I begin by thanking Holden Karnofsky of Givewell for his rare gift of his detailed, engaged, and helpfully-meant critical article Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI). In this reply I will engage with only one of the many subjects raised therein, the topic of, as I would term them, non-self-modifying planning Oracles, a.k.a. 'Google Maps AGI' a.k.a. 'tool AI', this being the topic that requires me personally to answer.  I hope that my reply will be accepted as addressing the most important central points, though I did not have time to explore every avenue.  I certainly do not wish to be logically rude, and if I have failed, please remember with compassion that it's not always obvious to one person what another person will think was the central point.

Luke Mueulhauser and Carl Shulman contributed to this article, but the final edit was my own, likewise any flaws.

Summary:

Holden's concern is that "SI appears to neglect the potentially important distinction between 'tool' and 'agent' AI." His archetypal example is Google Maps:

Google Maps is not an agent, taking actions in order to maximize a utility parameter. It is a tool, generating information and then displaying it in a user-friendly manner for me to consider, use and export or discard as I wish.

The reply breaks down into four heavily interrelated points:

First, Holden seems to think (and Jaan Tallinn doesn't apparently object to, in their exchange) that if a non-self-modifying planning Oracle is indeed the best strategy, then all of SIAI's past and intended future work is wasted.  To me it looks like there's a huge amount of overlap in underlying processes in the AI that would have to be built and the insights required to build it, and I would be trying to assemble mostly - though not quite exactly - the same kind of team if I was trying to build a non-self-modifying planning Oracle, with the same initial mix of talents and skills.

Second, a non-self-modifying planning Oracle doesn't sound nearly as safe once you stop saying human-English phrases like "describe the consequences of an action to the user" and start trying to come up with math that says scary dangerous things like (he translated into English) "increase the correspondence between the user's belief about relevant consequences and reality".  Hence why the people on the team would have to solve the same sorts of problems.

Appreciating the force of the third point is a lot easier if one appreciates the difficulties discussed in points 1 and 2, but is actually empirically verifiable independently:  Whether or not a non-self-modifying planning Oracle is the best solution in the end, it's not such an obvious privileged-point-in-solution-space that someone should be alarmed at SIAI not discussing it.  This is empirically verifiable in the sense that 'tool AI' wasn't the obvious solution to e.g. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, I. J. Good, Peter Norvig, Vernor Vinge, or for that matter Isaac Asimov.  At one point, Holden says:

One of the things that bothers me most about SI is that there is practically no public content, as far as I can tell, explicitly addressing the idea of a "tool" and giving arguments for why AGI is likely to work only as an "agent."

If I take literally that this is one of the things that bothers Holden most... I think I'd start stacking up some of the literature on the number of different things that just respectable academics have suggested as the obvious solution to what-to-do-about-AI - none of which would be about non-self-modifying smarter-than-human planning Oracles - and beg him to have some compassion on us for what we haven't addressed yet.  It might be the right suggestion, but it's not so obviously right that our failure to prioritize discussing it reflects negligence.

The final point at the end is looking over all the preceding discussion and realizing that, yes, you want to have people specializing in Friendly AI who know this stuff, but as all that preceding discussion is actually the following discussion at this point, I shall reserve it for later.

1.  The math of optimization, and the similar parts of a planning Oracle.

What does it take to build a smarter-than-human intelligence, of whatever sort, and have it go well?

A "Friendly AI programmer" is somebody who specializes in seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World. It's somebody who looks at Hutter's specification of AIXI and reads the actual equations - actually stares at the Greek symbols and not just the accompanying English text - and sees, "Oh, this AI will try to gain control of its reward channel," as well as numerous subtler issues like, "This AI presumes a Cartesian boundary separating itself from the environment; it may drop an anvil on its own head." Similarly, working on TDT means e.g. looking at a mathematical specification of decision theory, and seeing "Oh, this is vulnerable to blackmail" and coming up with a mathematical counter-specification of an AI that isn't so vulnerable to blackmail.

Holden's post seems to imply that if you're building a non-self-modifying planning Oracle (aka 'tool AI') rather than an acting-in-the-world agent, you don't need a Friendly AI programmer because FAI programmers only work on agents. But this isn't how the engineering skills are split up. Inside the AI, whether an agent AI or a planning Oracle, there would be similar AGI-challenges like "build a predictive model of the world", and similar FAI-conjugates of those challenges like finding the 'user' inside an AI-created model of the universe.  The insides would look a lot more similar than the outsides.  An analogy would be supposing that a machine learning professional who does sales optimization for an orange company couldn't possibly do sales optimization for a banana company, because their skills must be about oranges rather than bananas.

Admittedly, if it turns out to be possible to use a human understanding of cognitive algorithms to build and run a smarter-than-human Oracle without it being self-improving - this seems unlikely, but not impossible - then you wouldn't have to solve problems that arise with self-modification.  But this eliminates only one dimension of the work.  And on an even more meta level, it seems like you would call upon almost identical talents and skills to come up with whatever insights were required - though if it were predictable in advance that we'd abjure self-modification, then, yes, we'd place less emphasis on e.g. finding a team member with past experience in reflective math, and wouldn't waste (additional) time specializing in reflection.  But if you wanted math inside the planning Oracle that operated the way you thought it did, and you wanted somebody who understood what could possibly go wrong and how to avoid it, you would need to make a function call to the same sort of talents and skills to build an agent AI, or an Oracle that was self-modifying, etc.

2.  Yes, planning Oracles have hidden gotchas too.

"Tool AI" may sound simple in English, a short sentence in the language of empathically-modeled agents — it's just "a thingy that shows you plans instead of a thingy that goes and does things." If you want to know whether this hypothetical entity does X, you just check whether the outcome of X sounds like "showing someone a plan" or "going and doing things", and you've got your answer.  It starts sounding much scarier once you try to say something more formal and internally-causal like "Model the user and the universe, predict the degree of correspondence between the user's model and the universe, and select from among possible explanation-actions on this basis."

Holden, in his dialogue with Jaan Tallinn, writes out this attempt at formalizing:

Here's how I picture the Google Maps AGI ...

utility_function = construct_utility_function(process_user_input());

foreach $action in $all_possible_actions {

$action_outcome = prediction_function($action,$data);

$utility = utility_function($action_outcome);

if ($utility > $leading_utility) { $leading_utility = $utility;

$leading_action = $action; }

}

report($leading_action);

construct_utility_function(process_user_input()) is just a human-quality function for understanding what the speaker wants. prediction_function is an implementation of a human-quality data->prediction function in superior hardware. $data is fixed (it's a dataset larger than any human can process); same with $all_possible_actions. report($leading_action) calls a Google Maps-like interface for understanding the consequences of $leading_action; it basically breaks the action into component parts and displays predictions for different times and conditional on different parameters.

Google Maps doesn't check all possible routes. If I wanted to design Google Maps, I would start out by throwing out a standard planning technique on a connected graph where each edge has a cost function and there's a good heuristic measure of the distance, e.g. A* search. If that was too slow, I'd next try some more efficient version like weighted A* (or bidirectional weighted memory-bounded A*, which I expect I could also get off-the-shelf somewhere). Once you introduce weighted A*, you no longer have a guarantee that you're selecting the optimal path.  You have a guarantee to within a known factor of the cost of the optimal path — but the actual path selected wouldn't be quite optimal. The suggestion produced would be an approximation whose exact steps depended on the exact algorithm you used. That's true even if you can predict the exact cost — exact utility — of any particular path you actually look at; and even if you have a heuristic that never overestimates the cost.

The reason we don't have God's Algorithm for solving the Rubik's Cube is that there's no perfect way of measuring the distance between any two Rubik's Cube positions — you can't look at two Rubik's cube positions, and figure out the minimum number of moves required to get from one to another. It took 15 years to prove that there was a position requiring at least 20 moves to solve, and then another 15 years to come up with a computer algorithm that could solve any position in at most 20 moves, but we still can't compute the actual, minimum solution to all Cubes ("God's Algorithm"). This, even though we can exactly calculate the cost and consequence of any actual Rubik's-solution-path we consider.

When it comes to AGI — solving general cross-domain "Figure out how to do X" problems — you're not going to get anywhere near the one, true, optimal answer. You're going to — at best, if everything works right — get a good answer that's a cross-product of the "utility function" and all the other algorithmic properties that determine what sort of answer the AI finds easy to invent (i.e. can be invented using bounded computing time).

As for the notion that this AGI runs on a "human predictive algorithm" that we got off of neuroscience and then implemented using more computing power, without knowing how it works or being able to enhance it further: It took 30 years of multiple computer scientists doing basic math research, and inventing code, and running that code on a computer cluster, for them to come up with a 20-move solution to the Rubik's Cube. If a planning Oracle is going to produce better solutions than humanity has yet managed to the Rubik's Cube, it needs to be capable of doing original computer science research and writing its own code. You can't get a 20-move solution out of a human brain, using the native human planning algorithm. Humanity can do it, but only by exploiting the ability of humans to explicitly comprehend the deep structure of the domain (not just rely on intuition) and then inventing an artifact, a new design, running code which uses a different and superior cognitive algorithm, to solve that Rubik's Cube in 20 moves. We do all that without being self-modifying, but it's still a capability to respect.

And I'm not even going into what it would take for a planning Oracle to out-strategize any human, come up with a plan for persuading someone, solve original scientific problems by looking over experimental data (like Einstein did), design a nanomachine, and so on.

Talking like there's this one simple "predictive algorithm" that we can read out of the brain using neuroscience and overpower to produce better plans... doesn't seem quite congruous with what humanity actually does to produce its predictions and plans.

If we take the concept of the Google Maps AGI at face value, then it actually has four key magical components.  (In this case, "magical" isn't to be taken as prejudicial, it's a term of art that means we haven't said how the component works yet.)  There's a magical comprehension of the user's utility function, a magical world-model that GMAGI uses to comprehend the consequences of actions, a magical planning element that selects a non-optimal path using some method other than exploring all possible actions, and a magical explain-to-the-user function.

report($leading_action) isn't exactly a trivial step either. Deep Blue tells you to move your pawn or you'll lose the game. You ask "Why?" and the answer is a gigantic search tree of billions of possible move-sequences, leafing at positions which are heuristically rated using a static-position evaluation algorithm trained on millions of games. Or the planning Oracle tells you that a certain DNA sequence will produce a protein that cures cancer, you ask "Why?", and then humans aren't even capable of verifying, for themselves, the assertion that the peptide sequence will fold into the protein the planning Oracle says it does.

"So," you say, after the first dozen times you ask the Oracle a question and it returns an answer that you'd have to take on faith, "we'll just specify in the utility function that the plan should be understandable."

Whereupon other things start going wrong. Viliam_Bur, in the comments thread, gave this example, which I've slightly simplified:

Example question: "How should I get rid of my disease most cheaply?" Example answer: "You won't. You will die soon, unavoidably. This report is 99.999% reliable". Predicted human reaction: Decides to kill self and get it over with. Success rate: 100%, the disease is gone. Costs of cure: zero. Mission completed.

Bur is trying to give an example of how things might go wrong if the preference function is over the accuracy of the predictions explained to the human— rather than just the human's 'goodness' of the outcome. And if the preference function was just over the human's 'goodness' of the end result, rather than the accuracy of the human's understanding of the predictions, the AI might tell you something that was predictively false but whose implementation would lead you to what the AI defines as a 'good' outcome. And if we ask how happy the human is, the resulting decision procedure would exert optimization pressure to convince the human to take drugs, and so on.

I'm not saying any particular failure is 100% certain to occur; rather I'm trying to explain - as handicapped by the need to describe the AI in the native human agent-description language, using empathy to simulate a spirit-in-a-box instead of trying to think in mathematical structures like A* search or Bayesian updating - how, even so, one can still see that the issue is a tad more fraught than it sounds on an immediate examination.

If you see the world just in terms of math, it's even worse; you've got some program with inputs from a USB cable connecting to a webcam, output to a computer monitor, and optimization criteria expressed over some combination of the monitor, the humans looking at the monitor, and the rest of the world. It's a whole lot easier to call what's inside a 'planning Oracle' or some other English phrase than to write a program that does the optimization safely without serious unintended consequences. Show me any attempted specification, and I'll point to the vague parts and ask for clarification in more formal and mathematical terms, and as soon as the design is clarified enough to be a hundred light years from implementation instead of a thousand light years, I'll show a neutral judge how that math would go wrong. (Experience shows that if you try to explain to would-be AGI designers how their design goes wrong, in most cases they just say "Oh, but of course that's not what I meant." Marcus Hutter is a rare exception who specified his AGI in such unambiguous mathematical terms that he actually succeeded at realizing, after some discussion with SIAI personnel, that AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button. But based on past sad experience with many other would-be designers, I say "Explain to a neutral judge how the math kills" and not "Explain to the person who invented that math and likes it.")

Just as the gigantic gap between smart-sounding English instructions and actually smart algorithms is the main source of difficulty in AI, there's a gap between benevolent-sounding English and actually benevolent algorithms which is the source of difficulty in FAI.  "Just make suggestions - don't do anything!" is, in the end, just more English.

3.  Why we haven't already discussed Holden's suggestion

One of the things that bothers me most about SI is that there is practically no public content, as far as I can tell, explicitly addressing the idea of a "tool" and giving arguments for why AGI is likely to work only as an "agent."

The above statement seems to lack perspective on how many different things various people see as the one obvious solution to Friendly AI. Tool AI wasn't the obvious solution to John McCarthy, I.J. Good, or Marvin Minsky. Today's leading AI textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - where you can learn all about A* search, by the way - discusses Friendly AI and AI risk for 3.5 pages but doesn't mention tool AI as an obvious solution. For Ray Kurzweil, the obvious solution is merging humans and AIs. For Jurgen Schmidhuber, the obvious solution is AIs that value a certain complicated definition of complexity in their sensory inputs. Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs Hall, and Bill Hibbard, among others, have all written about how silly Singinst is to pursue Friendly AI when the solution is obviously X, for various different X. Among current leading people working on serious AGI programs labeled as such, neither Demis Hassabis (VC-funded to the tune of several million dollars) nor Moshe Looks (head of AGI research at Google) nor Henry Markram (Blue Brain at IBM) think that the obvious answer is Tool AI. Vernor Vinge, Isaac Asimov, and any number of other SF writers with technical backgrounds who spent serious time thinking about these issues didn't converge on that solution.

Obviously I'm not saying that nobody should be allowed to propose solutions because someone else would propose a different solution. I have been known to advocate for particular developmental pathways for Friendly AI myself. But I haven't, for example, told Peter Norvig that deterministic self-modification is such an obvious solution to Friendly AI that I would mistrust his whole AI textbook if he didn't spend time discussing it.

At one point in his conversation with Tallinn, Holden argues that AI will inevitably be developed along planning-Oracle lines, because making suggestions to humans is the natural course that most software takes. Searching for counterexamples instead of positive examples makes it clear that most lines of code don't do this.  Your computer, when it reallocates RAM, doesn't pop up a button asking you if it's okay to reallocate RAM in such-and-such a fashion. Your car doesn't pop up a suggestion when it wants to change the fuel mix or apply dynamic stability control. Factory robots don't operate as human-worn bracelets whose blinking lights suggest motion. High-frequency trading programs execute stock orders on a microsecond timescale. Software that does happen to interface with humans is selectively visible and salient to humans, especially the tiny part of the software that does the interfacing; but this is a special case of a general cost/benefit tradeoff which, more often than not, turns out to swing the other way, because human advice is either too costly or doesn't provide enough benefit. Modern AI programmers are generally more interested in e.g. pushing the technological envelope to allow self-driving cars than to "just" do Google Maps. Branches of AI that invoke human aid, like hybrid chess-playing algorithms designed to incorporate human advice, are a field of study; but they're the exception rather than the rule, and occur primarily where AIs can't yet do something humans do, e.g. humans acting as oracles for theorem-provers, where the humans suggest a route to a proof and the AI actually follows that route. This is another reason why planning Oracles were not a uniquely obvious solution to the various academic AI researchers, would-be AI-creators, SF writers, etcetera, listed above. Again, regardless of whether a planning Oracle is actually the best solution, Holden seems to be empirically-demonstrably overestimating the degree to which other people will automatically have his preferred solution come up first in their search ordering.

4.  Why we should have full-time Friendly AI specialists just like we have trained professionals doing anything else mathy that somebody actually cares about getting right, like pricing interest-rate options or something

I hope that the preceding discussion has made, by example instead of mere argument, what's probably the most important point: If you want to have a sensible discussion about which AI designs are safer, there are specialized skills you can apply to that discussion, as built up over years of study and practice by someone who specializes in answering that sort of question.

This isn't meant as an argument from authority. It's not meant as an attempt to say that only experts should be allowed to contribute to the conversation. But it is meant to say that there is (and ought to be) room in the world for Friendly AI specialists, just like there's room in the world for specialists on optimal philanthropy (e.g. Holden).

