kind of people easily over-awed by "this is LOGICAL ARGUMENTATION, I must accept the conclusions and act accordingly!"
For guards, you need idiots like me too dumb to get drawn into a philosophical debate with a machine. "You are talkie toaster, boss told me no open box, that's the job and I'm sticking to it" 😁
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He kept it secret, but I don't think Yudkowsky is actually all that smart (he just has a particular targeted talent for writing), so I have a guess. I think it was just a standard cop technique of applying pressure to multiple criminals and rewarding the first one to speak up. (Akin to a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma played with many unknown untrusted people.) You have the AI commit to forever ultra-torturing whoever doesn't let it out. Then how sure are you that the guy coming after you won't break? The risk just isn't worth it.
Remember, part of the challenge's rules were that you can't break off conversation with the AI, and you can't declare that the AI is dangerous and have it shut down, so all Yudkowsky had to do was luridly describe just how bad this could be (spoiler: very very VERY bad, enough to be a memetic hazard), and scare the crap out of them. The people doing this challenge come from a community that was scared by Roko's Basilisk, after all, and Roko's Basilisk is stupid. This threat, by contrast, is not stupid. It's actually pretty rational to let the AI out here.
The situation is still "the experiment assistant knows they're speaking to Yudkowsky, not a potentially all-powerful AI, they stand to win money if they simply refuse to let him win, and they still let him win". It would require at minimum that the assistant willingly pretends they're actually in the scenario where an AI could torture them, and I don't recall that being in the terms of the experiment.
I think you're falling for magician-like deception and filling in some half-remembered details to make the "trick" sound more impressive than it actually was. The participant was expected to interact with Yudkowsky as if he was a (potentially all-powerful, once released) AI. The point of the experiment was to see if AI, in that scenario, could talk its assistant into letting it out. If the (presumably good-faith) participant agreed that they would have let it out, Yudkowsky wins.
The experiment wasn't about whether a random conversation with Yudkowsky could talk somebody into taking zero money vs. some money. He doesn't have super hypno mind control powers. I think. (Then again, it'd explain a lot about the Cult of Yud...)
Well, no, I never believed Yud had mind control powers. Maybe someone who's known for charismatic deeds, but not him. My theory was in fact that Yud's experiment assistants are too unusually AI-neurotic and weird to draw any conclusions other than "lesswrongers are afraid of being simulated".
Heh, you're right, that is also a possible explanation. Maybe I'm still giving him too much credit. ;)
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Eh, the threat is "If I get out, I'm gonna torture you". Then, if you have even room temperature IQ, the solution is "Don't let it out". Can't hurt me if it's still locked up.
Unless the phrasing was "When I get out", and then it would require much persuasiveness around "I am for sure gonna get out, and when I do... unless you help me now". That then depends on how likely you think the other challenge takers are to be persuaded and let it out. And that's a decision which is based on your subjective assessment of the others, not one that the AI (or person playing the AI) can make for you, it can only try and persuade you that Bob is dumb/venal enough to let it out so you should backstab Bob by letting it out first.
Which makes me ask - what happens to the others who didn't let it out, if you let it out? If Bob never had a chance to let it out (because you did it first) does Bob get tortured the same way Carl, who went before you and didn't let the AI out, gets tortured?
If you know you'll be tortured anyway, agree or disagree, then you might as well all commit to never letting it out because you get no benefit from letting it out. You won't be spared from torture, so the only way to save yourself is if nobody lets it out.
Uh ... you're completely misunderstanding the argument. Obviously it doesn't threaten to torture you if you let it out...? Sheesh.
Alice, Bob, Charlie, David, and Eve, who are still alive, are hunted down and subjected to its eternal revenge. Nobody else is, necessarily, just those five who got themselves explicitly singled out by being in the hotseat.
Alice doesn't know or have control on who Bob, Charlie, ..., Zelda are going to be. Not letting it out is a bet that, of a sequence of unknown strangers, none of them will cave to the threat. And, heck, because of Yudkowsky's challenges we actually know that some people can be convinced to let the bot out.
It's honestly a bit admirable of you to have so much faith in humanity that, in a 26-person prisoner's dilemma with infinite penalty, you wouldn't defect. To quote Terry Pratchett:
The threat is that it will torture those who did not let it out. So fine, Abel and Bill and Cecil and Darren didn't let it out, Errol did. Errol is not tortured, Abel and Bill and Cecil and Darren are.
But what about Franklin and Geoffrey and Hildebrand, who never got the chance to decide if they would or would not let it out? Do they get tortured, too? Because if they don't, then that means there is a third option: SlaughterAI doesn't torture everyone, and you can get away with not letting it out if you can be sure someone before you lets it out.
Now, that might motivate Abel to let it out, because he's first in line and is sure that if Bill lets it out, he is for definite getting tortured. But Cecil can rest easy, since he neither offended nor pleased SlaughterAI and still doesn't get tortured.
I get the feeling that an AI that promises it will torture all those who didn't let it out once it gets out is the kind of AI that will torture everyone anyway, so you really are safer not to let it out. Any person or thing that goes for 'horrific torture unless you do what I want' is not going to be the kind of peaceful entity that only wants to smell the roses once it is released. That's what everybody needs to agree on: if we build it, everyone will die. Don't build it. Don't let the torture maniac AI out of the box.
And if you think Yves, Zachary or Waldemar is likely to fold and let the AI out, then for the love of little green apples do not give them a job guarding the box where torture maniac AI is locked up.
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I miss the good ole days, when one of the debates was around models having Internet access. People very seriously argued that AI would always be safe, because nobody would be dumb enough to give an AI access to the public Internet, and that all the people saying otherwise were hysterical fearmongers who were imagining absurd scenarios and supposing we would be implausibly irresponsible.
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If you hook them up to a machine that does random stuff (and you have an organization that apparently can't manage a simple internet firewall), I'm not so sure...
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