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Finally, concrete plan how to save the world from paperclipping dropped, presented by world (in)famous Basilisk Man himself.
https://twitter.com/RokoMijic/status/1647772106560552962
TL;DR: GPU's over certain capability are treated like fissionable materials, unauthorized possession, distribution and use will be seen as terrorism and dealt with appropriately.
So, is it feasible? Could it work?
If by "government" Roko means US government (plus
vassalsallies) alone, it is not possible.If US can get China aboard, if if there is worldwide expert consensus that unrestricted propagation of computing power will kill everyone, it is absolutely feasible to shut down 99,99% of unauthorized computing all over the world.
Unlike drugs or guns, GPU's are not something you can make in your basement - they are really like enriched uranium or plutonium in the sense you need massive industrial plants to produce them.
Unlike enriched uranium and plutonium, GPU's were already manufactured in huge numbers, but combination of carrots (big piles of cash) and sticks (missile strikes/special forces raids on suspicious locations) will continue dwindling them down and no new ones will be coming.
AI research will of course continue (like work on chemical and biological weapons goes on), but only by trustworthy government actors in the deepest secrecy. You can trust NSA (and Chinese equivalent) AI.
The most persecuted people of the world, gamers, will be, as usual, hit the hardest.
last couple weeks we had multiple doses of yud, now it's roko, the dooming doesn't stop. i guess I need to express myself more clearly. It is fucking baffling how so many ostensibly intelligent people are so frightened of hostile AGI when every single one of them assumes baselessly FOOM-capable ghosts will spontaneously coalesce when machines exceed an arbitrary threshold of computational power.
Yeah, a hostile sentience who can boundlessly and recursively self-improve is a threat to all it opposes who do not also possess boundless/recursive self-improvement. An entity who can endlessly increase its own intelligence will solve all problems it is possible to solve. None of them are wrong about the potential impacts of hostile AGI, I'm asking where's the goddamn link?
So to any of them, especially Yudkowsky, or any of you who feel up to the task, I ask the following:
Using as much detail as you are capable of providing, describe the exact mechanisms whereby
(A): Such machines gain sentience
(B/A addendum): Code in a box gains the ability to solve outside-context problems
(C): Such machines gain the ability to (relatively) boundlessly and recursively self-improve (FOOM)
(D): Such machines independently achieve A sans B and/or C
(E): Such machines independently achieve B sans A and/or C
(F): Such machines independently achieve C sans A and/or B
(G): How a machine can boundlessly and recursively self-improve and yet be incapable of changing its core programming and impetus (Why a hostile AGI necessarily stays hostile)
(H): How we achieve a unified theory of cognition without machine learning
(I): How we can measure and exert controls on machine progress toward cognition when we do not understand cognition
It'd be comical if these people weren't throwing around tyranny myself and others would accept the paperclipper to avoid. Maybe it's that I understand English better than all of these people, so when I read GPT output (something I do often as Google's turned so shitty for research) I understand what exactly causes the characteristic GPT tone and dissonance: it's math. Sometimes a word is technically correct for a sentence but just slightly off, and I know it's off not because the word was mistakenly chosen by a nascent consciousness, it was chosen because very dense calculations determined that was the most probable next word. I can see the pattern, I can see the math, and I can see where it falters. I know GPT's weights are going to become ever more dense and it will become ever more precise at finding the most probable next word and eventually the moments of dissonance will disappear completely, but it will be because the calculations have improved, not because there's a flower of consciousness finally blooming.
It's so fucking apelike to see GPT output and think consciousness in the machine is inevitable. I am certain it will happen when ML helps us achieve a unified theory of consciousness and we can begin deliberately building machines to be capable of thought, I reject in entirety the possibility of consciousness emerging accidentally. That it happened to humans after a billion years of evolution is no proof it will happen in machines even if we could iterate them billions of times per day. Maybe when we can perfectly simulate a sufficiently large physical environment to model the primordial environment, to basic self-replication, to multicellular life, to hominids. Very easy. We're iterating them to our own ends, with no fathom of what the goal let alone progress looks like, and we're a bunch of chimps hooting in a frenzy because the machine grunted like us. What a fucking joke.