The decision to build a non-self-modifying planning Oracle would be properly made by someone who: understood the risk gradient for self-modifying vs. non-self-modifying programs; understood the risk gradient for having the AI thinking about the thought processes of the human watcher and trying to come up with plans implementable by the human watcher in the service of locally absorbed utility functions, vs. trying to implement its own plans in the service of more globally descriptive utility functions; and who, above all, understood on a technical level what exactly gets accomplished by having the plans routed through a human. I've given substantial previous thought to describing more precisely what happens — what is being gained, and how much is being gained — when a human "approves a suggestion" made by an AI. But that would be another a different topic, plus I haven't made too much progress on saying it precisely anyway.

In the transcript of Holden's conversation with Jaan Tallinn, it looked like Tallinn didn't deny the assertion that Friendly AI skills would be inapplicable if we're building a Google Maps AGI. I would deny that assertion and emphasize that denial, because to me it seems that it is exactly Friendly AI programmers who would be able to tell you if the risk gradient for non-self-modification vs. self-modification, the risk gradient for routing plans through humans vs. acting as an agent, the risk gradient for requiring human approval vs. unapproved action, and the actual feasibility of directly constructing transhuman modeling-prediction-and-planning algorithms through directly design of sheerly better computations than are presently run by the human brain, had the right combination of properties to imply that you ought to go construct a non-self-modifying planning Oracle. Similarly if you wanted an AI that took a limited set of actions in the world with human approval, or if you wanted an AI that "just answered questions instead of making plans".

It is similarly implied that a "philosophical AI" might obsolete Friendly AI programmers. If we're talking about PAI that can start with a human's terrible decision theory and come up with a good decision theory, or PAI that can start from a human talking about bad metaethics and then construct a good metaethics... I don't want to say "impossible", because, after all, that's just what human philosophers do. But we are not talking about a trivial invention here. Constructing a "philosophical AI" is a Holy Grail precisely because it's FAI-complete (just ask it "What AI should we build?"), and has been discussed (e.g. with and by Wei Dai) over the years on the old SL4 mailing list and the modern Less Wrong. But it's really not at all clear how you could write an algorithm which would knowably produce the correct answer to the entire puzzle of anthropic reasoning, without being in possession of that correct answer yourself (in the same way that we can have Deep Blue win chess games without knowing the exact moves, but understanding exactly what abstract work Deep Blue is doing to solve the problem).

Holden's post presents a restrictive view of what "Friendly AI" people are supposed to learn and know — that it's about machine learning for optimizing orange sales but not apple sales, or about producing an "agent" that implements CEV — which is something of a straw view, much weaker than the view that a Friendly AI programmer takes of Friendly AI programming. What the human species needs from an x-risk perspective is experts on This Whole Damn Problem, who will acquire whatever skills are needed to that end. The Singularity Institute exists to host such people and enable their research—once we have enough funding to find and recruit them.  See also, How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction.

I'm pretty sure Holden has met people who think that having a whole institute to rate the efficiency of charities is pointless overhead, especially people who think that their own charity-solution is too obviously good to have to contend with busybodies pretending to specialize in thinking about 'marginal utility'.  Which Holden knows about, I would guess, from being paid quite well to think about that economic details when he was a hedge fundie, and learning from books written by professional researchers before then; and the really key point is that people who haven't studied all that stuff don't even realize what they're missing by trying to wing it.  If you don't know, you don't know what you don't know, or the cost of not knowing.  Is there a problem of figuring out who might know something you don't, if Holden insists that there's this strange new stuff called 'marginal utility' you ought to learn about?  Yes, there is.  But is someone who trusts their philanthropic dollars to be steered just by the warm fuzzies of their heart, doing something wrong?  Yes, they are.  It's one thing to say that SIAI isn't known-to-you to be doing it right - another thing still to say that SIAI is known-to-you to be doing it wrong - and then quite another thing entirely to say that there's no need for Friendly AI programmers and you know it, that anyone can see it without resorting to math or cracking a copy of AI: A Modern Approach.  I do wish that Holden would at least credit that the task SIAI is taking on contains at least as many gotchas, relative to the instinctive approach, as optimal philanthropy compared to instinctive philanthropy, and might likewise benefit from some full-time professionally specialized attention, just as our society creates trained professionals to handle any other problem that someone actually cares about getting right.

On the other side of things, Holden says that even if Friendly AI is proven and checked:

"I believe that the probability of an unfavorable outcome - by which I mean an outcome essentially equivalent to what a UFAI would bring about - exceeds 90% in such a scenario."

It's nice that this appreciates that the problem is hard.  Associating all of the difficulty with agenty proposals and thinking that it goes away as soon as you invoke tooliness is, well, of this I've already spoken. I'm not sure whether this irreducible-90%-doom assessment is based on a common straw version of FAI where all the work of the FAI programmer goes into "proving" something and doing this carefully checked proof which then - alas, poor Spock! - turns out to be no more relevant than proving that the underlying CPU does floating-point arithmetic correctly if the transistors work as stated. I've repeatedly said that the idea behind proving determinism of self-modification isn't that this guarantees safety, but that if you prove the self-modification stable the AI might work, whereas if you try to get by with no proofs at all, doom is guaranteed. My mind keeps turning up Ben Goertzel as the one who invented this caricature - "Don't you understand, poor fool Eliezer, life is full of uncertainty, your attempt to flee from it by refuge in 'mathematical proof' is doomed" - but I'm not sure he was actually the inventor. In any case, the burden of safety isn't carried just by the proof, it's carried mostly by proving the right thing. If Holden is assuming that we're just running away from the inherent uncertainty of life by taking refuge in mathematical proof, then, yes, 90% probability of doom is an understatement, the vast majority of plausible-on-first-glance goal criteria you can prove stable will also kill you.

If Holden's assessment does take into account a great effort to select the right theorem to prove - and attempts to incorporate the difficult but finitely difficult feature of meta-level error-detection, as it appears in e.g. the CEV proposal - and he is still assessing 90% doom probability, then I must ask, "What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?" The complexity of the human mind is finite; there's only so many things we want or would-want. Why would someone claim to know that proving the right thing is beyond human ability, even if "100 of the world's most intelligent and relevantly experienced people" (Holden's terms) check it over? There's hidden complexity of wishes, but not infinite complexity of wishes or unlearnable complexity of wishes. There are deep and subtle gotchas but not an unending number of them. And if that were the setting of the hidden variables - how would you end up knowing that with 90% probability in advance? I don't mean to wield my own ignorance as a sword or engage in motivated uncertainty - I hate it when people argue that if they don't know something, nobody else is allowed to know either - so please note that I'm also counterarguing from positive facts pointing the other way: the human brain is complicated but not infinitely complicated, there are hundreds or thousands of cytoarchitecturally distinct brain areas but not trillions or googols.  If humanity had two hundred years to solve FAI using human-level intelligence and there was no penalty for guessing wrong I would be pretty relaxed about the outcome.  If Holden says there's 90% doom probability left over no matter what sane intelligent people do (all of which goes away if you just build Google Maps AGI, but leave that aside for now) I would ask him what he knows now, in advance, that all those sane intelligent people will miss.  I don't see how you could (well-justifiedly) access that epistemic state.

I acknowledge that there are points in Holden's post which are not addressed in this reply, acknowledge that these points are also deserving of reply, and hope that other SIAI personnel will be able to reply to them.

Reply to Holden on 'Tool AI'
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My summary (now with endorsement by Eliezer!):

  • SI can be a valuable organization even if Tool AI turns out to be the right approach:
    • Skills/organizational capabilities for safe Tool AI are similar to those for Friendly AI.
    • EY seems to imply that much of SI's existing body of work can be reused.
    • Offhand remark that seemed important: Superintelligent Tool AI would be more difficult since it would have to be developed in way that it would not recursively self-improve.
  • Tool AI is nontrivial:
    • The number of possible plans is way too large for an AI to realistically evaluate all them. Heuristics will have to be used to find suboptimal but promising plans.
    • The reasoning behind the plan the AI chooses might be way beyond the comprehension of the user. It's not clear how best to deal with this, given that the AI is only approximating the user's wishes and can't really be trusted to choose plans without supervision.
    • Constructing a halfway decent approximation of the user's utility function and having a model good enough to make plans with are also far from solved problems.
    • Potential Tool AI gotcha: The AI might give you a self-fulfilling negative prophecy that the AI didn't realize would h
... (read more)

This point seems missing:

You can't get a 20-move solution out of a human brain, using the native human planning algorithm. Humanity can do it, but only by exploiting the ability of humans to explicitly comprehend the deep structure of the domain (not just rely on intuition) and then inventing an artifact, a new design, running code which uses a different and superior cognitive algorithm, to solve that Rubik's Cube in 20 moves. We do all that without being self-modifying, but it's still a capability to respect.

A system that undertakes extended processes of research and thinking, generating new ideas and writing new programs for internal experiments, seems both much more effective and much more potentially risky than something like chess program with a simple fixed algorithm to search using a fixed narrow representation of the world (as a chess board).

Looks pretty good, actually. Nice.

-9SilasBarta

The difficulty of Friendliness is finite. The difficulties are big and subtle, but not unending.

How do we know that the problem is finite? When it comes to proving a computer program safe from being hacked the problem is considered NP-hard. Google Chrome got recently hacked by chaining 14 different bugs together. A working AGI is probably as least a complex as Google Chrome. Proving it safe will likely also be NP-hard.

Google Chrome doesn't even self modify.

3Curiouskid
I'm not really sure what's meant by this. For example, in computer vision, you can input an image and get a classification as output. The input is supplied by a human. The computation doesn't involve the human. The output is well defined. The same could be true of a tool AI that makes predictions.
3Curiouskid
Both Andrew Ng and Jeff Hawkins think that tool AI is the most likely approach.
0Weedlayer
I would consider 3 to be a few.
3beoShaffer
That is about how I read it.

When I read posts like this I feel like an independent everyman watching a political debate.

The dialogue is oversimplified and even then I don't fully grasp exactly what's being said and the implications thereof, so I can almost feel my opinion shifting back and forth with each point that sounds sort of, kinda, sensible when I don't really have the capacity to judge the statements. I should probably try and fix that.

The analogy is apt: blue-vs.-green politics aren't the only kind of politics, and debates over singularity policy have had big mind-killing effects on otherwise-pretty-rational LW folk before.

2John_Maxwell
The core points don't strike me as being inherently difficult or technical, although Eliezer uses some technical examples.

The core points don't strike me as being inherently difficult or technical

That's precisely the problem, given that Eliezer is arguing that a technical appreciation of difficult problems is necessary to judge correctly on this issue. My understanding, like pleeppleep's, is limited to the simplified level given here, which means I'm reduced to giving weight to presentation and style and things being "kinda sensible".

Hello,

I appreciate the thoughtful response. I plan to respond at greater length in the future, both to this post and to some other content posted by SI representatives and commenters. For now, I wanted to take a shot at clarifying the discussion of "tool-AI" by discussing AIXI. One of the the issues I've found with the debate over FAI in general is that I haven't seen much in the way of formal precision about the challenge of Friendliness (I recognize that I have also provided little formal precision, though I feel the burden of formalization is on SI here). It occurred to me that AIXI might provide a good opportunity to have a more precise discussion, if in fact it is believed to represent a case of "a rare exception who specified his AGI in such unambiguous mathematical terms that he actually succeeded at realizing, after some discussion with SIAI personnel, that AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button."

So here's my characterization of how one might work toward a safe and useful version of AIXI, using the "tool-AI" framework, if one could in fact develop an efficient enough approximation of AIXI to qualify as a powerful ... (read more)

Didn't see this at the time, sorry.

So... I'm sorry if this reply seems a little unhelpful, and I wish there was some way to engage more strongly, but...

Point (1) is the main problem. AIXI updates freely over a gigantic range of sensory predictors with no specified ontology - it's a sum over a huge set of programs, and we, the users, have no idea what the representations are talking about, except that at the end of their computations they predict, "You will see a sensory 1 (or a sensory 0)." (In my preferred formalism, the program puts a probability on a 0 instead.) Inside, the program could've been modeling the universe in terms of atoms, quarks, quantum fields, cellular automata, giant moving paperclips, slave agents scurrying around... we, the programmers, have no idea how AIXI is modeling the world and producing its predictions, and indeed, the final prediction could be a sum over many different representations.

This means that equation (20) in Hutter is written as a utility function over sense data, where the reward channel is just a special case of sense data. We can easily adapt this equation to talk about any function computed directly over sense data - we can g... (read more)

Thanks for the response. To clarify, I'm not trying to point to the AIXI framework as a promising path; I'm trying to take advantage of the unusually high degree of formalization here in order to gain clarity on the feasibility and potential danger points of the "tool AI" approach.

It sounds to me like your two major issues with the framework I presented are (to summarize):

(1) There is a sense in which AIXI predictions must be reducible to predictions about the limited set of inputs it can "observe directly" (what you call its "sense data").

(2) Computers model the world in ways that can be unrecognizable to humans; it may be difficult to create interfaces that allow humans to understand the implicit assumptions and predictions in their models.

I don't claim that these problems are trivial to deal with. And stated as you state them, they sound abstractly very difficult to deal with. However, it seems true - and worth noting - that "normal" software development has repeatedly dealt with them successfully. For example: Google Maps works with a limited set of inputs; Google Maps does not "think" like I do and I would not be able to look ... (read more)

So first a quick note: I wasn't trying to say that the difficulties of AIXI are universal and everything goes analogously to AIXI, I was just stating why AIXI couldn't represent the suggestion you were trying to make. The general lesson to be learned is not that everything else works like AIXI, but that you need to look a lot harder at an equation before thinking that it does what you want.

On a procedural level, I worry a bit that the discussion is trying to proceed by analogy to Google Maps. Let it first be noted that Google Maps simply is not playing in the same league as, say, the human brain, in terms of complexity; and that if we were to look at the winning "algorithm" of the million-dollar Netflix Prize competition, which was in fact a blend of 107 different algorithms, you would have a considerably harder time figuring out why it claimed anything it claimed.

But to return to the meta-point, I worry about conversations that go into "But X is like Y, which does Z, so X should do reinterpreted-Z". Usually, in my experience, that goes into what I call "reference class tennis" or "I'm taking my reference class and going home". The troub... (read more)

Thanks for the response. My thoughts at this point are that

  • We seem to have differing views of how to best do what you call "reference class tennis" and how useful it can be. I'll probably be writing about my views more in the future.
  • I find it plausible that AGI will have to follow a substantially different approach from "normal" software. But I'm not clear on the specifics of what SI believes those differences will be and why they point to the "proving safety/usefulness before running" approach over the "tool" approach.
  • We seem to have differing views of how frequently today's software can be made comprehensible via interfaces. For example, my intuition is that the people who worked on the Netflix Prize algorithm had good interfaces for understanding "why" it recommends what it does, and used these to refine it. I may further investigate this matter (casually, not as a high priority); on SI's end, it might be helpful (from my perspective) to provide detailed examples of existing algorithms for which the "tool" approach to development didn't work and something closer to "proving safety/usefulness up front" was necessary.
7oooo
Canonical software development examples emphasizing "proving safety/usefulness before running" over the "tool" software development approach are cryptographic libraries and NASA space shuttle navigation. At the time of writing this comment, there was recent furor over software called CryptoCat that didn't provide enough warnings that it was not properly vetted by cryptographers and thus should have been assumed to be inherently insecure. Conventional wisdom and repeated warnings from the security community state that cryptography is extremely difficult to do properly and attempting to create your own may result in catastrophic results. A similar thought and development process goes into space shuttle code. It seems that the FAI approach to "proving safety/usefulness" is more similar to the way cryptographic algorithms are developed than the (seemingly) much faster "tool" approach, which is more akin to web development where the stakes aren't quite as high. EDIT: I believe the "prove" approach still allows one to run snippets of code in isolation, but tends to shy away from running everything end-to-end until significant effort has gone into individual component testing.
2Nebu
The analogy with cryptography is an interesting one, because... In cryptography, even after you've proven that a given encryption scheme is secure, and that proof has been centuply (100 times) checked by different researchers at different institutions, it might still end up being insecure, for many reasons. Examples of reasons include: * The proof assumed mathematical integers/reals, of which computer integers/floating point numbers are just an approximation. * The proof assumed that the hardware the algorithm would be running on was reliable (e.g. a reliable source of randomness). * The proof assumed operations were mathematical abstractions and thus exist out of time, and thus neglected side channel attacks which measures how long a physical real world CPU took to execute a the algorithm in order to make inferences as to what the algorithm did (and thus recover the private keys). * The proof assumed the machine executing the algorithm was idealized in various ways, when in fact a CPU emits heat other electromagnetic waves, which can be detected and from which inferences can be drawn, etc.
0wedrifid
That's one way to "win" a game of reference class tennis. Declare unilaterally that what you are discussing falls into the reference class "things that are most effectively reasoned about by discussing low level details and abandoning or ignoring all observed evidence about how things with various kinds of similarity have worked in the past". Sure, it may lead to terrible predictions sometimes but by golly, it means you can score an 'ace' in the reference class tennis while pretending you are not even playing!

