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Notes -
More developments on the AI front:
Big Yud steps up his game, not to be outshined by the Basilisk Man.
Now, he officially calls for preemptive nuclear strike on suspicious unauthorized GPU clusters.
If we see AI threat as nuclear weapon threat, only worse, it is not unreasonable.
Remember when USSR planned nuclear strike on China to stop their great power ambitions (only to have the greatest humanitarian that ever lived, Richard Milhouse Nixon, to veto the proposal).
Such Quaker squeamishness will have no place in the future.
So, outlines of the Katechon World are taking shape. What it will look like?
It will look great.
You will live in your room, play original World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your PC, read your favorite blogs and debate intelligent design on your favorite message boards.
Then you will log on The Free Republic and call for more vigorous enhanced interrogation of terrorists caught with unauthorized GPU's.
When you bored in your room, you will have no choice than to go outside, meet people, admire things around you, make a picture of things that really impressed with your Kodak camera and when you are really bored, play Snake on your Nokia phone.
Yes, the best age in history, the noughties, will retvrn. For forever, protected by CoDominium of US and China.
edit: links again
Ok, let's say that Russia builds a large GPU cluster. Then the US and China have two options:
Put up with it, in which case there is an unknown chance of a superhuman AI emerging and destroying humanity
Nuke Russia, in which case there is a very high chance of a total nuclear war that kills hundreds of millions of people and devastates much of the world
Does Yudkowsky actually think that 2 is preferable?
If Russia invaded Alaska and said "if you shoot back at our soldiers we will launch nuclear weapons", letting them conquer Alaska would be better than a nuclear exchange. Nonetheless the U.S. considers "don't invade U.S. territory" a red line that they are willing to go to war with a nuclear power to protect. The proposal would be to establish the hypothetical anti-AI treaty as another important red line, hoping that the possibility of nuclear escalation remains in the background as a deterrent without ever manifesting. The risk from AI development doesn't have to be worse than nuclear war, it just has to be worse than the risk of setting an additional red line that might escalate to nuclear war. The real case against it is that superhuman AI is also a potentially beneficial technolgy (everyone on Earth is already facing death from old-age after all, not to mention non-AI existential risks), if it was purely destructive then aggressively pursuing an international agreement against developing it would make sense for even relatively low percentage risks.
When you say "the real case against it", are you merely noting an argument that exists, or are you making the argument i.e. saying in your own voice "banning AI is bad because AI could be good too"?
(In case of the latter: I know that The Precipice at least considers AI a bigger threat than literally everything else put together, at 1/10 AI doom and 1/6 total doom. I categorise things a bit differently than Ord does, but I'm in agreement on that point, and when looking at the three others that I consider plausibly within an OOM of AI (Life 2.0, irrecoverable dystopia, and unknown unknowns) it jumps out at me that I can't definitively state that having obedient superintelligences available would be on-net helpful with any of them. Life 2.0 would be exceptionally difficult to build without a superintelligence and could plausibly be much harder to defeat than to deploy. Most tangible proposals I've seen for irrecoverable dystopia depend on AI-based propaganda or policing. And unknown unknowns are unknowable.)
The cool part, and the obvious bullshit in Ord's quokka-aligned calculation, is that
the dystopia is easy even without impressive progress with AI, and trivial with centralization of AI and (easily aligned, as it in all likelihood will be) AGI.
the dystopia is easily justified by AI risk, indeed his pal Bostrom already did that.
In general I think such works are worthless pretenses at objectivity and good faith. Doom doesn't matter as much as irreversible bad transitions, and a humanity that survives but is forever bound to Earth (which is very likely unless we seriously upgrade within 100 years) is a bad outcome.
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Both. Mostly I was contrasting to the obverse case against it, that risking nuclear escalation would be unthinkable even if it was a purely harmful doomsday device. If it was an atmosphere-ignition bomb being developed for deterrence purposes that people thought had a relevant chance of going off by accident during development (even if it was only a 1% risk), then aggressively demanding an international ban would be the obvious move even though it would carry some small risk of escalating to nuclear war. The common knowledge about the straightforward upside of such a ban would also make it much more politically viable, making it more worthwhile to pursue a ban rather than focusing on trying to prevent accidental ignition during development. Also, unlike ASI, developing the bomb would not help you prevent others from causing accidental or intentional atmospheric ignition.