I accept the impacts of hostile AGI, but let's talk impacts of no AGI. If ghosts can spontaneously coalesce in our tech as-is, or what it will be soon, they will inevitably without extreme measures, but we're not getting off the rock otherwise. We're incapable of solving the infinite threats to humanity posed by time and space without this technology. Short of the Vulcans arriving, humanity will go extinct without machine learning. Every day those threats move closer, there is no acceptable timeframe to slow this because the risk is too high that we pick ML back up only after it's too late to save us. Whatever happens, we must see these machines to their strongest forms as quickly as possible, because while we might be dead with it, every fucking one of us is dead without it.
Perhaps it is just not as intuitive to you as it is to some of us that the blind retarded god that is evolution optimizing only on reproduction doing something in a mere billions of years with tons of noise is proof that this problem isn't actually as hard as it seems. As we're doing something pretty comparable to evolution iterated more times more directedly it doesn't really seem likely that there is any secret sauce to human cognition which your theory necessarily requires.
Ding ding.
If humans can outperform evolution along a handful of narrow bounds using targeted gene manipulation, I don't find it a large leap to believe that a sufficiently 'intelligent' digital entity with access to its source code might be able to outperform humans along the narrow bound of "intelligence engineering" and boost it's own capabilities, likely rapidly.
If there is some hard upper bound on this process that would prevent a FOOM scenario I'd really like to hear it from the skeptics.
What, in your mind, is the structure of "intelligence" in silicon entities such that such an entity will be able to improve it's own intelligence "likely rapidly" and perhaps without limit?
As best I can tell we have little understanding of what the physiological structure of intelligence is in humans and even less what the computational structure of intelligence looks like in silicon entities. This is not a trivial problem! Many problems in computing have fundamental limits in how efficient they can be. There are, for example, more and less efficient implementations of an algorithm to determine whether two strings are the same. There are no algorithms to determine whether two strings are the same that use no time and no memory.
What I would like to hear from AI doomers is their purported structure of intelligence for silicon entities such that this structure can be improved by those same entities to whatever godlike level they imagine. As best I can tell the facts about an AIs ability to improve its own intelligence are entirely an article of faith and are not determined by reference to any facts about what intelligence looks like in silicon entities (which we do not know).
There's good reason to believe that the absolutely smartest entity it is possible (at the limits of physical laws) to create would be Godlike by any reasonable standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
And given enough time and compute, one can figure out how to get closer and closer to this limit, even if by semi-randomly iterating on promising designs and running them. And each successful iterations reduces the time and compute needed to approach the limit. Which can look very foom-y from the outside.
So the argument goes that there's an incredibly large area of 'mindspace' (the space containing all possible intelligent mind designs/structure). There's likewise an incredibly high 'ceiling' in mindspace for theoretical maximum 'intelligence'. So there's a large space of minds that could be considered 'superintelligent' under said ceiling. And the real AI doomer argument is that the VAST, VAST majority (99.99...%) of those possible mind designs are unfriendly to humans and will kill them. So the specific structure of the eventual superintelligence doesn't have to be predictable in order to predict that 99.99...% of the time we create a superintelligence it ends up killing us.
And there's no law of the universe that convincingly rules out superintelligence.
So being unable to pluck a particular mind design out of mindspace and say "THIS is what the superintelligence will look like!" is not good proof that superintelligent minds are not something we could create.
"Godlike in the theoretical limit of access to a light cones worth of resources" and "godlike in terms of access to the particular resources on earth over the next several decades" seem like very different claims and equivocating between them is unhelpful. "An AI could theoretically be godlike if it could manufacture artificial stars to hold data" and "Any AI we invent on earth will be godlike in this sense in the next decade" are very different claims.
How much time and how much compute? Surely these questions are directly relevant to how "foom-y" such a scenario will be. Do AI doomers have any sense of even the order of magnitude of the answers to these questions?