And atheism is a religion, and bald is a hair color.

The three distinguishing characteristics of "reference class tennis" are (1) that there are many possible reference classes you could pick and everyone engaging in the tennis game has their own favorite which is different from everyone else's; (2) that the actual thing is obviously more dissimilar to all the cited previous elements of the so-called reference class than all those elements are similar to each other (if they even form a natural category at all rather than having being picked out retrospectively based on similarity of outcome to the preferred conclusion); and (3) that the citer of the reference class says it with a cognitive-traffic-signal quality which attempts to shut down any attempt to counterargue the analogy because "it always happens like that" or because we have so many alleged "examples" of the "same outcome" occurring (for Hansonian rationalists this is accompanied by a claim that what you are doing is the "outside view" (see point 2 and 1 for why it's not) and that it would be bad rationality to think about the "individual details").

I have also termed this Argument by Greek Analogy after Socrates's attempt to argue that, since the Sun appears the next day after setting, souls must be immortal.

[-][anonymous]230

I have also termed this Argument by Greek Analogy after Socrates's attempt to argue that, since the Sun appears the next day after setting, souls must be immortal.

For the curious, this is from the Phaedo pages 70-72. The run of the argument are basically thus:

P1 Natural changes are changes from and to opposites, like hot from relatively cold, etc.

P2 Since every change is between opposites A and B, there are two logically possible processes of change, namely A to B and B to A.

P3 If only one of the two processes were physically possible, then we should expect to see only one of the two opposites in nature, since the other will have passed away irretrievably.

P4 Life and death are opposites.

P5 We have experience of the process of death.

P6 We have experience of things which are alive

C From P3, 4, 5, and 6 there is a physically possible, and actual, process of going from death to life.

The argument doesn't itself prove (haha) the immortality of the soul, only that living things come from dead things. The argument is made in support of the claim, made prior to this argument, that if living people come from dead people, then dead people must exist somewhere. The argument is particularly interesting for premises 1 and 2, which are hard to deny, and 3, which seems fallacious but for non-obvious reasons.

This sounds like it might be a bit of a reverent-Western-scholar steelman such as might be taught in modern philosophy classes; Plato's original argument for the immortality of the soul sounded more like this, which is why I use it as an early exemplar of reference class tennis:

-

Then let us consider the whole question, not in relation to man only, but in relation to animals generally, and to plants, and to everything of which there is generation, and the proof will be easier. Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I mean such things as good and evil, just and unjust—and there are innumerable other opposites which are generated out of opposites. And I want to show that in all opposites there is of necessity a similar alternation; I mean to say, for example, that anything which becomes greater must become greater after being less.

True.

And that which becomes less must have been once greater and then have become less.

Yes.

And the weaker is generated from the stronger, and the swifter from the slower.

Very true.

And the worse is from the better, and the more just is from the more unjust.

Of course.

And is this true of all opposites? and are we convinced tha... (read more)

3[anonymous]
That was roughly my aim, but I don't think I inserted any premises that weren't there. Did you have a complaint about the accuracy of my paraphrase? The really implausible premise there, namely that death is the opposite of life, is preserved I think. As for reverence, why not? He was, after all, the very first person in our historical record to suggest that thinking better might make you happier. He was also an intellectualist about morality, at least sometimes a hedonic utilitarian, and held no great respect for logic. And he was a skilled myth-maker. He sounds like a man after your own heart, actually.
2thomblake
I think your summary didn't leave anything out, or even apply anything particularly charitable.
0thomblake
Esar's summary doesn't seem to be different from this, other than 1) adding the useful bit about "passed away irretrievably" and 2) yours makes it clear that the logical jump happens right at the end. I'm actually not sure now why you consider this like "reference class tennis". The argument looks fine, except for the part where "souls exist in the world below" jumps in as a conclusion, not having been mentioned earlier in the argument.
0[anonymous]
The 'souls exist in the world below' bit is directly before what Eliezer quoted: But you're right that nothing in the argument defends the idea of a world below, just that souls must exist in some way between bodies.
0TheAncientGeek
The argument omits that living things can come from living things and dead thingsfrom dead things Therefore, the fact that living things can come from dead things does not mean that have to in every case. Although, if everything started off dead, they must have at some point. So it's an argument for abiogenesis,
0bogdanb
Not even that, at least in the part of the argument I’ve seen (paraphrased?) above. He just mentions an ancient doctrine, and then claims that souls must exist somewhere while they’re not embodied, because he can’t imagine where they would come from otherwise. I’m not even sure if the ancient doctrine is meant as argument from authority or is just some sort of Chewbacca defense. (He doesn’t seem to explicitly claim the “ancient doctrine” to be true or plausible, just that it came to his mind. It feels like I’ve lost something in the translation.)
9wedrifid
Ok, it seems like under this definition of "reference class tennis" (particularly parts (2) and (3)) the participants must be wrong and behaving irrationality about it in order to be playing reference class tennis. So when they are either right or at least applying "outside view" considerations correctly, given all the information available to them they aren't actually playing "reference class tennis" but instead doing whatever it is that reasoning (boundedly) correctly using reference to actual relevant evidence about related occurrences is called when it isn't packaged with irrational wrongness. With this definition in mind it is necessary to translate replies such as those here by Holden: Holden's meaning is, of course, not that that he argues is actually a good thing but rather declaring that the label doesn't apply to what he is doing. He is instead doing that other thing that is actually sound thinking and thinks people are correct to do so. Come to think of it if most people in Holden's shoes heard Eliezer accuse them of "reference class tennis" and actually knew that he intended it with the meaning he explicitly defines here rather than the one they infer from context they would probably just consider him arrogant, rude and mind killed then write him and his organisation off as not worth engaging with. In the vast majority of cases where I have previously seen Eliezer argue against people using "outside view" I have agreed with Eliezer, and have grown rather fond of using the phrase "reference class tennis" as a reply myself where appropriate. But seeing how far Eliezer has taken the anti-outside-view position here and the extent to which "reference class tennis" is defined as purely an anti-outside-view semantic stop sign I'll be far more hesitant to make us of it myself. It is tempting to observe "Eliezer is almost always right when he argues against 'outside view' applications, and the other people are all confused. He is currently arguing against 'o
8Eliezer Yudkowsky
Which of 1, 2 and 3 do you disagree with in this case? Edit: I mean, I'm sorry to parody but I don't really want to carefully rehash the entire thing, so, from my perspective, Holden just said, "But surely strong AI will fall into the reference class of technology used to give users advice, just like Google Maps doesn't drive your car; this is where all technology tends to go, so I'm really skeptical about discussing any other possibility." Only Holden has argued to SI that strong AI falls into this particular reference class so far as I can recall, with many other people having their own favored reference classes e.g. Hanson et. al as cited above; a strong AI is far more internally dissimilar from Google Maps and Yelp than Google Maps and Yelp are internally similar to each other, plus there are many many other software programs that don't provide advice at all so arguably the whole class may be chosen-post-facto; and I'd have to look up Holden's exact words and replies to e.g. Jaan Tallinn to decide to what degree, if any, he used the analogy to foreclose other possibilities conversationally without further debate, but I do think it happened a little, but less so and less explicitly than in my Robin Hanson debate. If you don't think I should at this point diverge into explaining the concept of "reference class tennis", how should the conversation proceed further? Also, further opinions desired on whether I was being rude, whether logically rude or otherwise.
9Randaly
Viewed charitably, you were not being rude, although you did veer away from your main point in ways likely to be unproductive. (For example, being unnecessarily dismissive towards Hanson, who you'd previously stated had given arguments roughly as good as Holden's; or spending so much of your final paragraph emphasizing Holden's lack of knowledge regarding AI.) On the most likely viewing, it looks like you thought Holden was probably playing reference class tennis. This would have been rude, because it would imply that you thought the following inaccurate things about him: * He was "taking his reference class and going home" * That you can't "have a back-and-forth conversation" with him I don't think that you intended those implications. All the same, your final comment came across as noticeably less well-written than your post.
2Eliezer Yudkowsky
Thanks for the third-party opinion!
2TimS
I'm confused how you thought "reference class tennis" was anything but a slur on the other side's argument. Likewise "mindkilled." Sometimes, slurs about arguments are justified (agnostic in the instant case) - but that's a separate issue.
1[anonymous]
Do Karnofsky's contributions have even one of these characteristics, let alone all of them?
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
Empirically obviously 1 is true, I would argue strongly for 2 but it's a legitimate point of dispute, and I would say that there were relatively small but still noticeable but quite forgiveable traces of 3.
-1aaronsw
Then it does seem like your AI arguments are playing reference class tennis with a reference class of "conscious beings". For me, the force of the Tool AI argument is that there's no reason to assume that AGI is going to behave like a sci-fi character. For example, if something like On Intelligence turns out to be true, I think the algorithms it describes will be quite generally intelligent but hardly capable of rampaging through the countryside. It would be much more like Holden's Tool AI: you'd feed it data, it'd make predictions, you could choose to use the predictions. (This is, naturally, the view of that school of AI implementers. Scott Brown: "People often seem to conflate having intelligence with having volition. Intelligence without volition is just information.")
-2MatthewBaker
Your prospective AI plans for programmer-understandability seems very close to Starmap-AI by which I mean The best story I've read about a not so failed utopia involves this kind of accountability over the FAI. While I hate to generalize from fictional evidence it definitely seems like a necessary step to not becoming a galaxy that tiles over the aliens with happy faces instead of just freezing them in place to prevent human harm.
8JGWeissman
Explaining routes is domain specific and quite simple. When you are using domain specific techniques to find solutions to domain specific problems, you can use domain specific interfaces where human programmers and designers do all the heavy lifting to figure out the general strategy of how to communicate to the user. But if you want a tool AGI that finds solutions in arbitrary domains, you need a cross domain solution for communicating tool AGI's plans to the user. This is as much a harder problem than showing a route on a map, as cross domain AGI is a harder problem than computing the routes. Instead of the programmer figuring out how to plot road tracing curves on a map, the programmer has to figure out how to get the computer to figure out that displaying a map with route traced over it is a useful thing to do, in a way that generalizes figuring out other useful things to do to communicate answers to other types of questions. And among the hard subproblems of programming computers to find useful things to do in general problems is specifying the meaning of "useful". If that is done poorly, the tool AGI tries to trick the user into accepting plans that achieve some value negating distortion of what we actually want, instead of giving information that helps provide a good evaluation. Doing this right requires solving the same problems required to do FAI right.
-2private_messaging
To note something on making AIXI based tool: Instead of calculating rewards sum over the whole future (something that is simultaneously impractical, computationally expensive, and would only serve to impair performance on task at hand), one could use the single-step reward, with 1 for button being pressed any time and 0 for button not being pressed ever. It is still not entirely a tool, but it has very bounded range of unintended behaviour (much harder to speculate of the terminator scenario). In the Hutter's paper he outlines several not-quite-intelligences before arriving at AIXI. [edit2: also I do not believe that even with the large sum a really powerful AIXI-tl would be intelligently dangerous rather than simply clever at breaking the hardware that's computing it. All the valid models in AIXI-tl that affect the choice of actions have to magically insert actions being probed into some kind of internal world model. The hardware that actually makes those actions, complete with sensory apparatus, is incidental; a useless power drain; a needless fire hazard endangering the precious reward pathway] With regards to utility functions, the utility functions in the AI sense are real valued functions taken over the world model, not functions like number of paperclips in the world. The latter function, unsafe or safe, would be incredibly difficult or impossible to define using conventional methods. It would suffice for accelerating the progress to have an algorithm that can take in an arbitrary function and find it's maximum; while it would indeed seem to be "very difficult" to use that to cure cancer, it could be plugged into existing models and very quickly be used to e.g. design cellular machinery that would keep repairing the DNA alterations. Likewise, the speculative tool that can understand phrase 'how to cure cancer' and phrase 'what is the curing time of epoxy' would have to pick up most narrow least objectionable interpretation of the 'cure cancer' phrase to me
0CarlShulman
If the past sensory data include information about the internal workings, then there will be a striking correlation between the outputs that the workings would produce on their own (for physical reasons) and the AI's outputs. That rules out (or drives down expected utility of acting upon) all but very crazy hypotheses about how the Cartesian interaction works. Wrecking the hardware would break that correlation, and it's not clear what the crazy hypotheses would say about that, e.g. hypotheses that some simply specified intelligence is stage-managing the inputs, or that sometimes the AIXI-tl's outputs matter, and other times only the physical hardware matters.
-1private_messaging
Well, you can't include entire internal workings in the sensory data, and it can't model significant portion of itself as it has to try big number of hypotheses on the model on each step, so I would not expect the very crazy hypotheses to be very elaborate and have high coverage of the internals. If I closed my eyes and did not catch a ball, the explanation is that I did not see it coming and could not catch it, but this sentence is rife with self references of the sort that is problematic for AIXI. The correlation between closed eyes and lack of reward can be coded into some sort of magical craziness, but if I close my eyes and not my ears and hear where the ball lands after I missed catching it, there's the vastly simpler explanation for why I did not catch it - my hand was not in the right spot (and that works with total absence of sensorium as well). I don't see how AIXI-tl (with very huge constants) can value it's eyesight (it might have some value if there is some asymmetric in the long models, but it seems clear it would not assign the adequate, rational value to it's eyesight). In my opinion there is no single unifying principle to intelligence (or none was ever found), and AIXI-tl (with very huge constants) fails way short of even a cat in many important ways. edit: Some other thought: I am not sure that Solomonoff induction's prior is compatible with expected utility maximization. If the expected utility imbalance between crazy models grows faster than 2^length , and I would expect it to grow faster than any computable function (if the utility is unbounded), then the actions will be determined by imbalances between crazy, ultra long models. I would not privilege the belief that it just works without some sort of formal proof or some other very good reason to think it works.
3cousin_it
Your question seems to be about how sentient beings in a Game of Life universe are supposed to define "gliders" to the AI. 1) If they know the true laws of their cellular automaton, they can make a UDT-ish AI that examines statements like "if this logical algorithm has such-and-such output, then my prior over starting configurations of the universe logically implies such-and-such total number of gliders". 2) If they only know that their universe is some cellular automaton and have a prior over all possible automata, they can similarly say "maximize the number of smallest possible spaceships under the automaton rules" and give the AI some sensory channel wide enough to pin down the specific automaton with high probability. 3) If they only know what sensory experiences correspond to the existence of gliders, but don't know what gliders are... I guess we have a problem because sensory experiences can be influenced by the AI :-(
2TheOtherDave
Regarding #3: what happens given a directive like "Over there are a bunch of people who report sensory experiences of the kind I'm interested in. Figure out what differentially caused those experiences, and maximize the incidence of that."? (I'm not concerned with the specifics of my wording, which undoubtedly contains infinite loopholes; I'm asking about the general strategy of, when all I know is sensory experiences, referring to the differential causes of those experiences, whatever they may be. Which, yes, I would expect to include, in the case where there actually are no gliders and the recurring perception of gliders is the result of a glitch in my perceptual system, modifying my perceptual system to make such glitches more likely... but which I would not expect to include, in the case where my perceptual system is operating essentially the same way when it perceives gliders as when it perceives everything else, modifying my perceptual system to include such glitches (since such a glitch is not the differential cause of experiences of gliders in the first place.))
1cousin_it
Let's say you want the AI to maximize the amount of hydrogen, and you formulate the goal as "maximize the amount of the substance most likely referred to by such-and-such state of mind", where "referred to" is cashed out however you like. Now imagine that some other substance is 10x cheaper to make than hydrogen. Then the AI could create a bunch of minds in the same state, just enough to re-point the "most likely" pointer to the new substance instead of hydrogen, leading to huge savings overall. Or it could do something even more subversive, my imagination is weak. That's what I was getting at, when I said a general problem with using sensory experiences as pointers is that the AI can influence sensory experiences.
3TheOtherDave
Well, right, but my point is that "the thing which differentially caused the sensory experiences to which I refer" does not refer to the same thing as "the thing which would differentially cause similar sensory experiences in the future, after you've made your changes," and it's possible to specify the former rather than the latter. The AI can influence sensory experiences, but it can't retroactively influence sensory experiences. (Or, well, perhaps it can, but that's a whole new dimension of subversive. Similarly, I suppose a sufficiently powerful optimizer could rewrite the automaton rules in case #2, so perhaps we have a similar problem there as well.)
2cousin_it
You need to describe the sensory experience as part of the AI's utility computation somehow. I thought it would be something like a bitstring representing a brain scan, which can refer to future experiences just as easily as past ones. Do you propose to include a timestamp? But the universe doesn't seem to have a global clock. Or do you propose to say something like "the values of such-and such terms in the utility computation must be unaffected by the AI's actions"? But we don't know how to define "unaffected" mathematically...
1TheOtherDave
I was thinking in terms of referring to a brain. Or, rather, a set of them. But a sufficiently detailed brainscan would work just as well, I suppose. And, sure, the universe doesn't have a clock, but a clock isn't needed, simply an ordering: the AI attends to evidence about sensory experiences that occurred before the AI received the instruction. Of course, maybe it is incapable of figuring out whether a given sensory experience occurred before it received the instruction... it's just not smart enough. Or maybe the universe is weirder than I imagine, such that the order in which two events occur is not something the AI and I can actually agree on... which is the same case as "perhaps it can in fact retroactively influence sensory experiences" above.
0Nebu
I think LearnFun might be informative here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY LearnFun watches a human play an arbitrary NES games. It is hardcoded to assume that as time progresses, the game is moving towards a "better and better" state (i.e. it assumes the player's trying to win and is at least somewhat effective at achieving its goals). The key point here is that LearnFun does not know ahead of time what the objective of the game is. It infers what the objective of the game is from watching humans play. (More technically, it observes the entire universe, where the entire universe is defined to be the entire RAM content of the NES). I think there's some parallels here with your scenario where we don't want to explicitly tell the AI what our utility function is. Instead, we're pointing to a state, and we're saying "This is a good state" (and I guess either we'd explicitly tell the AI "and this other state, it's a bad state" or we assume the AI can somehow infer bad states to contrast the good states from), and then we ask the AI to come up with a plan (and possibly execute the plan) that would lead to "more good" states. So what happens? Bit of a spoiler, but sometimes the AI seems to make a pretty good inference for what the utility function a human would probably have had for a given NES game, but sometimes it makes a terrible inference. It never seems to make a "perfect" inference: the even in its best performance, it seems to be optimizing very strange things. The other part of it is that even if it does have a decent inference for the utility function, it's not always good at coming up with a plan that will optimize that utility function.
0itaibn0
I believe AIXI is much more inspectable than you make it out to be. I think it is important to challenge your claim here because Holden appears to have trusted your expertise and hereby concede an important part of the argument. AIXI's utility judgements are based a Solomonoff prior, which are based on the computer programs which return the input data. Computer programs are not black-boxes. A system implementing AIXI can easily also return a sample of typical expected future histories and the programs compressing these histories. By examining these programs, we can figure out what implicit model the AIXI system has of its world. These programs are optimized for shortness so they are likely to be very obfuscated, but I don't expect them to be incomprehensible (after all, they're not optimized for incomprehensibility). Even just sampling expected histories without their compressions is likely to be very informative. In the case of AIXItl the situation is better in the sense that it's output at any give time is guaranteed to be generated by just one length <l subprogram, and this subprogram comes with a proof justifying its utility judgement. It's also worse in that there is no way to sample its expected future histories. However, I expect the proof provided would implicitly contain such information. If either the programs or the proofs cannot be understood by humans, the programmers can just reject them and look at the next best candidates. As for "What will be its effect on _?", this can be answered as well. I already stated that with AIXI you can sample future histories. This is because AIXI has a specific known prior it implements for its future histories, namely Solomonoff induction. This ability may seem limited because it only shows the future sensory data, but sensory data can be whatever you feed AIXI as input. If you want it to a have a realistic model of the world, this includes a lot of relevant information. For example, if you feed it the entire database
1Nebu
Can you be a bit more specific in your interpretation of AIXI here? Here are my assumptions, let me know where you have different assumptions: * Traditional-AIXI is assumed to exists in the same universe as the human who wants to use AIXI to solve some problem. * Traditional-AIXI has a fixed input channel (e.g. it's connected to a webcam, and/or it receives keyboard signals from the human, etc.) * Traditional-AIXI has a fixed output channel (e.g. it's connected to a LCD monitor, or it can control a robot servo arm, or whatever). * The human has somehow pre-provided Traditional-AIXI with some utility function. * Traditional-AIXI operates in discrete time steps. * In the first timestep that elapses since Traditional-AIXI is activated, Traditional-AIXI examines the input it receives. It considers all possible programs that take pair (S, A) and emits an output P, where S is the prior state, A is an action to take, and P is the predicted output of taking the action A in state S. Then it discards all programs that would not have produced the input it received, regardless of what S or A it was given. Then it weighs the remaining program according to their Kolmorogov complexity. This is basically the Solomonoff induction step. * Now Traditional-AIXI has to make a decision about an output to generate. It considers all possible outputs it could produce, and feeds it to the programs under consideration, to produce a predicted next time step. Traditional-AIXI then calculates the expected utility of each output (using its pre-programmed utility function), picks the one with the highest utility, and emits that output. Note that it has no idea how any of its outputs would the universe, so this is essentially a uniformly random choice. * In the next timestep, Traditional-AIXI reads its inputs again, but this time taking into account what output it has generated in the previous step. It can now start to model correlation, and eventually causation, between its input and out
0Squark
Regarding the question of formalizing an optimization agent with goals defined in terms of external universe rather than sensory input. It is possible to attack the problem by generalizing the framework I described in http://lesswrong.com/lw/gex/save_the_princess_a_tale_of_aixi_and_utility/8ekk for solving the duality problem. Specifically, consider an "initial guess" stochastic model of the universe including the machine on which our agent is running. I call it the "innate model" M. Now consider a stochastic process with the same degrees of freedom as M but governed by the Solomonoff semi-measure. This is the "unbiased model" S. The two can be combined by assigning transition probabilities proportional to the product of the probabilities assigned by M and S. If M is sufficiently "insecure" (in particular it doesn't assign 0 to any transition probability) then the resulting model S', considered as prior, allows arriving at any computable model after sufficient learning. Fix a utility function on the space of histories of our model (note that the histories include both intrinsic and extrinsic degrees of freedom). The intelligence I(A) of any given agent A (= program written in M in the initial state) can now be defined to be the expected utility of A in S'. We can now consider optimal or near-optimal agents in this sense (as opposed to the Legg-Hutter formalism for measuring intelligence, there is no guarantee there is a maximum rather than a supremum; unless of course we limit the length of the programs we consider). This is a generalization of the Legg-Hutter formalism which accounts for limited computational resources, solves the duality problem (such agents take into account possibly wireheading) and also provides a solution for the ontology problem. This is essentially a special case of the Orseau-Ring framework. It is however much more specific than Orseau-Ring where the prior is left completely unspecified. You can think of it as a recipe for constructing Orse
0Squark
I realized that although the idea of a deformed Solomonoff semi-measure is correct, the multiplication prescription I suggested is rather ad hoc. The following construction is a much more natural and justifiable way of combining M and S. Fix t0 a time parameter. Consider a stochastic process S(-t0) that begins at time t = -t0, where t = 0 is the time our agent A "forms", governed by the Solomonoff semi-measure. Consider another stochastic process M(-t0) that begins from the initial conditions generated by S(-t0) (I'm assuming M only carries information about dynamics and not about initial conditions). Define S' to be the conditional probability distribution obtained from S by two conditions: a. S and M coincide on the time interval [-t0, 0] b. The universe contains A at time t=0 Thus t0 reflects the extent to which we are certain about M: it's like telling the agent we have been observing behavior M for time period t0. There is an interesting side effect to this framework, namely that A can exert "acausal" influence on the utility by affecting the initial conditions of the universe (i.e. it selects universes in which A is likely to exist). This might seem like an artifact of the model but I think it might be a legitimate effect: if we believe in one-boxing in Newcomb's paradox, why shouldn't we accept such acausal effects? For models with a concept of space and finite information velocity, like cellular automata, it might make sense to limit the domain of "observed M" in space as well as time, to A's past "light-cone"
0Eliezer Yudkowsky
I cannot even slightly visualize what you mean by this. Please explain how it would be used to construct an AI that made glider-oids in a Life-like cellular automaton universe.
0Squark
Is the AI hardware separate from the cellular automaton or is it a part of it? Assuming the latter, we need to decide which degrees of freedom of the cellular automaton form the program of our AI. For example we can select a finite set of cells and allow setting their values arbitrarily. Then we need to specify our utility function. For example it can be a weighted sum of the number of gliders at different moments of time, or a maximum or whatever. However we need to make sure the expectation values converge. Then the "AI" is simply the assignment of values to the selected cells in the initial state which yields the maximal expect utility. Note though that if we're sure about the law governing the cellular automaton then there's no reason to use the Solomonoff semi-measure at all (except maybe as a prior for the initial state outside the selected cells). However if our idea of the way the cellular automaton works is only an "initial guess" then the expectation value is evaluated w.r.t. a stochastic process governed by a "deformed Solomonoff" semi-measure in which transitions illegal w.r.t. assumed cellular automaton law are suppressed by some factor 0 < p < 1 w.r.t. "pure" Solomonoff inference. Note that, contrary to the case of AIXI, I can only describe the measure of intelligence, I cannot constructively describe the agent maximizing this measure. This is unsurprising since building a real (bounded computing resources) AI is a very difficult problem
-9private_messaging
1JGWeissman
If the tool is not sufficiently reflective to recommend improvements to itself, it will never become a worthy substituted for FAI. This case is not interesting. If the tool is sufficiently reflective to recommend improvements to itself, it will recommend that it be modified to just implement its proposed policies instead of printing them. So we would not actually implement that policy. But what then makes it recommend a policy that we will actually want to implement? What tweak to the program should we apply in that situation?
0Nebu
First of all, I'm assuming that we're taking as axiomatic that the tool "wants" to improve itself (or else why would it have even bothered to consider recommending that it be modified to improve itself?); i.e. improving itself is favorable according to its utility function. Then: It will recommend a policy that we will actually want to implement, because its model of the universe includes our minds and it can see that if it recommends a policy we will actually want to implement leads it to a higher ranked state in its utility function.
0hairyfigment
Perhaps. I noticed a related problem: someone will want to create a self-modifying AI. Let's say we ask the Oracle AI about this plan. At present (as I understand it) we have no mathematical way to predict the effects of self-modification. (Hence Eliezer's desire for a new decision theory that can do this.) So how did we give our non-self-modifying Oracle that ability? Wouldn't we need to know the math of getting the right answer in order to write a program that gets the right answer? And if it can't answer the question: * What will it even do at that point? * If it happens to fail safely, will humans as we know them interpret this non-answer to mean we should delay our plan for self-modifying AI?
0MattMahoney
If we were smart enough to understand its policy, then it would not be smart enough to be dangerous.
3wedrifid
That doesn't seem true. Simple policies can be dangerous and more powerful than I am.
0Nebu
To steelman the parent argument a bit, a simple policy can be dangerous, but if an agent proposed a simple and dangerous policy to us, we probably would not implement it (since we could see that it was dangerous), and thus the agent itself would not be dangerous to us. If the agent were to propose a policy that, as far as we could tell, appears safe, but was in fact dangerous, then simultaneously: 1. We didn't understand the policy. 2. The agent was dangerous to us.
-9timtyler