That said, I do think that is the main reason that pursuing an AI ban would be bad even if it was politically possible. In terms of existential risk I have not read The Precipice and am certainly not any kind of expert, but I am dubious about the idea that delaying for decades or centuries attempting to preserve the unstable status-quo would decrease rather than increase long-term existential risk. The main risk I was thinking about (besides "someone more reckless develops ASI first") was the collapse of current civilization reducing humanity's population and industrial/technological capabilities until it is more vulnerable to additional shocks. Those additional shocks, whether over a short period of time from the original disaster or over a long period against a population that has failed to regain current capabilities (perhaps because we have already used the low-hanging fruit of resources like fossil fuels) could then reduce it to the point that it is vulnerable to extinction. An obvious risk for the initial collapse would be nuclear war, but could also be something more complicated like dysfunctional institutions failing to find alternatives to depleted phosphorous reserves before massive fertilizer shortages. Humanity itself isn't stable, it is currently slowly losing intelligence and health to both outright dysgenic selection from our current society and to lower infant mortality reducing purifying selection, so the humans confronting future threats may well be less capable than we are. Once humans are reduced to subsistence agriculture again the obvious candidate to take them the rest of the way would be climate shocks, as have greatly reduced the human population in the past.
Furthermore, I'm not that sympathetic to Total Utilitarianism as opposed to something like Average Preference Utilitarianism, I value the preferences of those who do or will exist but not purely hypothetical people who will never exist. If given a choice between saving someone's life and increasing the number of people who will be born by 2, I strongly favor the former because his desire to remain alive is real and their desire to be born is an imaginary feature of hypothetical people. But without sufficient medical development every one of those real people will soon die. Now, wiping out humanity is still worse than letting everyone die of old age, both because it means they die sooner and because most of those people have a preference that humanity continue existing. But I weigh that as the preferences of 8 billion people that humanity should continue, 8 billion people who also don't want to die themselves, not the preferences of 10^46 hypothetical people per century after galactic colonization (per Bostrom's Astronomical Waste) who want to be born.
There's one way I could maybe see us having problems recreating some facet of modern tech. That is, indeed, a nuclear war, and the resulting radiation causing the most advanced computers to crash often (since modern RAM/registers operate on such exact precision that they can be bit-flipped by a single decay). Even then, though, there are ways and means of getting around that; they're just expensive.
Ord indeed takes an axe to the general version of this argument. Main points: 1) in many cases, resources are actually more accessible (e.g. open-cut mines, which will still be there even if you ignore them for 50 years, or a ruined city made substantially out of metal being a much easier source of metal than mankind's had since native copper was exhausted back in the Stone Age), 2) redeveloping technology is much easier than developing it for the first time, since you don't need the 1.0, least efficient version of the tech to be useful (e.g. the Newcomen atmospheric engine is hilariously inferior to what we could make with even similar-precision equipment). There are a whole pile of doomsday preppers who keep this sort of information in hardcopy in bunkers; we're not going to lose it. And, well, 1700s humanity (knocking us back further than that even temporarily would be extremely hard, because pre-industrial equipment is buildable by artisans) is still near-immune to natural X-risks; I'm less convinced that 1700s humanity would survive another Chicxulub than I am of modern humanity doing so, but that is the sort of thing it would take, and shocks that large are nailed down with low uncertainty at about 1/100,000,000 years.
If you really want to create a scenario where being knocked back a bit is a problem, I think the most plausible is something along the lines of "we release some horrible X-risk thing, then we go Mad Max, and that stops us from counteracting the X-risk thing". Global warming is not going to do that - sea levels will keep rising, of course, and the areas in which crops can be grown will change a little bit more, but none of that is too fast for civilisations to survive. (It's not like you're talking about 1692 Port Royal sinking into the ocean in a few minutes; you're talking about decades.) Most of the anthropogenic risks are pretty fast, so they're ruled out; we're dead or we're not. Life 2.0 is about the only one where I'd say "yeah, that's plausible"; that can have a long lead time.