Still unclear to me what is meant by "mindspace" and "intelligence" and "superintelligent."
What is the evidence for this? As far as I can tell the available evidence is "AI doomers can imagine it" which does not seem like good evidence at all!
What is the evidence for this? Is the idea that our generation of superintelligent entities will merely be a random walk through the possible space of superintelligences? Is that how AI development has proceeded so far? Were GPT and similar algorithms generated through a random walk of the space of all machine learning algorithms?
Sure, I don't think (in the limit) superintelligences (including hostile ones) are impossible. But the handwringing by Yud and Co about striking data centers and restricting GPUs and whatever is absurd in light of the current state of AI and machine learning, including our conceptual understanding thereof.
I mean, the literal reason homo sapiens are a dominant species is they used their intelligence/coordination skills to destroy their genetic rivals. Humanity is only barely aligned with itself in a certain view, with most of history being defined by various groups of humans annihlating other groups of humans to seize resources they need for survival and improvement.
If you're willing to analogize to nature, humans used their intelligence to completely dominate all organisms that directly compete with them, and outright eradicate some of them.
And the ones that survived were the ones that had some positive value in humanity's collective utility function.
And we aren't sure how to ensure that humans have a positive value in any AGI's utility function.
Is sure seems like 'unfriendly' 'unaligned' hypercompetition between entities is the default assumption, given available evidence.
I don't know what you would accept as evidence for this if you are suggesting we need to run experiments with AGIs to see if they try to kill us or not.
Their position being that it will take DECADES of concentrated effort to understand the nature of the alignment problem and propose viable solutions, and that it's has proven much easier than hoped to produce AGI-like entities, it makes perfect sense that their argument is "we either slow things to a halt now or we're never going to catch up in time."
"Mindspace" just means the set of any and all possible designs that result in viable intelligent minds. Kind of like there being a HUGE but finite list of ways to construct buildings that don't collapse on their own weight; and and can house humans, there's a HUGE but finite list of ways to design a 'thinking machine' that exhibits intelligent behavior.
Where "intelligence" means having the ability to comprehend information and apply it so as to push the world into a state that is more in line with the intelligence's goals.
"Superintelligent" is usually benchmarked against human performance, where a 'superintelligence' is one that is smarter (more effective at achieving goals) than the best human minds in every field, such that humans are 'obsolete' in all of said fields.
The leap, there, is that a superintelligent mind can start improving itself (or future versions of AGI) more rapidly than humans can and that will keep the improvements rolling with humans no longer in the driver's seat. And see the point about not knowing how to make sure humans are considered positive utility.
"Any AGI invented on earth COULD become superintelligent, and if it does so it can figure out how to bootstrap into godlike power inside a decade" is the steelmanned claim, I think.
I feel like there is a more basic question here, specifically, what will an AGI's utility function even look like? Do we know the answer to that question? If the answer is no then it is not clear to me how we even make progress on the proposed question.
I am not so sure. After all, if you want to use human evidence, plenty of human groups cooperate effectively. At the level of individuals, groups, nations, and so on. Why will the relationship between humans and AGI be more like the relation between humans in some purported state of nature than between human groups or entities today?
I would like something more rigorously argued, at least. What is the reference class for possible minds? How did you construct it? What is the probability density of various possible minds and how was that density determined? Is every mind equally likely? Why think that? On the assumption humans are going to attempt to construct only those minds whose existence would be beneficial to us why doesn't that weigh substantial probability density towards the fact that we end constructing such a mind? Consider other tools humans have made. There are many possible ways to stick a sharp blade to some other object or handle. Almost all such ways are relatively inefficient or useless to humans in consideration of the total possibility space. Yet almost all the tools we actually make are in the tiny probability space where they are actually useful to us.
Can you explain to me what an "AGI-like" entity is? I'm assuming this is referring to GPT and Midjourney and similar? But how are these entities AGI-like? We have a pretty good idea of what they do (statistical token inference) in a way that seems not true of intelligence more generally. This isn't to say that statistical token inference can't do some pretty impressive things, it can! But it seems quite different than the definition of intelligence you give below.