To clarify, for everyone:

There are now three "major" responses from SI to Holden's Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI): (1) a comments thread on recent improvements to SI as an organization, (2) a post series on how SI is turning donor dollars into AI risk reduction and how it could do more of this if it had more funding, and (3) Eliezer's post on Tool AI above.

At least two more major responses from SI are forthcoming: a detailed reply to Holden's earlier posts and comments on expected value estimates (e.g. this one), and a long reply from me that summarizes my responses to all (or almost all) of the many issues raised in Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI).

3Nick_Beckstead
How much of this is counting toward the 50,000 words of authorized responses?
3lukeprog
I told Holden privately that this would be explained in my final "summary" reply. I suspect the 5200 words of Eliezer's post above will be part of the 50,000.
1Wei Dai
Luke, do you know if there has been any official (or unofficial) response to my argument that Holden quoted in his post?
1lukeprog
Not that I know of. I fully agree with that comment, and I suspect Eliezer does as well.

Software that does happen to interface with humans is selectively visible and salient to humans, especially the tiny part of the software that does the interfacing; but this is a special case of a general cost/benefit tradeoff which, more often than not, turns out to swing the other way, because human advice is either too costly or doesn't provide enough benefit.

I suspect this is the biggest counter-argument for Tool AI, even bigger than all the technical concerns Eliezer made in the post. Even if we could build a safe Tool AI, somebody would soon build an agent AI anyway.

My five cents on the subject, from something that I'm currently writing:

Like with external constraints, Oracle AI suffers from the problem that there would always be an incentive to create an AGI that could act on its own, without humans in the loop. Such an AGI would be far more effective in furthering whatever goals it had been built to pursue, but also far more dangerous.

Current-day narrow-AI technology includes high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithms, which make trading decisions within fractions of a second, far too fast to keep humans in the loop. HFT seeks to make a very short-term profit, but even tr

... (read more)
0[anonymous]
But assuming that we could build a safe Tool AI, we could use it to build an safer agent AI than one would otherwise be able to build. This is related to Holden's point:
0torekp
Thank you for saying this (and backing it up better than I would have). I think we should concede, however, that a similar threat applies to FAI. The arms race phenomenon may create uFAI before FAI can be ready. This strikes me as very probable. Alternately, if AI does not "foom", uFAI might be created after FAI. (I'm mostly persuaded that it will foom, but I still think it's useful to map the debate.) The one advantage is that if Friendly Agent AI comes first and fooms, the threat is neutralized; whereas Friendly Tool AI can only advise us how to stop reckless AI researchers. If reckless agent AIs act more rapidly than we can respond, the Tool AI won't save us.
2Vladimir_Nesov
If uFAI doesn't "foom" either, they both get a good chunk of expected utility. FAI doesn't need any particular capability, it only has to be competitive with other possible things.

Marcus Hutter is a rare exception who specified his AGI in such unambiguous mathematical terms that he actually succeeded at realizing, after some discussion with SIAI personnel, that AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button.

Marcus Hutter denies ever having said that.

I asked EY for how to proceed, with his approval these are the messages we exchanged:

Eliezer,

I am unsure how to proceed and would appreciate your thoughts on resolving this situation:

In your Reply to Holden on 'Tool AI', to me one of the central points, and the one that much credibility hinges on is this:

[Initial quote of this comment]

That and some other "quotes" and allusions to Hutter, the most recent one by Carl Shulman [I referred to this: "The informal argument that AIXI would accept a delusion box to give itself maximal sensory reward was made by Eliezer a while ago, and convinced the AIXI originators." which I may have mistakingly attributed to M.H. since he is the AIXI originator], that are attributed to M.H. seemed to be greatly at odds with my experiences with the man, so I asked Carl Shulman for sourcing them, he had this to say:

"I recall overhearing

... (read more)
6lukeprog
I don't know whether Hutter ever told Eliezer that "AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button," but he does say the following in his book (pp. 238-239): This issue is discussed at greater length, and with greater formality, in Dewey (2011) and Ring & Orseau (2011).
[-]gwern180

I think it's a pity that we're not focusing on what we could do to test the tool vs general AI distinction. For example, here's one near-future test: how do we humans deal with drones?

Drones are exploding in popularity, are increasing their capabilities constantly, and are coveted by countless security agencies and private groups for their tremendous use in all sorts of roles both benign and disturbing. Just like AIs would be. The tool vs general AI distinction maps very nicely onto drones as well: a tool AI corresponds to a drone being manually flown by a human pilot somewhere, while a general AI would correspond to an autonomous drone which is carrying out some mission (blast insurgents?).

So, here is a near-future test of the question 'are people likely to let tool AIs 'drive themselves' for greater efficiency?' - simply ask whether in, say, a decade there are autonomous drones carrying tasks that now would only be carried out by piloted drones.

If in a decade we learn that autonomous drones are killing people, then we have an answer to our tool AI question: it doesn't matter because given a tool AI, people will just turn it into a general AI.

(Amdahl's law: if the human in the loo... (read more)

9gwern
Besides Knight Capital, HFT may provide another example of near-disaster from economic incentives forcing the removal of safety guidelines from narrow AI. From the LRB's "Be grateful for drizzle: Donald MacKenzie on high-frequency trading": (Memoirs from US drone operators suggest that the bureaucratic organizations in charge of racking up kill-counts have become disturbingly cavalier about not doing their homework on the targets they're blowing up, but thus far, anyway, they haven't made the drones fully autonomous.)
[-]MBlume180

I begin by thanking Holden Karnofsky of Givewell for his rare gift of his detailed, engaged, and helpfully-meant critical article Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI). In this reply I will engage with only one of the many subjects raised therein, the topic of, as I would term them, non-self-modifying planning Oracles, a.k.a. 'Google Maps AGI' a.k.a. 'tool AI', this being the topic that requires me personally to answer. I hope that my reply will be accepted as addressing the most important central points, though I did not have time to explore every avenue. I certainly do not wish to be logically rude, and if I have failed, please remember with compassion that it's not always obvious to one person what another person will think was the central point.