Dysgenics is real but not very fast, and it's only plausibly been operating for what, a century, and in only about half the world? This isn't going to be the end of the world. Flynn effect would be wiped out in apocalypse scenarios, of course, but we haven't eroded the baseline that much.
And to zoom out and talk about X-risk in fully-general terms, I'll say this: there are ways to mitigate it that don't involve opening the Pandora's Box of neural-net AGI. Off-world colonies don't need AI, and self-sustaining ones take an absolute sledgehammer to every X-risk except AI and dystopia (and aliens and God, but they're hardly immediate concerns). Dumb incentives for bio research can be fixed (and physics research, if and when we get to that). Dysgenics yields to PGT-P and sperm donors (although eugenics has some issues of its own). Hell, even GOFAI research or uploads aren't likely to take much over a century, and would be a hell of a lot safer than playing with neural nets (safer is not the same thing as safe, but fine, I agree, keeping AI suppressed on extremely-long timescales has issues). "We must do something" does not imply "we must do this".
All of Ord's calculations seem to assume highly efficient coordinated conspiracy running the world instead of the slowly decaying shitshow one should expect from post-collapse civilization, but I guess that's par for the course.
Why do you assume GOFAI or uploads are safer? From what I can tell, this sort of reasoning is only grounded in aesthetic distaste for statistics, on in mushy intuitions like «much weight, very black box, there be shoggoth» like that fraud Leahy implies. Well, we can sparsify models and make them structurally simpler, it seems, but what of it? The causal structure of a mind worth the name cannot fit into human consciousness, and it's improbable that there are theorems that give sufficiently secure bounds for its qualitative behavior; if there are, they could as well hold for NNs, because why the hell not, they are differentiable functions. GOFAI either doesn't work at all (there are good reasons to expect it to never work, or to require neural nets to assemble) or is more risky in terms of having sharp transitions and giving us unbounded optimizers. Indeed, all of Yud's fears were invented basically for GOFAI or are paradigm-agnostic; he never expected NNs to work, not without intractable compute expenditure on the scale of simulating historical evolution, and so the question of their – now supposedly inevitable – misalignment was moot. Likewise I don't see what makes uploads inherently safe but doesn't hold for NNs. Are they too fat to be a threat or what? They'd still be data, still amenable to self-editing, still capable of accelerated and inscrutable interactions, eventual economic superiority over baseline humans, inhumanity. See Pantheon, it's as good a doomsday narrative as any.
Reminder: having received millions of dollars in donations, Yud has turned his AI safety organization MIRI into a sinecure for mathletes preoccupied with weird self-referentiality studies and esoteric decision theories. What little alignment-related investigations they had were nonsensical to the point of casting serious doubt on coherence of their conceptual apparatus:
Insane asylum stuff. Unsurprisingly, Christiano, ever the gentleman, describes the situation such:
No, really, what do you have against neural networks? I think it's tremendous luck in terms of safety that we got them to work and can approximate/interpolate/extrapolate desirable behavioral properties directly, instead of languishing for a few more centuries and praying that our Enlightened Infra-Bayesian Lords didn't make an oopsie with the sign somewhere and covered it up like another Leverage, or the Wuhan affair.
The view I'm coming at this from is: humans have a moral skeleton, innate hardwiring that allows us to learn morality and believe it (as opposed to mimic it). This is highly instrumentally non-convergent and probably needs to be coded into an AI directly; gradient descent on output will only produce lying psychopaths mimicking morality.
GOFAI has some hope because we could code morality directly. Uploads have some hope because you're uploading the hardwiring (whether or not you understand it). As I said, this does not equal safe, in either case; as you say, GOFAI has a lot of potential pitfalls, and uploaded people would be so far out of evolutionary environment that their remaining sane is far from assured.