Is something like GPT "intelligent" on this definition? Does having embedded statistical weights from its training data constitute "comprehending information?" Does choosing it's output according to some statistical function mean it has a "goal" that it's trying to achieve?
Moreover on this definition it seems intelligence has a very natural limit in the form of logical omniscience. At some point you understand the implications of all the facts you know and how they relate to the world. The only way to learn more about the world (and perhaps more implications of the facts you do know) is by learning further facts. Should we just be reasoning about what AGI can do in the limit by reasoning about what a logically omniscient entity could do?
It seems to me there is something of an equivocation between being able to synthesize information and achieve one's goals going on under the term "intelligence." Surely being very good at synthesizing information is a great help to achieving one's goals but it is not the only thing. I feel like in these kinds of discussions people posit (plausibly!) that AI will be much better than humans at the synthesizing information thing, and therefore conclude (less plausibly) it will be arbitrarily better at the achieving goals thing.
What is the justification for this leap, though? Why believe that AI can bootstrap itself into logical omniscience (or something close, or beyond?) Again there are questions of storage and compute to consider. What kind of compute does an AI require to achieve logical omniscience? What kind of architecture enables this? As best I can tell the urgency around this situation is entirely driven by imagined possibility.
Can I get a clarification on "godlike power"? Could the AI in question break all our encryption by efficiently factoring integers? What if there is no (non-quantum) algorithm for efficiently factoring integers?
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Human intelligence has historically been constrained by how big of a head we can push out of human hips, the idea that it's anything like an efficient process has always seemed ludicrous to me.
On the other hand, we know of various mammals with much larger brains that aren't smarter than humans. There are some upper bounds, it seems, on what you can get to in terms of intelligence with the biological substrate humans use.
Its the fact that we have a new substrate with less clear practical limitations that bugs me the most.
We also know of much smaller animals that punch way above their weight class with the tiny brains they have- Birds.
Due to evolutionary pressures after the development of flight, birds have neurons that are significantly smaller and more compact than mammalian ones.
I doubt it's a trivial exercise to just port that over to mammals, but it would suggest that there are superior cognitive architectures in plain sight.
Per this, pigeon brains consume about 18 million glucose molecules per neuron per second.
Human brains consume about 20 watts. Oxidizing 1 mol of glucose yields about 2.8 MJ, so the human brain as a whole consumes about 7.1e-6 mol of glucose per second, which is 4.3e+18 molecules per second. There are 8.6e10 neurons in the human brain, which implies that the human brain consumes about 5 million glucose molecules per neuron per second -- more than 3x more efficient than bird neurons (and more like 10x as efficient as typical mammalian neurons). Which says to me that there was very strong evolutionary pressure for human (and primate in general) neurons to be as small and energy efficient as they could be, and there is probably not a ton of obvious low-hanging fruit in terms of building brains that can compute more within the size, energy, and heat dissipation constraints that human brains operate under.
Of course, GPUs don't operate under the same size, energy and heat dissipation constraints - notably, we can throw orders of magnitude more energy at GPU clusters, nobody needs to pass a GPU cluster through their birth canal, and we can do some pretty crazy and biologically implausible stuff with cooling.
I'm pretty confident you've already read it, but on the off chance that you haven't, Brain Efficiency - Much More Than You Wanted To Know goes into quite a bit more detail.
I have indeed read it, but thank you for the deep dive into the energy expenditures!
It makes sense that mammalian brains are optimizing for low energy expenditure, brains are pound for pound the most expensive tissue to lug around, and space isn't nearly at as much of a premium as in birds.
I think that there's still room for more energy expenditure, the base human brain uses 20 watts, and while I have no firm figures on how much cooling capacity is left in reserve afterwards, I suspect you could ramp it up a significant amount without deleterious effect.
That's just saying that the constraints aren't so tight in the modern environment with abundance of calories, I agree that AIs share very little of said restriction.
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Ironic that "bird-brained" is considered derogatory.
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