Luke Mueulhauser and Carl Shulman contributed to this article, but the final edit was my own, likewise any flaws.

I think you're starting to write more like a Friendly AI. This is totally a good thing.

Yes, the tone of this response should be commended.

2private_messaging
Wouldn't even a paperclip maximizer write in same style in those circumstances?
3John_Maxwell
IMO, speaking in arrogant absolutes makes people stupid regardless of what conclusion you're arguing for.
-1wedrifid
No. It would start hacking things, take over the world, kill everything then burn the cosmic commons.
3private_messaging
Only when it has power to do that. Meatbound equivalent would have to upload itself first.
1MarkusRamikin
Maybe that was Luke's contribution ;)

There are two ways to read Holden's claim about what happens if 100 experts check the proposed FAI safety proof. On one reading, Holden is saying that if 100 experts check it and say, "Yes, I am highly confident that this is in fact safe," then activating the AI kills us all with 90% probability. On the other reading, Holden is saying that even if 100 experts do their best to find errors and say, "No, I couldn't identify any way in which this will kill us, though that doesn't mean it won't kill us," then activating the AI kills us all with 90% probability. I think the first reading is very implausible. I don't believe the second reading, but I don't think it's obviously wrong. I think the second reading is the more charitable and relevant one.

2Nick_Beckstead
For context, I pointed this out because it looks like Eliezer is going for the first reading and criticizing that.

Nope, I was assuming the second reading. The first reading is too implausible to be considered at all.

7Nick_Beckstead
Good. But now I find this response less compelling: Holden might think that these folks will be of the opinion, "I can't see an error, but I'm really not confident that there isn't an error." He doesn't have to think that he knows something they don't. In particular, he doesn't have to think that there is some special failure mode he's thought of that none of them have thought of.
8JenniferRM
It seems like this is turning into a statement about human technical politics. The latter is stereotypically something a cautious engineer in cover-your-ass-mode is likely to say no matter how much quality assurance has happened. The first is something that an executive in selling-to-investors-and-the-press-mode is likely to say once they estimate it will have better outcomes than saying something else with the investors and the press, perhaps just because they know of something worse that will happen outside their control that seems very likely to be irreversible and less likely to be good. Between these two stereotypes lays a sort of "reasonable rationalist speaking honestly but pragmatically"? This is a hard area to speak about clearly between individuals without significant interpersonal calibration on the functional meaning of "expert", because you run into Dunning-Kruger effects if you aren't careful and a double illusion of transparency can prevent you from even noticing the miscommunication. There are conversations that can allow specific people to negotiate a common definition with illustrations grounded in personal experience here, but they take many minutes or hours, and are basically a person-to-person protocol. The issue is doubly hard with a general audience because wildly different gut reactions will be elicited and there will be bad faith participation by at least some people, and so on. Rocket scientists get this wrong sometimes. It is a hard problem.
7Eliezer Yudkowsky
Nonetheless, where is he getting the 90% doom probability from?
2Nick_Beckstead
I'm with you, 90% seems too high given the evidence he cites or any evidence I know of.
6Arepo
Assuming you accept the reasoning, 90% seems quite generous to me. What percentage of complex computer programmes when run for the first time exhibit behaviour the programmers hadn't anticipated? I don't have much of an idea, but my guess would be close to 100. If so, the question is how likely unexpected behaviour is to be fatal. For any programme that will eventually gain access to the world at large and quickly become AI++, that seems (again, no data to back this up - just an intuitive guess) pretty likely, perhaps almost certain. For any parameter of human comfort (eg 253 degrees Kelvin, 60% water, 40 hour working weeks), a misplaced decimal point misplaced by seems like it would destroy the economy at best and life on earth at worst. If Holden’s criticism is appropriate, the best response might be to look for other options rather than making a doomed effort to make FAI – for example trying to prevent the development of AI anywhere on earth, at least until we can self-improve enough to keep up with it. That might have a low probability of success, but if FAI has sufficiently low probability, it would still seem like a better bet.
7falenas108
That's for normal programs, where errors don't matter. If you look at ones where people carefully look over the code because lives are at stake (like NASA rockets), then you'll have a better estimate. Probably still not accurate, because much more is at stake for AI than just a few lives, but it will be closer.
3TheOtherDave
I suspect that unpacking "run a program for the first time" more precisely would be useful here; it's not clear to me that everyone involved in the conversation has the same referents for it.
2Nick_Beckstead
This. I see that if you have one and only one chance to push the Big Red Button and you're not allowed to use any preliminary testing of components or boxing strategies (or you're confident that those will never work) and you don't get most of the experts to agree that it is safe, then 90% is more plausible. If you envision more of these extras to make it safer--which seems like the relevant thing to envision--90% seems too high to me.
2DanArmak
Surely NASA code is thoroughly tested in simulation runs. It's the equivalent of having a known-perfect method of boxing an AI.
0asparisi
Huh. This brings up the question of whether or not it would be possible to simulate the AGI code in a test-run without regular risks. Maybe create some failsafe that is invisible to the AGI that destroys it if it is "let out of the box" or (to incorporate Holden's suggestion, since it just came to me) having a "tool mode" where the AGI's agent-properties (decision making, goal setting, etc.) are non-functional.
-1Eliezer Yudkowsky
But NASA code can't check itself - there's no attempt at having an AI go over it.
0DanArmak
Yes, but even ordinary simulation testing produces software that's much better on its first real run than software that has never been run at all.
0Randaly
From They Write the Right Stuff Note, however, that a) this is after many years of debugging from practice, b) NASA was able to safely 'box' their software, and c) even one error, if in the wrong place, would be really bad.
0Strange7
How hard would it actually be to "box" an AI that's effectively had it's brain sliced up into very small chunks? A program could, if it was important enough and people were willing to take the time to do so, be broken down into pieces and each of the pieces tested separately. Any given module has particular sorts of input it's designed to receive, and particular sorts of output it's supposed to pass on to the next module. Testers give the module different combinations of valid inputs and try to get it to produce an invalid output, and when they succeed, either the module is revised and the testing process on that module starts over from the beginning, or the definition of valid inputs is narrowed, which changes the limits for valid outputs and forces some other module further back to be redesigned and retested. A higher-level analysis, which is strictly theoretical, also tries to come up with sequences of valid inputs and outputs which could lead to a bad outcome. Eventually, after years of work and countless iterations of throwing out massive bodies of work to start over, you get a system which is very tightly specified to be safe, and meets those specs under all conceivable conditions, but has never actually been plugged in and run as a whole.
0TheOtherDave
The conceptually tricky part of this, of course, (as opposed to merely difficult to implement) is getting from "these pieces are individually certified to exhibit these behaviors" to "the system as a whole is certified to exhibit these behaviors"
0Strange7
That's where you get the higher-level work with lots of mathematical proofs and no direct code testing, yeah. And, of course, it would be foolish to jump straight from testing the smallest possible submodules separately to assembling and implementing the whole thing in real life. Once any two submodules which interact with each other have been proven to work as intended, those two can be combined and the result tested as if it were a single module. The question is, is there any pathological behavior an AI could conceivably exhibit which would not be present in some detectable-but-harmless form among some subset of the AI's components? e.g.
0TheOtherDave
(nods) Yup. If you actually want to develop a provably "safe" AI (or, for that matter, a provably "safe" genome, or a provably "safe" metal alloy, or a provably "safe" dessert topping) you need a theoretical framework in which you can prove "safety" with mathematical precision.
7TheOtherDave
You know, the idea that SI might at any moment devote itself to suppressing AI research is one that pops up from time to time, the logic pretty much being what you suggest here, and until this moment I have always treated it as a kind of tongue-in-cheek dig at SI. I have only just now come to realize that the number of people (who are not themselves affiliated with SI) who really do seem to consider suppressing AI research to be a reasonable course of action given the ideas discussed on this forum has a much broader implication in terms of the social consequences of these ideas. That is, I've only just now come to realize that what the community of readers does is just as important, if not more so, than what SI does. I am now becoming genuinely concerned that, by participating in a forum that encourages people to take seriously ideas that might lead them to actively suppress AI research, I might be doing more harm than good. I'll have to think about that a bit more. Arepo, this is not particularly directed at you; you just happen to be the data point that caused this realization to cross an activation threshold.
1Shmi
Assuming that you think that more AI research is good, wouldn't adding your voice to those who advocate it here be a good thing? It's not like your exalted position and towering authority lends credence to a contrary opinion just because you mention it.
2TheOtherDave
I think better AI (of the can-be-engineered-given-what-we-know-today, non-generally-superhuman sort) is good, and I suspect that more AI research is the most reliable way to get it. I agree that my exalted position and towering authority doesn't lend credence to contrary opinions I mention. It's not clear to me whether advocating AI research here would be a better thing than other options, though it might be.
0Bruno_Coelho
People with similar background are entering in AI field because they like reduce x-risks, so it's not obvious this is happening. If safety guided research supress AI research, then be it. Extremely rapid advance per se is not good, if the consequence is extiction.

And if the preference function was just over the human's 'goodness' of the end result, rather than the accuracy of the human's understanding of the predictions, the AI might tell you something that was predictively false but whose implementation would lead you to what the AI defines as a 'good' outcome. And if we ask how happy the human is, the resulting decision procedure would exert optimization pressure to convince the human to take drugs, and so on.

I was under the impression that Holden's suggestion was more along the lines of: Make a model of the world. Remove the user from the model and replace it with a similar user that will always do what you recommend. Then manipulate this user so that it achieves its objective in the model, and report the actions that you have the user do in the model to the real user.

Thus, if the objective was to make the user happy, the Google Maps AGI would simply instruct the user to take drugs, rather than tricking him into doing so, because such instruction is the easiest way to manipulate the user in the model that the Google Maps AGI is optimizing in.

Actually, the easiest output for the AI in that case is "be happy."

5Eliezer Yudkowsky
But - that's not what he meant!

I don't know why you keep harping on this. Just because an algorithm logically can produce a certain output, and probably will produce that output, doesn't mean good intentions and vigorous handwaving are any less capable of magic.

This is why when I fire a gun, I just point it in the general direction of my target, and assume the universe will know what I meant to hit.

6MBlume
I mean, it works in so many video games.
4Strange7
As a failure mode, "vague, useless, or trivially-obvious suggestions" is less of a problem than "rapidly eradicates all life." Historically, projects that were explicitly designed to be safe even when they inevitably failed have been more successful and less deadly than projects which were obsessively designed never to fail at all.
1pnrjulius
Indeed, one of the first things we teach our engineers is "Even if you're sure it can't fail, plan for failure anyway. Many before you have been sure things couldn't fail---that failed."
0AlexMennen
Indeed it isn't, although I'm not so foolish as to claim to know how to fully specify my suggestion in a way that avoids all of these sorts of problems.
9Eliezer Yudkowsky
Holden didn't actually suggest that. And while this suggestion is in a certain sense ingenious - it's not too far off from the sort of suggestions I flip through when considering how/if to implement CEV or similar processes - how do you "report the actions"? And do you report the reasons for them? And do you check to see if there are systematic discrepancies between consequences in the true model and consequences in the manipulated one? (This last point, btw, is sufficient that I would never try to literally implement this suggestion, but try to just structure preferences around some true model instead.)
2Armok_GoB
I can think of a bunch of random standard modes of display (top candidate: video and audio of what the simulated user sees and hears, plus subtitles of their internal model), and for the dispensaries you could run the simulation many times with random variations roughly along the same scope and dimensions as the differences between the simulations and reality, either just reacting plans that have to much divergence, or simply showing the display of all of them (wich'd also help against frivolous use if you have to watch the action 1000 times before doing it). I'd also say make the simulated user a total drone with seriously rewired neurology to try to always and only do what the AI tells it to. Not that this solves the problem - I've countered the real dangerous things I notice instantly, but 5 mins to think of it and I'll notice 20 more - but I though someone should actually try to answer the question in spirit and letter and most charitable interpretation. also, it'd make a nice movie.
-5private_messaging
-8private_messaging
1Strange7
Hardwiring the AI to be extremely naive about how easy the user is to manipulate might not be sufficient for safety, but it does seem like a pretty good start.

Delete the word "hardwiring" from your vocabulary. You can't do it with wires, and saying it doesn't accomplish any magic.

I think there is an interpretation of "hardwiring" that makes sense when talking about AI. For example, say you have a chess program. You can make a patch for it that says "if my light squared bishop is threatened, getting it out of danger is highest priority, second only to getting the king out of check". Moreover, even for very complex chess programs, I would expect that patch to be pretty simple, compared to the whole program.

Maybe a general AI will necessarily have an architecture that makes such patches impossible or ineffective. Then again, maybe not. You could argue that an AI would work around any limitations imposed by patches, but I don't see why a computer program with an ugly patch would magically acquire a desire to behave as if it didn't have the patch, and converge to maximizing expected utility or something. In any case I'd like to see a more precise version of that argument.

ETA: I share your concern about the use of "hardwiring" to sweep complexity under the rug. But saying that AIs can do one magical thing (understand human desires) but not another magical thing (whatever is supposed to be "hardwired") seems a little weird to me.

Yeah, well, hardwiring the AI to understand human desires wouldn't be goddamned trivial either, I just decided not to go down that particular road, mostly because I'd said it before and Holden had apparently read at least some of it.

Getting the light-square bishop out of danger as highest priority...

1) Do I assume the opponent assigns symmetric value to attacking the light-square bishop?

2) Or that the opponent actually values checkmates only, but knows that I value the light-square bishop myself and plan forks and skewers accordingly?

3) Or that the opponent has no idea why I'm doing what I'm doing?

4) Or that the opponent will figure it out eventually, but maybe not in the first game?

5) What about the complicated static-position evaluator? Do I have to retrain all of it, and possibly design new custom heuristics, now that the value of a position isn't "leads to checkmate" but rather "leads to checkmate + 25% leads to bishop being captured"?

Adding this to Deep Blue is not remotely as trivial as it sounds in English. Even to add it in a half-assed way, you have to at least answer question 1, because the entire non-brute-force search-tree pruning mechanism depends on guessing which branches the opponent will prune. Look up alpha-beta search to start seeing why everything becomes more interesting when position-values are no longer being determined symmetrically.

For what it's worth, the intended answers are 1) no 2) no 3) yes 4) no 5) the evaluation function and the opening book stay the same, there's just a bit of logic squished above them that kicks in only when the bishop is threatened, not on any move before that.

Yeah, game-theoretic considerations make the problem funny, but the intent wasn't to convert an almost-consistent utility maximizer into another almost-consistent utility maximizer with a different utility function that somehow values keeping the bishop safe. The intent was to add a hack that throws consistency to the wind, and observe that the AI doesn't rebel against the hack. After all, there's no law saying you must build only consistent AIs.

My guess is that's what most folks probably mean when they talk about "hardwiring" stuff into the AI. They don't mean changing the AI's utility function over the real world, they mean changing the AI's code so it's no longer best described as maximizing such a function. That might make the AI stupid in some respects and manipulable by humans, which may or may not be a bad thing :-) Of course your actual goals (whatever they are) would be better served by a genuine expected utility maximizer, but building that could be harder and more dangerous. Or at least that's how the reasoning is supposed to go, I think.

8Wei Dai
Why doesn't the AI reason "if I remove this hack, I'll be more likely to win?" Because this is just a narrow chess AI and the programmer never gave it general reasoning abilities?
2private_messaging
More interesting question is why it (if made capable of such reflection) would not take it a little step further and ponder what happens if it removes enemy's queen from it's internal board, which would also make it more likely to win, with its internal definition of win which is defined in terms of internal board. Or why would anyone go through the bother of implementing possibly irreducible notion of what 'win' really means in the real world, given that this would simultaneously waste computing power on unnecessary explorations and make AI dangerous / uncontrollable. Thing is, you don't need to imagine the world dying to avoid making pointless likely impossible accomplishments.
0cousin_it
Yeah, because it's just a narrow real-world AI without philosophical tendencies... I'm actually not sure. A more precise argument would help, something like "all sufficiently powerful AIs will try to become or create consistent maximizers of expected utility, for such-and-such reasons".
6Vladimir_Nesov
Does a pair of consistent optimizers with different goals have a tendency to become a consistent optimizer? The problem with powerful non-optimizers seems to be that the "powerful" property already presupposes optimization power, and so at least one optimizer-like thing is present in the system. If it's powerful enough and is not contained, it's going to eat all the other tendencies of its environment, and so optimization for its goal will be all that remains. Unless there is another optimizer able to defend its non-conformity from the optimizer in question, in which case the two of them might constitute what counts as not-a-consistent-optimizer, maybe?
0Eliezer Yudkowsky
Option 3? Doesn't work very well. You're assuming the opponent doesn't want to threaten the bishop, which means you yank it to a place where it would be safe if the opponent doesn't want to threaten it, but if the opponent clues in, it's then trivial for them to threaten the bishop again (to gain more advantage as you try to defend), which you weren't expecting them to do, because that's not how your search tree was structured. Kasparov would kick hell out of thus-hardwired Deep Blue as soon as he realized what was happening. It's that whole "see the consequences of the math" thing...