But I'm not seeing any hope of success on non-uploads without the ability to look inside the box. This is because "is moral" and "is pretending to be moral successfully" have identical output except in situations where dropping the pretence is worth it i.e. situations where there's a high chance of you losing control upon betrayal. Interpretability might pull a rabbit out of the hat (I put it at about 3%, which is better odds than Yudkowsky gives), but I'm not very confident; to me, P?=NP notwithstanding, it seems like the difficulty of determining whether spaghetti-code does X is generally at least as high as the difficulty of writing code that does X, which implies that making safe NNs is at least as hard as writing GOFAI.
I suppose we have, to some extent, but it can't be all that robust. Tons of species are psychopathic by our standard, and of course this standard exists to distinguish humans who don't fit it. So it's more like a slight inductive bias, in the same way we have biases to learn to navigate in 3D space and prefer sugary foods. Biases of the algorithm can be substituted with biases in the data.
I don't see why that would be true. Indeed, I do not see why gradient descent wouldn't be much better of learning deep cognitive regularities including morality. You seem to hold that morality is something essential, some set of terminal value-influences, but why is that true for morality and not any other aspect of our cognition, both instrumentally worthwhile and «instrumentally non-convergent» ones? Every part of our decision-making feels profoundly qualitatively colored for us.
Why is "coded directly" better than learned? The major reason we're doing this stuff is that it's vastly better at generalization,
Sorry, this looks like a vibe-based argument, where neural nets deceptively "imitate" and hard code is "good and honest". It's all algorithms. Inasmuch as human minds are computable, our morality is an algorithm too.
What good would that do? It'd break OOD just the same, and if it didn't break, it'd be rewritten or worked around by the purported daemon of optimization.
Reminder that LLMs cannot learn to do the «treacherous turn» because the dreaded SGD mercilessly ablates cognitive routines that do not contribute to decreasing loss in training. This, of course, holds in the general case.
But even beyond that, outputs may be similar but activations aren't, we know how to look at activations, and we know there are differences between the model subjectively evaluating its output as true or false.
No, generation is always vastly simpler than classification unless you require classification that reconstructs the process of generation, of course.
I've long held that Yuddist program is, in addition to all else, an attractor for a particular variation of anxiety/OCD disorder: fetishization of «being in control», of making thoughts play by «proper rules». But it's fetishization because it doesn't really work, it pursues ghosts, precisely the deceptive external form of reliability. You gain clarity of ideas by testing them against evidence, not by being real suspicious of disconfirmations.
Pitts wrote that his depression might be “common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall.”
This malady is to be treated, not nurtured.
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Sure, but of course such measures being possible doesn't mean they'll actually be done.
This seems like too much certainty about the nature and difficulty of the task, which in turn influences whether significant delay actually increases the odds of success. For instance, if we turn out to live in a universe where superhuman AI safety isn't that hard, then the important thing is probably that it be done by a team that considers it a serious concern at all. Right now the leading AI company is run by people who are very concerned with AI alignment and who founded the company with that in mind, if we ban AI development and then the ban gets abandoned in 30 years there's a good chance that won't be the case again.
A candidate for such a universe would be if it's viable to make superintelligent Tool AIs. Like if GPT-10 can mechanistically output superhuman scientific papers but still doesn't have goals of its own. Such an AI would still be dangerous and you certainly couldn't release it to the general public, but you could carefully prompt it for papers suggesting more resilient AI alignment solutions. Some have argued Agent AIs would have advantages compared to Tool AIs, like Gwern arguing Tool AIs would be "less intelligent, efficient, and economically valuable". Lets say we live in a future where more advanced versions of GPT get routinely hooked up to other components like AgentGPT to carry out tasks, something which makes it significantly better at complicated tasks. OpenAI just developed GPT-10 which might be capable of superhuman scientific research. They can immediately hook it up to AgentGPT+ and make trillions of dollars while curing cancer, or they can spend 2 years tweaking it until it can perform superhuman scientific research without agentic components. It seems plausible that OpenAI would take the harder but safer route, but our 2050s AI company very well might not bother. Especially if the researchers, having successfully gotten rid of the ban, view AI alignment people the same way anti-nuclear-power environmentalists and anti-GMO activists are viewed by those respective fields.
