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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on BOOK DRAFT: 'Ethics and Superintelligence' (part 1) - Less Wrong
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Comments (107)
Roko's original proposed basilisk is not and never was the problem in Roko's post. I don't expect it to be part of CEV, and it would be caught by generic procedures meant to prevent CEV from running if 80% of humanity turns out to be selfish bastards, like the Last Jury procedure (as renamed by Bostrom) or extrapolating a weighted donor CEV with a binary veto over the whole procedure.
EDIT: I affirm all of Nesov's answers (that I've seen so far) in the threads below.
wedrifid is right: if you're now counting on failsafes to stop CEV from doing the wrong thing, that means you could apply the same procedures to any other proposed AI, so the real value of your life's work is in the failsafe, not in CEV. What happened to all your clever arguments saying you can't put external chains on an AI? I just don't understand this at all.
Since my name was mentioned I had better confirm that I generally agree with your point but would have left out this sentence:
I don't disagree with the principle of having a failsafe - and don't think it is incompatible with the aforementioned clever arguments. But I do agree that "but there is a failsafe" is an utterly abysmal argument in favour of preferring CEV<humanity> over an alternative AI goal system.
Tell me about it. With most people if they kept asking the same question when the answer is staring them in the face and then act oblivious as it is told to them repeatedly I dismiss them as either disingenuous or (possibly selectively) stupid in short order. But, to borrow wisdom from HP:MoR:
Any given FAI design can turn out to be unable to do the right thing, which corresponds to tripping failsafes, but to be a FAI it must also be potentially capable (for all we know) of doing the right thing. Adequate failsafe should just turn off an ordinary AGI immediately, so it won't work as an AI-in-chains FAI solution. You can't make AI do the right thing just by adding failsafes, you also need to have a chance of winning.
Affirmed.
Is the Last Jury written up anywhere? It's not in the draft manuscript I have.
I assume Last Jury is just the Last Judge from CEV but with majority voting among n Last Judges.
I too am confused by your asking of such questions. Your own "80% of humanity turns out to be selfish bastards" gives a pretty good general answer to the question already.
"But we will not run it if is bad" seems like it could be used to reply to just about anything. Sure, it is good to have safety measures no matter what you are doing but not running it doesn't make CEV<humanity> desirable.
I'm completely confused now. I thought CEV was right by definition? If "80% of humanity turns out to be selfish bastards" then it will extrapolate on that. If we start to cherry pick certain outcomes according to our current perception, why run CEV at all?
CEV is not right by definition, it's only well-defined given certain assumptions that can fail. It should be designed so that if it doesn't shut down, then it's probably right.
Sincere question: Why would "80% of humanity turns out to be selfish bastards" violate one of those assumptions? Is the problem the "selfish bastard" part? Or is it that the "80%" part implies less homogeneity among humans than CEV assumes?
It would certainly seem that 80% of humanity turning out to be selfish bastards is compatible with CEV<humanity> being well defined, but not with being 'right'. This does not technically contradict anything in the grandparent (which is why I didn't reply with the same question myself). It does, perhaps, go against the theme of Nesov's comments.
Basically, and as you suggest, either it must be acknowledged that 'not well defined' and 'possibly evil' are two entirely different problems or something that amounts to 'humans do not want things that suck' must be one of the assumptions.
I suppose you have to comprehend Yudkowsky's metaethics to understand that sentence. I still don't get what kind of 'right' people are talking about.
Very similar to your right, for all practical purposes. A slight difference in how it is described though. You describe (if I recall), 'right' as being "in accordance with XiXiDu's preferences". Using Eliezer's style of terminology you would instead describe 'right' as more like a photograph of what XiXiDu's preferences are, without them necessarily including any explicit reference to XiXiDu.
In most cases it doesn't really matter. It starts to matter once people start saying things like "But what if XiXiDu could take a pill that made him prefer that he eat babies? Would that mean it became right? Should XiXiDu take the pill?"
By the way, 'right' would also mean what the photo looks like after it has been airbrushed a bit in photoshop by an agent better at understanding what we actually want than we are at introspection and communication. So it's an abstract representation of what you would want if you were smarter and more rational but still had your preferences.
Also note that Eliezer sometimes blurs the line between 'right' meaning what he would want and what some abstract "all of humanity" would want.
No, CEV<wedrifid> is right by definition. When CEV is used as shorthand for "the coherent extrapolated volitions of all of humanity" as is the case there then it is quite probably not right at all. Because many humans, to put it extremely politely, have preferences that are distinctly different to what I would call 'right'.
Yes, that would be pointless, it would be far better to compare the outcomes to CEV<group_I_identify_with_sufficiently> (then just use the latter!) The purpose of doing CEV<humanity> at all is for signalling and cooperation.
Before or after extrapolation? If the former then why does that matter, if the latter then how do you know?
Former in as much as it allows inferences about the latter. I don't need to know with any particular confidence for the purposes of the point. The point was to illustrate possible (and overwhelmingly obvious) failure modes.
Hoping that CEV<humanity> is desirable rather than outright unfriendly isn't a particularly good reason to consider it. It is going to result in outcomes that are worse from the perspective of whoever is running the GAI than CEV<that person> and CEV<group more closely identified with>.
The purpose of doing CEV<humanity> at all is for signalling and cooperation (or, possibly, outright confusion).
Do you mean it is simply an SIAI marketing strategy and that it is not what they are actually going to do?
Signalling and cooperation can include actual behavior.
In case where assumptions fail, and CEV ceases to be predictably good, safety measures shut it down, so nothing happens. In case where assumptions hold, it works. As a result, CEV has good expected utility, and gives us a chance to try again with a different design if it fails.
This does not seem to weaken the position you quoted in any way.
Failsafe measures are a great idea. They just don't do anything to privileged CEV<humanity> + failsafe over anything_else + failsafe.
Yes. They make sure that [CEV<humanity> + failsafe] is not worse than not running any AIs. Uncertainty about whether CEV<humanity> works makes expected [CEV<humanity> + failsafe] significantly better than doing nothing. Presence of potential controlled shutdown scenarios doesn't argue for worthlessness of the attempt, even where detailed awareness of these scenarios could be used to improve the plan.
I'm actually not even sure whether you are trying to disagree with me or not but once again, in case you are, nothing here weakens my position.
"Not running it" does make [CEV<humanity> + failsafe] desirable, as compared to doing nothing, even in the face of problems with [CEV<humanity>], and nobody is going to run just [CEV<humanity>]. So most arguments for presence of problems in CEV<humanity>, if they are met with adequate failsafe specifications (which is far from a template to reply to anything, failsafes are not easy), do indeed lose a lot of traction. Besides, what are they arguments for? One needs a suggestion for improvement, and failsafes are intended to make it so that doing nothing is not an improvement, even though improvements over any given state of the plan would be dandy.
Yes, this is trivially true and not currently disputed by anyone here. Nobody is suggesting doing nothing. Doing nothing is crazy.
Of course, Roko did not originally propose a basilisk at all. Just a novel solution to a obscure game theory problem.