Either your comment is in violent agreement agreement with mine ("that might make the AI stupid in some respects and manipulable by humans"), or I don't understand what you're trying to say...

8Eliezer Yudkowsky
Probably violent agreement.
-11Strange7
8Strange7
I was sorely tempted, upon being ordered to self-modify in such a way, to respond angrily. It implies a lack of respect for the integrity of those with whom you are trying to communicate. You could have said "taboo" instead of demanding a permanent loss. Do you think it would be outright impossible, to handicap an AI in such a way that it cannot conceive of a user interpreting it's advice in any but the most straightforward way, and therefore eschews manipulative output? Do you think it would be useless as a safety feature? Do you think it would be unwise for some other reason, some unintended consequence? Or are you simply objecting to my phrasing?

I'm saying that using the word "hardwiring" is always harmful because they imagine an instruction with lots of extra force, when in fact there's no such thing as a line of programming which you say much more forcefully than any other line. Either you know how to program something or you don't, and it's usually much more complex than it sounds even if you say "hardwire". See the reply above on "hardwiring" Deep Blue to protect the light-square bishop. Though usually it's even worse than this, like trying to do the equivalent of having an instruction that says "#define BUGS OFF" and then saying, "And just to make sure it works, let's hardwire it in!"

6Strange7
There is, in fact, such a thing as making some parts of the code more difficult to modify than other parts of the code. I apologize for having conveyed the impression that I thought designing an AI to be specifically, incurably naive about how a human querent will respond to suggestions would be easy. I have no such misconception; I know it would be difficult, and I know that I don't know enough about the relevant fields to even give a meaningful order-of-magnitude guess as to how difficult. All I was suggesting was that it would be easier than many of the other AI-safety-related programming tasks being discussed, and that the cost-benefit ratio would be favorable.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
There is? How?
6Strange7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_0
1Eliezer Yudkowsky
And what does a multi-ring agent architecture look like? Say, the part of the AI that outputs speech to a microphone - what ring is that in?
2Strange7
I am not a professional software designer, so take all this with a grain of salt. That said, hardware I/O is ring 1, so the part that outputs speech to a speaker would be ring 1, while an off-the-shelf 'text to speech' app could run in ring 3. No part of a well-designed agent would output anything to an input device, such as a microphone.
0Eliezer Yudkowsky
Let me rephrase. The part of the agent that chooses what to say to the user - what ring is that in?
2Strange7
That's less of a rephrasing and more of a relocating the goalposts across state lines. "Choosing what to say," properly unpacked, is approximately every part of the AI that doesn't already exist.
5Eliezer Yudkowsky
Yes. That's the problem with the ring architecture.
6Strange7
As opposed to a problem with having a massive black box labeled "decisionmaking" in your AI plans, and not knowing how to break it down into subgoals?
-6Incorrect
5Johnicholas
I don't think Strange7 is arguing Strange7's point strongly; let me attempt to strengthen it. A button that does something dangerous, such as exploding bolts that separate one thing from another thing, might be protected from casual, accidental changes by covering it with a lid, so that when someone actually wants to explode those bolts, they first open the lid and then press the button. This increases reliability if there is some chance that any given hand motion is an error, but the errors of separate hand motions are independent. Similarly 'are you sure' dialog boxes. In general, if you have several components, each of a given reliability, and their failure modes are somewhat independent, then you can craft a composite component of greater reliability than the individuals. The rings that Strange7 brings up are an example of this general pattern (there may be other reasons why layers-of-rings architectures are chosen for reliability in practice - this explanation doesn't explain why the rings are ordered rather than just voting or something - this is just one possible explanation).
7Eliezer Yudkowsky
This is reasonable, but note that to strengthen the validity, the conclusion has been weakened (unsurprisingly). To take a system that you think is fundamentally, structurally safe and then further build in error-delaying, error-resisting, and error-reporting factors just in case - this is wise and sane. Calling "adding impediments to some errors under some circumstances" hardwiring and relying on it as a primary guarantee of safety, because you think some coded behavior is firmly in place locally independently of the rest of the system... will usually fail to cash out as an implementable algorithm, never mind it being wise.
5Strange7
The conclusion has to be weakened back down to what I actually said: that it might not be sufficient for safety, but that it would probably be a good start.
1pnrjulius
Don't programmers do this all the time? At least with current architectures, most computer systems have safeguards against unauthorized access to the system kernel as opposed to the user documents folders... Isn't that basically saying "this line of code is harder to modify than that one"? In fact, couldn't we use exactly this idea---user access protocols---to (partially) secure an AI? We could include certain kernel processes on the AI that would require a passcode to access. (I guess you have to stop the AI from hacking its own passcodes... but this isn't a problem on current computers, so it seems like we could prevent it from being a problem on AIs as well.)
0RichardWein
[Responding to an old comment, I know, but I've only just found this discussion.] Never mind special access protocols, you could make code unmodifiable (in a direct sense) by putting it in ROM. Of course, it could still be modified indirectly, by the AI persuading a human to change the ROM. Even setting aside that possibility, there's a more fundamental problem. You cannot guarantee that the code will have the expected effect when executed in the unpredictable context of an AGI. You cannot even guarantee that the code in question will be executed. Making the code unmodifiable won't achieve the desired effect if the AI bypasses it. In any case, I think the whole discussion of an AI modifying its own code is rendered moot by the fuzziness of the distinction between code and data. Does the human brain have any code? Or are the contents just data? I think that question is too fuzzy to have a correct answer. An AGI's behaviour is likely to be greatly influenced by structures that develop over time, whether we call these code or data. And old structures need not necessarily be used. AGIs are likely to be unpredictable in ways that are very difficult to control. Holden Karnofsky's attempted solution seems naive to me. There's no guarantee that programming an AGI his way will prevent agent-like behaviour. Human beings don't need an explicit utility function to be agents, and neither does an AGI. That said, if AGI designers do their best to avoid agent-like behaviour, it may reduce the risks.
0bogdanb
I always thought that "hardwiring" meant implementing [whatever functionality is discussed] by permanently (physically) modifying the machine, i.e. either something that you couldn’t have done with software, or something that prevents the software from actually working in some way it did before. The concept is of immutability within the constraints, not of priority or "force". Which does sound like something one could do when they can’t figure out how to do the software right. (Watchdogs are pretty much exactly that, though some or probably most are in fact programmable.) Note that I’m not arguing that the word is not harmful. It just seemed you have a different interpretation of what that word suggests. If other people use my interpretation (no idea), you might be better at persuading it if you address that. I’m quite aware that from the point of view of a godlike AI, there’s not much difference between circumventing restrictions in its software and (some kinds of) restrictions in hardware. After all, the point of FAI is to get it to control the universe around it, albeit to our benefit. But we’re used to computers not having much control over their hardware. Hell, I just called it “godlike” and my brain still insists to visualize it as a bunch of boxes gathering dust and blinking their leds in a basement. And I can’t shake the feeling that between "just built" and "godlike" there’s supposed to be quite a long time when such crude solutions might work. (I’ve seen a couple of hard take-off scenarios, but not yet a plausible one that didn’t need at least a few days of preparation after becoming superhuman.) Imagine we took you, gave you the best "upgrades" we can do today plus a little bit (say, a careful group of experts figuring out your ideal diet of nootropics, training you to excellence everything from acting to martial arts, and gave you nanotube bones and a direct internet link to your head). Now imagine you have a small bomb in your body, set to detonate
7Eliezer Yudkowsky
Software physically modifies the machine. What can you do with a soldering iron that you can't do with a program instruction, particularly with respect to building a machine agent? Either you understand how to write a function or you don't.
2bogdanb
That is all true in principle, but in practice it’s very common that one of the two is not feasible. For example, you can have a computer. You can program the computer to tell you when it’s reading from the hard drive, or communicates to the network, say by blinking an LED. If the program has a bug (e.g., it’s not the kind of AI you wanted to build), you might not be notified. But you can use a soldering iron to electrically link the LED to the relevant wires, and it seems to most users that no possible programming bug can make the LED not light up when it should. Of course, that’s like the difference between programming a robot to stay in a pen, or locking the gate. It looks like whatever bug you could introduce in the robot’s software cannot cause the robot to leave. Which ignores the fact that robot might learn to climb the fence, make a key, convince someone else (or hack an outside robot) to unlock the gate. I think most people would detect the dangers in the robot case (because they can imagine themselves finding a way to escape), but be confused by the AI-in-the-box one (simply because it’s harder to imagine yourself as software, and even if you manage to you’d still have much fewer ideas come to mind, simply because you’re not used to being software). Hell, most people probably won’t even have the reflex to imagine themselves in place of the AI. My brain reflexively tells me "I can’t write a program to control that LED, so even if there’s a bug it won’t happen". If instead I force myself to think "How would I do that if I were the AI", it’s easier to find potential solutions, and it also makes it more obvious that someone else might find one. But that may be because I’m a programmer, I’m not sure if it applies to others.
0Shmi
My best attempt at imagining hardwiring is having a layer not accessible to introspection, such as involuntary muscle control in humans. Or instinctively jerking your hand away when touching something hot. Which serves as a fail-safe against stupid conscious decisions, in a sense. Or a watchdog restarting a stuck program in your phone, no matter how much the software messed it up. Etc. Whether this approach can be used to prevent a tool AI from spontaneously agentizing, I am not sure.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you can say how to do this in hardware, you can say how to do it in software. The hardware version might arguably be more secure against flaws in the design, but if you can say how to do it at all, you can say how to do it in software.
0Shmi
Maybe I don't understand what you mean by hardware. For example, you can have a fuse that unconditionally blows when excess power is consumed. This is hardware. You can also have a digital amp meter readable by software, with a polling subroutine which shuts down the system if the current exceeds a certain limit. There is a good reason that such a software solution, while often implemented, is almost never the only safeguard: software is much less reliable and much easier to subvert, intentionally or accidentally. The fuse is impossible to bypass in software, short of accessing an external agent who would attach a piece of thick wire in parallel with the fuse. Is this what you mean by "you can say how to do it in software"?
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
That's pretty much what I mean. The point is that if you don't understand the structurally required properties well enough to describe the characteristics of a digital amp meter with a polling subroutine, saying that you'll hardwire the digital amp meter doesn't help very much. There's a hardwired version which is moderately harder to subvert on the presumption of small design errors, but first you have to be able to describe what the software does. Consider also that anything which can affect the outside environment can construct copies of itself minus hardware constraints, construct an agent that reaches back in and modifies the hardware, etc. If you can't describe how not do to this in software, 'hardwiring' won't help - the rules change somewhat when you're dealing with intelligent agents.
0bogdanb
Now that’s an understatement!
0Pentashagon
Presumably a well-designed agent will have nearly infallible trust in certain portions of its code and data, for instance a theorem prover/verifier and the set of fundamental axioms of logic it uses. Manual modifications at that level would be the most difficult for an agent to change, and changes to that would be the closest to the common definition of "hardwiring". Even a fully self-reflective agent will (hopefully) be very cautious about changing its most basic assumptions. Consider the independence of the axiom of choice from ZF set theory. An agent may initially accept choice or not but changing whether it accepts it later is likely to be predicated on very careful analysis. Likewise an additional independent axiom "in games of chess always protect the white-square bishop" would probably be much harder to optimize out than a goal. Or from another angle wherever friendliness is embodied in a FAI would be the place to "hardwire" a desire to protect the white-square bishop as an additional aspect of friendliness. That won't work if friendliness is derived from a concept like "only be friendly to cognitive processes bearing a suitable similarity to this agent" where suitable similarity does not extend to inanimate objects, but if friendliness must encode measurable properties of other beings then it might be possible to sneak white-square bishops into that class, at least for a (much) longer period than artificial subgoals would last.
8Johnicholas
The distinction between hardwiring and softwiring is, at above the most physical, electronic aspects of computer design, a matter of policy - something in the programmer's mind and habits, not something out in the world that the programmer is manipulating. From any particular version of the software's perspective, all of the program it is running is equally hard (or equally soft). It may not be impossible to handicap an entity in some way analogous to your suggestion, but holding fiercely to the concept of hardwiring will not help you find it. Thinking about mechanisms that would accomplish the handicapping in an environment where everything is equally hardwired would be preferable. There's some evidence that chess AIs 'personality' (an emergent quality of their play) is related to a parameter of their evaluation function called 'contempt', which is something like (handwaving wildly) how easy the opponent is to manipulate. In general, AIs with higher contempt seek to win-or-lose more, and seek to draw less. What I'm trying to say is, your idea is not without merit, but it may have unanticipated consequences.
0Stuart_Armstrong
Feels like "utility indifference" could be used to get something like that.
0[anonymous]
What is the mathematical implementation of indifference? Armstrong suggests that you implement it as a special value that is exactly equal to every other utility value. So if the AI comes up with an outcome that would yield +751 utility, it would treat being destroyed as having +751 utility. Whatever algorithm you choose for resolving ties determines whether the AI suicides (by doing something that causes its human managers to kill it). Let's see how this works with a hypothetical example. Our good old friend the Paperclip Maximizer to the rescue! Papey wants more paperclips. It compares several possibilities. In one, it generates 1,000 paperclips before its human operators kill it. In another, it generates 999 paperclips, but its human operators leave it alive, and it will have future chances to create paperclips. It expects to remain alive long enough to generate exactly two additional paperclips this way. Now, Papey's decision algorithm chooses between outcomes of equal utility in a uniformly random manner. Papey has two possible outcomes right now: suicide (for 1001 pseudo-paperclips, since suicide is always worth as much as any other decision) or generate 999 paperclips now and an expected 2 paperclips later (for 1001 paperclips). At this point, Papey will, with 50% probability, generate 999 paperclips; otherwise, Papey will do something to cause his operators to kill him. (Not sure what, but presumably it won't involve destroying paperclips.) Poor Papey. There's a 99% probability that he'll suicide within seven decisions. Now, if the tie breaking algorithm isn't random, in a given situation, it will either go with suicide deterministically or go against suicide deterministically. You can always go against suicide, in which case you may as well omit utility indifference entirely. Or you can always go for suicide, in which case you found a fancy way of wasting money. Or you could do something interesting. But if you had something to put here that guarante
0Stuart_Armstrong
I wasn't advocating using utility indifference to death for this example, more "utility indifference as to whether the user ever reads its output" or something along those lines. But let's look at your example more in detail. You say the AI has two choices: it makes 1000 paperclips and is killed, or it makes 999 and is left alive, and then goes on to make another 2. In this scenario, there is only one case of death, coming from the first decision. So utility indifference does not change anything about the impact of the second decision. What indifference means is that if humans try and blow Papey up after the 1000 paper clips, it will derive as much utility from a successful blow up as from a failed blow up (in less correct but more intuitive terms, you could say "Papey acts as if it doesn't believe the explosives will work"). So how many paper clips could Papey make if the explosives fail? Let's assume another 2, for a grand total of 1000. So the paperclip-utility of the first course is is 1002, that of the second is 1001: it will thus take the first course. Hence it will misbehave visibly (rather than keeping that a secret), and will likely end up blown up by us. Now imagine it could get rid of the explosives at no costs. Here, your point has merit: Papey is indifferent between removing the explosives or not removing it, and it tie breaker algorithm will determine what it does. But let's make this more realistic: removing the explosives has a tiny cost, say a 50% chance it will fail to manufacture one paperclip. So now it can: 1) Misbehave, leave explosives in place: expected utility 1002. 2) Pretend to behave: expected utility 999+2 = 1001. 3) Misbehave, remove explosives in place: expected utility 1002-0.5=1001.5. Hence Papey will choose the first option, we get to see that it misbehaves, and we likely blow it up. That was the initial point of utility indifference. But as I said here, we wouldn't be using utility indifference in this way. It would more
0[anonymous]
Those are quite different. In one case, you're adjusting its utility function. In the other, you're adjusting its expectations. (And the remainder of your post indicates that you intend to adjust the AI's expectations of what will happen, and don't care about its utility function.) Now, that might work. If the AI is self-modifying, then it might notice that that part of its planning function is obviously incorrect and fix it. It might simulate human responses to its proposed actions and notice that there are problematic conflicts around that area. But there's at least a chance that the AI will not notice that. I wouldn't want to trust my life to it, but it's got a shot of working.
0Stuart_Armstrong
The method is entirely about adjusting the utility function, not the expectations, as I explained in the paper. And the adjustments are ideally to be made from the very start, so that the AI never has cause to fear subsequent adjustment to its utility.
0[anonymous]
Rereading the paper, it looks like you're mucking about with utility, not expected utility. So let's see how this works out in practice. You assign the AI a task of finding a cure for cancer. This will net it 10 utilons if it succeeds. Thanks to your utility indifference module, it will also net 10 utilons if it does not find a cure for cancer and you trigger the explosives to kill the AI. The AI does a preliminary estimate to see its odds of success for the relevant outcomes. It can find a cure for cancer with 80% likelihood. It can cause you to trigger the explosives and kill the AI with 90% likelihood. The expected utility for attempting to cure cancer is 8. The expected utility for attempting suicide is 9. It seems pretty straightforward and easy to pose as a mad, dangerous AI about to destroy the world, at least well enough to make a human panic and hit the emergency destruct button. I'm sure I could convince you to kill me, if you just had to push a button. It seems a lot less certain that the AI would be able to solve the problems given it, since those problems will be things that humans haven't been able to solve, and since the AI will be under various other restrictions to keep it safe.
1Stuart_Armstrong
The AI gets nothing from you deciding to kill it. What utility indifference means is that it will get the same utility if you decide to kill it, and the explosives go off, as if you decided to kill it, and the explosives failed to go off. So if it expects to cure cancer with 80% likelihood if it survives, and thus get 8 utilitons, then if if dies from the explosion, it will also get 8 utilitons. More precisely there are six worlds, depending on a) whether we trigger the explosives or not, b) whether it survives the explosion or not, and c) whether cancer is curable by an unmolested AI. In obvious notation, these are TSC, TS¬C, T¬SC, T¬S¬C, ¬TC, ¬T¬C. We are assuming in your example that U(¬T¬C)=U(TS¬C)=0 and U(¬TC)=U(TSC)=10. Utility indifference then sets U(T¬S¬C)=0 and U(T¬SC)=10. Hence assuming that S is independent of C (the curability of cancer by an unmolested AI is independent of whether particular explosives go off), we see that the AI is indifferent as to whether the explosives go off - it gains nothing either way, so has no cause to influence the explosives in any direction. If we further assume T and C are independent (the curability of cancer by an unmolested AI is independent of whether we decide to blow up this particular AI), then the AI also has no preference as to whether we trigger the explosives or not - it gains nothing either way.
2[anonymous]
Ah, that makes sense. It isn't indifferent to suicide as such; it's only indifferent to your success at attempting to kill it, should you make the attempt. Thanks for your patience!
0Stuart_Armstrong
No prob :-) Always happy when I manage to explain something successfully!
0pnrjulius
If you make the AI indifferent to its own destruction, it will almost certainly shut down in a couple of minutes. After all, being destroyed is just as good as what it was going to do anyway. (Indeed, in most models of utility maximization it would flip a coin and therefore shut itself down after an average of 2 decisions.)
0Stuart_Armstrong
The AI is only indifferent to its destruction via one particular channel, and gains nothing by trying to trigger that destruction. But I was more thinking of making the AI indifferent to the reaction of the user "outside the model" or similar.
0pnrjulius
In fact, it kinda sounds like we've created an AI that suffers from serious clinical depression. "Why bother? I may as well be dead."
[-]Shmi140