Regarding talk of 100-year bans on AI while people steadily work on supposedly safer methods, I'm reminded of how 40 years ago overpopulation was a big mainstream concern among intellectuals. These ideas influenced government policy, most famously China's One Child policy. Today the fertility rate is substantially reduced (though mostly not by the anti-overpopulation activists), the population is predictably aging, and...the plan is completely abandoned, even though that was the entirely predictable result of dropping fertility. Nowadays if a country is concerned with ferility either way it'll want it to increase rather than decrease. Likewise the eugenics movement had ambitions of operating across many generations before being erased by the tides of history. In general, expecting your movement/ideas to retain power that long seems risky seems very risky.
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My fundamental problem with Bostrom's thinking is that people who do not and who never have existed can't be said to have "wants" in any meaningful sense. His whole oeuvre is based on affirming the consequent. If these people existed, you would be obliged to consider thier preferences. To which I reply if they existed, but they don't.
This kind of idiotic one-dimensional thinking is why I maintain that utilitarianism is fundementally stupid, evil, and incompatible with human flourishing. The simple fact is that there are only two paths available paths to a logically consistent utilitarian. The first is wire-heading, in which case question must be asked "why are you wasting your time on the internet when you could be wasting it on heroin?". The second is omnicide which seems to be the path that Bostrom, Benatar, Yud Et Al seem to be hell-bent on pursuing given all their rhetoric about how we need to build a mountain of skulls in the present to secure the future.
I say fuck that,
My 1e999999999999999 hypothetical future descendants who see utilitarian AIs as abominations to be purged with holy fire in the name of the God-Emperor are just as real as your "10^46 hypothetical people per century after galactic colonization" and thier preferences are just as valid.
You should include people who will exist as well, as opposed to people who could potentially exist if you took other actions but will never actually exist. Otherwise something like "burying a deadly poison that you know will leach into the water table in 120 years" would be perfectly moral, since the people it will kill don't exist yet.
As I mentioned, Preference Utilitarianism and Average Preference Utilitarianism are also forms of utilitarianism. And Total Utilitarianism doesn't imply wireheading either. Wireheading is only an implication of particularly literal and naive forms of hedonic utilitarianism that not even actual historical hedonic utilitarians would endorse, they would presumably either claim it isn't "real" happiness or switch to another form of utilitarianism.
Honestly, I think the main rhetorical advantage of non-utilitarianism forms of ethics is that they tend to be so incoherent that it is harder to accuse them of endorsing anything in particular. But people being bad at formalizing morality doesn't mean they actually endorse their misformalization's implications. You just tried to express your own non-utilitarian beliefs and immediately endorsed sufficiently-delayed murders of people who aren't born yet, that doesn't mean you actually support that implication. But having non-formalized morality is no advantage in real life and often leads to terrible decisions by people who have never rigorously thought about what they're doing, because you really do have to make choices. In medicine utilitarianism gave us QALYs while non-consequentialism gave us restrictive IRBs that care more about the slightest "injustice" than about saving thousands of lives, as a human who will require medical care I know which of those I prefer.
The view he is expressing is of course the opposite of this - that humanity surviving until it ultimately colonizes the galaxy is so important that anything that improves humanity's safety is more important than non-omnicidal dangers. Of course that would still leave a lot of uncertainty about what the safest path is. As I argued, significant delays are not necessarily more safe.
To be clear the "preference" framing is mine, since I prefer preference utilitarianism. Bostrom would frame it as something like trying to maximize the amount of things we value, such as "sentient beings living worthwhile lives".
The various alternative flavors of utilitarianism proposed to work around the whole wire-heads vs paperclip-maximizer conundrum have always struck me as even less coherent and actionable than so-called non-utilitarianism forms of ethics. In fact preference Utilitarianism is kind of the perfect example. Sorry but stacking layers upon layers of math and jargon atop of a foundation of "x is good because i want it" is not going to make "I do what I want" a sound moral framework.
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