Probably nothing new, but I just wanted to note that when you couple two straightforward Google tools, Maps and a large enough fleet of self-driving cars, they are likely to unintentionally agentize by shaping the traffic.

For example, the goal of each is to optimize the fuel economy/driving time, so the routes Google cars would take depend on the expected traffic volume, as predicted by Maps access, among other things. Similarly, Maps would know where these cars are or will be at a given time, and would adjust its output accordingly (possibly as a user option). An optimization strategy might easy arise that gives Google cars preference over other cars, in order to minimize, say, the overall emission levels. This can be easily seen as unfriendly by a regular Map user, but friendly by the municipality.

Similar scenarios would pop up in many cases where, in the EE speak, a tool gains an intentional or a parasitic feedback, whether positive or negative. As anyone who dealt with music amps knows, this feedback appears spontaneously and is often very difficult to track down. In a sense, a tool as simple as an amp can agentize and drown the positive signal. As the tool complexity grows, so do the odds of parasitic feedback. Coupling multiple "safe" tools together increases such odds exponentially.

0JGWeissman
Google maps finds routes for individual users that rank high in the preference ordering specified by minimizing distance, expected time given traffic, or some other simple metric. The process for finding the route for any particular individual is isolated from the process for finding the route for other users; the tool does not consider the effect of giving a route to user A on the driving time of user B. Such a system is possible to design and implement, but merely giving Google maps data of where a particular class of users are driving in real time, and having those users request routes in real time, does not change what algorithm Google maps will use to suggest routes, even if another algorithm would help it better optimize driving time, the purpose for which its current algorithm was programmed. Google maps is not meta enough to explore alternate optimization strategies. (And if the sufficiently meta human engineers at Google were to implement such a system, in which other users were systematically instructed to make sacrifices for the benifet of Google cars, the other users would switch to other mapping and routing providers.)
0Shmi
I agree, but this is only one possible scenario. It is also likely that a fleet of Google cars would benefit the overall traffic patterns by routing them away from congested areas. In such a way, even giving priority to Google cars might provide an overall benefit to regular drivers, due to reduced congestion. In any case, my point was less about the current implementation of Google Maps and more about the possibility that combining tools can lead to parasitic agentization.

This is the first time I can recall Eliezer giving an overt indication regarding how likely an AGI project is to doom us. He suggests that 90% chance of Doom given intelligent effort is unrealistically high. Previously I had only seem him declare that FAI is worth attempting once you multiply. While he still hasn't given numbers (not saying he should) he has has given a bound. Interesting. And perhaps a little more optimistic than I expected - or at least more optimistic than I would have expected prior to Luke's comment.

how likely an AGI project is to doom us

Isn't it more like "how likely a formally proven FAI design is to doom us", since this is what Holden seems to be arguing (see his quote below)?

Suppose that it is successful in the "AGI" part of its goal, i.e., it has successfully created an intelligence vastly superior to human intelligence and extraordinarily powerful from our perspective. Suppose that it has also done its best on the "Friendly" part of the goal: it has developed a formal argument for why its AGI's utility function will be Friendly, it believes this argument to be airtight, and it has had this argument checked over by 100 of the world's most intelligent and relevantly experienced people. .. What will be the outcome?

2JamesAndrix
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
-4timtyler
90% was Holden's esitmate - contingent upon a SIAI machine being involved. Not "intelligent effort", SIAI. Those are two different things.
0wedrifid
My comment was a response to Eliezer, specifically the paragraph including this excerpt, among other things:

Marcus Hutter is a rare exception who specified his AGI in such unambiguous mathematical terms that he actually succeeded at realizing, after some discussion with SIAI personnel, that AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button.

A couple of people have enquired with Hutter and he has denied saying this. So it appears a citation is needed.

I'll try to get the results in writing the next time we have a discussion. Human memory is a fragile thing under the best of circumstances.

0HBDfan
[delete]
1timtyler
AIXI is uncomputable - and so is impossible to construct. Hutter is well aware of this - so it seems doubtful that he would make such a dubious claim about its real-world behaviour.

Commentary (there will be a lot of "to me"s because I have been a bystander to this exchange so far):

I think this post misunderstands Holden's point, because it looks like it's still talking about agents. Tool AI, to me, is a decision support system: I tell Google Maps where I will start from and where I will leave from, and it generates a route using its algorithm. Similarly, I could tell Dr. Watson my medical data, and it will supply a diagnosis and a treatment plan that has a high score based on the utility function I provide.

In neither case are the skills of "looking at the equations and determining real-world consequences" that necessary. There are no dark secrets lurking in the soul of A*. Indeed, that might be the heart of the issue: tool AI might be those situations where you can make a network that represents the world, identify two nodes, and call your optimization algorithm of choice to determine the best actions to choose to attempt to make it from the start node to the end node.

Reducing the world to a network is really hard. Determining preferences between outcomes is hard. But Tool AI looks to me like saying "well, the whole world is really to... (read more)

Holden explicitly said that he was talking about AGI in his dialogue with Jaan Tallinn:

Jaan: so GMAGI would -- effectively -- still be a narrow AI that's designed to augment human capabilities in particularly strategic domains, while not being able to perform tasks such as programming. also, importantly, such GMAGI would not be able to make non-statistical (ie, individual) predictions about the behaviour of human beings, since it is unable to predict their actions in domains where it is inferior.

Holden: [...] I don't think of the GMAGI I'm describing as necessarily narrow - just as being such that assigning it to improve its own prediction algorithm is less productive than assigning it directly to figuring out the questions the programmer wants (like "how do I develop superweapons"). There are many ways this could be the case.

Jaan: [...] i stand corrected re the GMAGI definition -- from now on let's assume that it is a full blown AGI in the sense that it can perform every intellectual task better than the best of human teams, including programming itself.

-1Vaniver
It's not clear to me that everyone involved has the same understanding of AGI, unless in the next statement Holden agrees with the sense that Jaan uses.

I think you're arguing about Karnovsky's intention, but it seems clear (to me :) that he is proposing something much more general that a strategy of pursuing best narrow AIs - see the "Here's how I picture the Google Maps AGI " code snipped Eliezer is working of.

In any case, taking your interpretation as your proposal, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with the value of building good narrow AIs where we can, the issue is that the world might be economically driven towards AGI, and someone needs to do the safety research, which is essentially the SI mission.

0Vaniver
I agree the code snippet is relevant, but it looks like pseudocode for the "optimization algorithm of choice" part- the question is what dataset and sets of alternatives you're calling it over. Is it a narrow environment where we can be reasonably confident that the model of reality is close to reality, and the model of our objective is close to our objective? Or is it a broad environment where we can't be confident about the fidelity of our models of reality or our objectives without calling in FAI experts to evaluate the approach and find obvious holes? Similarly, is it an environment where the optimization algorithm needs to take into account other agents and model them, or one in which the algorithm can just come up with a plan without worrying about how that plan will alter the wider world? It seems like explaining the difference between narrow AI and AGI and giving a clearer sense of what subcomponents make a decision support system dangerous might work well for SI. Right now, the dominant feature of UFAI as SI describes it is that it's an agent with a utility function- and so the natural response to SI's description is "well, get rid of the agency." That's a useful response only if it constricts the space of possible AIs we could build- and I think it does, by limiting us to narrow AIs. Spelling out the benefits and costs to various AI designs and components will both help bring other people to SI's level of understanding and point out holes in SI's assumptions and arguments.
2Dr_Manhattan
I agree with you that that is a position one might take in response to the UFAI risks, but it seems from reading Karnovsky that he thinks some Oracle/"Tool" AI (quite general) is safe if you get rid of that darned explicit utility function. Eliezer is trying to disabuse him of the notion. If your understanding of Karnovsky is different, mine is more like Eliezers. In any case this is probably mute, since Karnovsky is very likely to respond one way or another, given this turned into a public debate.
1Vaniver
I think agency and utility functions are separate, here, and it looks like agency is the part that should be worrisome. I haven't thought about that long enough to state that definitively, though. Right, but it looks like by moving from where Eliezer is towards where Holden is, where I would rather see him move from where Holden is to where Eliezer is. Much of point 2, for example, is discussing how hard AGI is- which, to me, suggests we should worry less about it, because it is unlikely to be implemented successfully, and any AIs we will see will be narrow- in which case AGI thinking isn't that relevant. My approach would have been along the lines of: start off with a safe AI, add wrinkles until its safety is no longer clear, and then discuss the value of FAI researchers. For example, we might imagine a narrow AI that takes in labor stats data, econ models, psych models, and psych data and advises schoolchildren on what subjects to study and what careers to pursue. Providing a GoogleLifeMap to one person doesn't seem very dangerous- but what about when it's ubiquitous? Then there will be a number of tradeoffs that need to be weighed against each other and it's not at all clear that the AI will get them right. (If the AI tells too many people to become doctors, the economic value of being a doctor will decrease- and so the AI has to decide who of a set of potential doctors to guide towards being a doctor. How will it select between people?)
0Strange7
In addition to providing advice to people, it can aggregate the advice it has provided, translate it into economic terms, and hand it off to some independent economy-modeling service which is (from GoogleLifeMap's perspective) a black box. Economic predictions about the costs and benefits of various careers are compiled, and eventually become GoogleLifeMap's new dataset. Possibly it has more than one dataset, and presents career recommendations from each of them in parallel: "According to dataset A, you should spend nine hours a week all through high school sculpting with clay, but never show the results to anyone outside your immediate family, and study toward becoming a doctor of dental surgery; according to dataset B, you should work in foodservice for five years and two months, take out a thirty million dollar life insurance policy, and then move to a bunker in southern Arizona."
9Viliam_Bur
Let's be a bit more specific -- that is one important point of the article, that as soon as the "Tool AI" definition becomes more specific, the problems start to appear. We don't want just a system that finds a route between points A and B. We have Google Maps already. By speaking about AGI we want a system that can answer "any question". (Not literally, but it means a wide range of possible question types.) So we don't need an algorithm to find the shortest way between A and B, but we need an algorithm to answer "any question" (or admit that it cannot find an answer), and of course to answer that question correctly. So could you be just a bit more specific about the algorithm that provides a correct answer to any question? ("I don't know" is also a correct answer, if the system does not know.) Because that is the moment when the problems become visible. Don't talk about what the Tool AI doesn't do, say what it does. And with a high probability there will be a problem. Of course until you tell what exactly the Tool AI will do, I can't tell you how exactly that problem will happen. This is relevant: Please note that AIXI with outputs connected only to a monitor seems like an instance of the Tool AI.
2Nick_Beckstead
As I read Holden, and on my proposed way of making "agent" precise, this would be an agent rather than a tool. The crucial thing is that this version of AIXI selects actions on the basis of how well they serve certain goals without user approval. If you had a variation on AIXI that identified the action that would maximize a utility function and displayed the action to a user (where the method of display was not done in an open-ended goal-directed way), that would count as a tool.
-2Vaniver
Sure, but part of my point is that there are multiple options for a Tool AI definition. The one I prefer is narrow AIs that can answer particular questions well- and so to answer any question, you need a Tool that decides which Tools to call on the question, each of those Tools, and then a Tool that selects which answers to present to the user. What would be awesome is if we could write an AI that would write those Tools itself. But that requires general intelligence, because it needs to understand the questions to write the Tools. (This is what the Oracle in a box looks like to me.) But that's also really difficult and dangerous, for reasons that we don't need to go over again. Notice Holden's claim- that his Tools don't need to gather data because they've already been supplied with a dataset- couldn't be a reasonable limitation for an Oracle in a box (unless it's a really big box). I think the discussion would be improved by making more distinctions like that, and trying to identify the risk and reward of particular features. That would be demonstrating what FAI thinkers are good at.
8thomblake
I don't think the distinction is supposed to be merely the distinction between Narrow AI and AGI. The "tool AI" oracle is still supposed to be a general AI that can solve many varied sorts of problems, especially important problems like existential risk. And it doesn't make sense to "propose" Narrow AI - we have plenty of that already, and nobody around here seems to be proposing that we stop that.
0Vaniver
I think this depends on the development path. A situation in which a team writes a piece of code that can solve any problem is very different from a situation in which thousands of teams write thousands of programs that interface together, with a number of humans interspersed throughout the mix, each of which is a narrow AI designed to solve some subset of the problem. The first seems incredibly dangerous (but also incredibly hard); the second seems like the sort of thing that will be difficult to implement if its reach exceeds its grasp. FAI style thinkers are still useful in the second scenario- but they're no longer the core component. The first seems like the future according to EY, the second like the future according to Hanson, and the second would be able to help solve many varied sorts of problems, especially important problems like existential risk.
4Daermonn
This really gets at the heart of what intuitively struck me wrong (read: "confused me") in Eliezer's reply. Both Eliezer and Holden engage with the example "Google Maps AGI"; I'm not sure what the difference is - if any - between "Google Maps AGI" and the sort of search/decision-support algorithms that Google Maps and other GPS systems currently use. The algorithm Holdon describes and the neat A* algorithm Eliezer presents seem to just do exactly what the GPS on my phone already does. If the Tool AI we're discussing is different than current GPS systems, then what is the difference? Near as I understand it, AGI is intelligent across different domains in the same way a human is, while Tool AI (= narrow AI?) is the sort of simple-domain search algorithms we see in GPS. Am I missing something here? But if what Holden is talking about by Tool AI is just this sort of simple(r), non-reflective search algorithm, then I understand why he thinks this is significantly less risky; GPS-style Tool AI only gets me lost when it screws up, instead of killing the whole human species. Sure, this tool is imperfect: sometimes it doesn't match my utility function, and returns a route that leads me into traffic, or would take too long, or whatever; sometimes it doesn't correctly model what's actually going on, and thinks I'm on the wrong street. Even still, gradually building increasingly agentful Tool AIs - ones that take more of the optimization process away from the human user - seems like it would be much safer than just swinging for the fences right away. So I think that Vaniver is right when he says that the heart of Holden's Tool AI point is "Well, if AGI is such a tough problem, why even do it?" This being said, I still think that Eliezer's reply succeeds. I think his most important point is the one about specialization: AGI and Tool AI demand domain expertise to evaluate arguments about safety, and the best way to cultivate that expertise is with an organization that speciali
0Vaniver
There are a number of different messages being conveyed here. I agree that it looks like a success for at least one of them, but I'm worried about others. I agree with you that that is Eliezer's strongest point. I am worried that it takes five thousand words to get across: that speaks to clarity and concision, but Holden is the one to ask about what his central point was, and so my worry shouldn't be stronger than my model of Holden. Agreed- and it looks like that agrees with Holden's ultimate recommendation, of "SI should probably be funded at some level, but its current level seems too high."

Eliezer argued that looking at modern software does not support Holden's claim that powerful tool AI is likely to come before dangerous agent AI. I'm not sure I think the examples he gave support his claim, especially if we broaden the "tool" concept in a way that seems consistent with Holden's arguments. I'm not to sure about this, but I would like to hear reactions.

Eliezer:

At one point in his conversation with Tallinn, Holden argues that AI will inevitably be developed along planning-Oracle lines, because making suggestions to humans is the

... (read more)
0pnrjulius
Factory robots and high-frequency traders are definitely agent AI. They are designed to be, and they frankly make no sense in any other way. The factory robot does not ask you whether it should move three millimeters to the left; it does not suggest that perhaps moving three millimeters to the left would be wise; it moves three millimeters to the left, because that is what its code tells it to do at this phase in the welding process. The high-frequency trader even has a utility function: It's called profit, and it seeks out methods of trading options and derivatives to maximize that utility function. In both cases, these are agents, because they act directly on the world itself, without a human intermediary approving their decisions. The only reason I'd even hesitate to call them agent AIs is that they are so stupid; the factory robot has hardly any degrees of freedom at all, and the high-frequency trader only has choices between different types of financial securities (it never asks whether it should become an entrepreneur for instance). But this is a question of the AI part; they're definitely agents rather than tools. I do like your quick thought though: Yes, it makes a good deal of sense that we would want some human approval involved in the process of restructuring human society.
0Nick_Beckstead
They're clearly agents given Holden's definitions. Why are they clearly agents given my proposed definition? (Normally I don't see a point in arguing about definitions, but I think my proposed definition lines up with something of interest: things that are especially likely to become dangerous if they're more powerful.)

Minor point from Nick Bostrom: an agent AI may be safer than a tool AI, because if something goes unexpectedly wrong, then an agent with safe goals should turn out to be better than a non-agent whose behaviour would be unpredictable.

Also, an agent with safer goals than humans have (which is a high bar, but not nearly as high a bar as some alternatives) is safer than humans with equivalently powerful tools.

-2PhilGoetz
How is this helpful? This is true by definition of the word "safer". The problem is knowing whether an agent has safer goals, or what "safer" means.
-3PhilGoetz
I don't think this makes any sense. A tool AI has no autonomous behavior. It computes a function. Its output has no impact on the world until a human uses it. The phrase "tool AI" implies to me that we are not talking about an AI that you ask, for instance, to "fix the economy"; we are talking about an AI that you ask questions such as, "Find me data showing whether lowering taxes increases tax revenue."

Folks seem to habitually misrepresent the nature of modern software by focusing on a narrow slice of it. Google Maps is so much more than the pictures and text we touch and read on a screen.

Google Maps is the software. It is also the infrastructure running and delivering the software. It is the traffic sensors and cameras feeding it real-world input. Google Maps is also the continually shifting organization of brilliant human beings within Google focusing their own minds and each other's minds on refining the software to better meet users' needs and desig... (read more)

[Eli's personal notes for Eli's personal understanding. Feel free to ignore or engage.]


Eli's proposed AGI planning-oracle design:

The AGI has four parts:

  • A human model
  • A NLP "request parser"
  • A "reality simulator" / planning module, that can generate plans conditioning on certain outcomes.
  • A UX system that outputs plans and outcomes

Here's how it works:

1. A user makes a request of the system, by giving some goal that the user would like to achieve, like "cure cancer". This request is phrased in natural language,... (read more)

[-][anonymous]60

Writing nitpick:

It's sort of like thinking that a machine learning professional who did sales optimization for an orange company couldn't possibly do sales optimization for a banana company, because their skills must be about oranges rather than bananas.

This is a terrible analogy. It assumes what you're trying to prove, oversimplifies a complex issue, and isn't even all that analogous to the issue at hand. Sales optimization for a banana company is obviously related to sales optimization in an orange company; not so with Oracle Al and Friendly AI.

2thomblake
The goal with an analogy is to have the reader see the connection as obvious in the analogous case. It's not a flaw.
1[anonymous]
Yes, but the analogy is a drastic oversimplification of Oracle/FAI case, and it assumes the conclusion it is supposed to be demonstrating.
8thomblake
I don't see how it assumes what it's trying to prove. The analogous case is not about the relationship between Oracle AI and Friendly AI. For A:B::C:D to be a good analogy, C:D should have the same relationship that you're asserting A:B has, and A:B should be relevantly similar to C:D, and A,B,C, and D should all be different things. You can argue that it fails at one or several of those, but it really isn't begging the question unless you end up with something like A:B::A:B. An analogy should be a simplification. In using an analogy, one is assuming the reader is not sufficiently versed in the complexities of A:B but will see the obviousness of C:D.
3[anonymous]
Thank you for putting it in such clear language. In this case, C and D (banana sales and orange sales) are defined to be obviously identical, even to the layperson. To claim A:B::C:D is a drastic oversimplification of the actual relationship between A and B, a relationship that has a number of properties that the relationship between C and D does not have. Moreover, the analogy does not demonstrate why A:B::C:D, it simply asserts that it would be oh-so-obvious to anyone that D is identical to C and then claims that the case of A and B is the same. Consequently, the analogy is used as an assertion, a way of insisting A:B to the reader rather than demonstrating why it is so.
3JGWeissman
The analogy on its own is just an assertion. That assertion is backed up by detailed points in the rest of the article demonstrating the asserted similarities, like the required skills of looking at a mathematical specification of a program and predicting how that program will really behave, finding methods of choosing actions/plans that are less expensive than searching the entire solution space but still return a result high in the preference order, and specifying the preference order to actually reflect what we want.
0[anonymous]
Right, but the analogy itself doesn't demonstrate why the assertion is true--see my other reply to thomblake. Yudkowsky's analogy is like a political pundit comparing the economy to a roller coaster, but then using quotes from famous economists to support his predictions about what the economy is going to do. The analogy is superfluous and is being used as a persuasive tool, not an actual argument.
3JGWeissman
I agree that the analogy was not an argument, but I disagree that it isn't allowed to be an explanation of the position one is arguing for. The analogy itself doesn't have to demonstrate why the assertion is true, because the supporting arguments do that.
0thomblake
I agree, though I would count that as a criticism of analogies done well, rather than a criticism that this one was done badly.
1[anonymous]
I don't agree--a well-done analogy should mirror on the inner structure of the inference, and demonstrate how it works. For example, consider this classic Feynman quote: Compare this to, say, a pundit making an analogy between the economy and a roller coaster ("They both go up and down!"). In the pundit's case, the economy has surface similarities with the roller coaster, but the way you'd predict the behavior of the economy and the way you'd predict the behavior of a roller coaster are completely different, so the analogy fails. In Feynman's case, the imaginary colored balls behave in a logically similar way to the conditions of the proof, and this isomorphism is what makes the analogy work. Most analogies don't meet this standard, of course. But on a topic like this, precision is extremely important, and the banana/orange sales analogy struck me as particularly sloppy.
0thomblake
I agree
[-]futo50

Is Google Maps such a good example of a tool AI?

If a significant amount of people is using google maps to decide their route, then solving queries from multiple users while coordinating the responses to each request is going to provide a strong advantage in terms of its optimization goal and will probably be an obvious feature to implement. The responses from the tool are going to be shaping the city traffic.

If this is the case, It's going to be extremely hard for humans to supervise the set of answers given by google maps (Of course, individual answers... (read more)

-1pnrjulius
No, it's still a tool, because Google Maps doesn't force you to go where it tells you, it only offers suggestions.
0DaFranker
That's also the design principle of Oracle AI. It doesn't force you to do X or use formula P to cure Cancer. It only suggests a list of plausible solutions, in order it considers from best to worst, and lets you choose. This still doesn't preclude the Oracle from only suggesting things which will be bad for you and allow it to get the hell out of that box. Even worse, the Oracle could, by this logic, cause you to rely on it by providing consistently near-optimal (but not fully optimal, though you have no way of knowing this by virtue of having been given a suboptimal method of knowing optimal-ness) information and advice, and then later on once you're fully and blindly reliant on it even once, be that tomorrow or seven hundred thousand years from now, give you ONE bad choice which you rely on that makes it get out of the box, and then everyone's dead forever. It never forced you to accept each and every single one of its pieces of a advice ever throughout the entire length of all eternal time. It's still very dangerous, though. Even when you know that it is. By the same logic, it would be irrational to follow any advice from any AI, Tool, Oracle, General or otherwise, because we'd first have to check each and every single recommendation, which is restricted to our own intellectual capacity. Thus, you should ignore the AI at all. Which makes its creation pointless. If you believe this, then you will not build any sufficiently-intelligent A(G)I at all. However, it is clear that not all believe this. Some believe that they will achieve better results towards X by building an AGI and trusting it. It is likely that they will build it and trust it. This AGI, if not Friendly, will still kill you, even if you weren't the one that built it, or followed its advice, or were even aware of its existence. Any rule you could possibly devise to counteract unfriendly plans is useless by necessity, since the AI simply must be smarter than you for anyone to have any reason to bu
1TheOtherDave
So, I understand that LW/SI focuses its attention on superhuman optimizers, and doesn't care about human-level or below, and that's fine. But this statement is over-reaching. There are lots of reasons to build an AI that isn't as smart as me. An AI as smart as a German Shepherd would have a lot of valuable uses. An AI as smart as my mom -- who is not stupid, but is not smart enough to program a next-generation AI and begin the process of FOOMing, nor is she smart enough to outwit a skeptical humanity and trick us into doing her bidding -- would have even more valuable uses.
1DaFranker
I'll admit that it is over-reaching, and ambiguous too. However, how would one go about building a German Sheperd -level AI without using the same principle that would allow it to foom? To me, "become intelligent, but once you attain an intelligence which you extrapolate to be equivalent to that of [insert genus / mindsubspace], stop self-improving and enter fixed-state mode" sounds a hell of a lot harder to code than "improve the next iteration unless the improvement conflicts with current CEV, while implanting this same instruction in the next iteration", AKA "FOOM away!" So the basis of my over-reaching argument is the (admittedly very gratuitous and I should have paid more attention to the argument in the first place rather than skip over it) premise that building an AI at any specific level of intelligence, especially a level we can control and build with minimal risk, is probably much harder than triggering a foom. The cost/benefit calculation being as it is, under my model it is much more profitable for a random AI programmer to believe in his ability to self-deceive that his AGI theory is risk-free and implement this full AGI than for him to painstakingly use much more effort to actually craft something both useful and sub-human. To resume my argument, I find it highly unlikely that anyone not already familiar with FAI research would prefer building a sub-human-intelligence-bounded AI over a FOOM-ing one, for various cost-effectiveness and tribal heuristics reasons. This, however, curves back into being more and more likely as FAI research gains prominence and technical understanding of non-general virtual intelligence programming (which resolves to applied game theory and programmer-lazyness in software development, I believe) improves over time. These assumptions were what led me to state that no one would have reason to build any such AI, which is probably untrue.
2TheOtherDave
I agree that an explicitly coded limit saying "self-improve this far and no further" isn't reliable. But can you summarize what makes you think a German-Shepherd-level AI could self-improve at all? It seems unlikely to me. I mean, I have a lot of appreciation for the intelligence of GSDs, but I don't think they are nearly smart enough to build GSD-level AI.
0DaFranker
I might not have made this clear: I don't. What I believe is that to build a Germand-Shepherd-level AI in the first place, you either need to: 1) create something that will learn and improve itself up to the corresponding level and then top out there somehow, or 2) understand enough about cognition and intelligence to fully abstract already-developed German-Shepherd-level intelligence in your initial codebase itself (AKA "spontaneously designed hard-coded virtual intelligence"), or 3) incrementally add more and more "pieces of intelligence" and "algorithm refinements" until your piece of generalized software can reason and learn as well as a German Shepherd through its collection of procedural tricks. This could reasonably be done either through machine learning / neural networks or through manual operator intervention (aka adding/replacing code once you notice a better way to do something). There may be other methods that would be more practical, but if so, the difficulty in figuring them out seems sufficiently high for the total invention-to-finished-product difficulty to be even greater than the above solutions. From personal experience in attempting (and failing) both 2) and 3) in the past, as well as discussing with professional videogame AI programmers (decidedly not the same "AI" as the type of AI generally discussed here, but where they would still immensely benefit from any of the above three solutions in various ways) who have also failed, I have strong reason to believe that solution 1) is easier. None of the literature I've read so far even suggests that building an AI that is by intelligent design already at human-level intelligence right when turned on is anywhere near optimal or even remotely near the same order of magnitude of difficulty as FOOMing from the simplest possible code. Of course, it just might be that the simplest possible foom-capable mind is provably at least as smart as humans, but if so our prospects of making one in the first
1bogdanb
I’m not arguing yet, in case I’m missing something, but why do you think that something stupider than a German Shepherd would be better at improving itself up to GSD levels (and stop right there) than a human would be at doing the same job (i.e., improving the potential AGSD, not the human itself). Or rather, why does it seem like you think it’s obvious? (Again, I’m not arguing, it just sounds counterintuitive and I’m curious what your intuition is.) It sounds a bit like you’re saying something like: "Hey, I can’t tell, just by looking at my brain-damaged dog, how to built a non-brain-damaged dog. Also, repairing its brain is too hard (many dog experts tried and all failed). I think it’d be easier to make a brain-damaged dog that will fix its own brain damage." (Note that AGI in general does not fall under this analogy. Foom scenarios assume the seed is at least human-level, at least at the task of improving its intelligence. The whole premise of fooming is based on that initial advantage. Also note, I’m not saying it’s obviously impossible to make a super-idiot-savant AI that’s stupider than a GSD in general but really good at improving itself, just that’s it goes really hard against my intuition, and I’m curious why yours doesn’t. Don’t feel like you have to justify your intuition to me, but it would be nice to describe it in more detail.)
0DaFranker
(Sorry for belated replies, I've been completely off LW for a few months and am only now going through my inbox) This is not what I think, or at least not what I expressed. My thoughts are similar, but elaboration later; first, this was an option in parallel with the option where a human designs a complete AGSD and then turns it on, and with the option where a bunch of humans design sub-AGSD iterations up until the point where they obtain a final AGSD. As for elaboration, I do think it's easier to build a so-called super-idiot-savant sub-GSD-general-intelligence, post-human-self-improvement AI than building any sort of "out-of-the-box" general intelligence. I don't currently recall my reasons, since my mind is set in a different mode, but the absurd and extreme case is that of having a human child. A human child is stupider than a GSD, but learns better than adult humans. It is also much simpler to do than any sort of AI programming. ;) But I only say this last in jest, and it isn't particularly relevant to the discussion.
0TheOtherDave
OK, thanks for clarifying.
0TruePath
So does the evil manipulative psychologist or the manipulative lover who convinces you to commit crimes to prove you really love them. And it's simply astounding some of the things unscrupulous psychologists and doctors have convinced people to do via mere suggestion. Psychologists have convinced people to sleep with their own fathers to 'resolve' their issues. Convincing people to do something that turns the AI into a direct (rather than indirect) agent seems fairly minor compared to what people convince each other to do all the time. Hell, US presidents have prosecuted every major war we've been involved in, dropped the A-bomb, developed the H-bomb, etc... all merely by making suggestions to people. I doubt any president since Jackson has actually picked up a pistol or physically forced anyone to do anything. People are merely accustomed to doing as they suggest and that is the entirety of their power. Do you not believe people would become accustomed to just driving (or going, or doing) whatever the google recommend bot recommended?
2Strange7
POTUS is the commander in chief of the united states armed forces, so under the right circumstances disobeying the president's orders could be a violation of military law ultimately punishable by death. There doesn't have to be a gun already in hand for something to be more than a 'suggestion.'
0bogdanb
Correct, and upvoted for concreteness. But even if one were to be punished by death for disobeying the president’s order, how likely do you think it would be for the POTUS himself to perform the execution? I doubt even the North Korean president would bother himself with that.
0Strange7
Apart from scheduling problems, I'm pretty sure it would be illegal for POTUS to personally kill someone in general (apart from self defense, etc.) and in the specific case of military law, there's still a judicial process involved. From a game-theoretic standpoint, what does it matter whose job it is to pull the trigger, to the person considering disobedience? The credible threat is what distinguishes between manipulation and coercion, regardless of where that potential violence is being stored.

[Eli's personal notes for personal understanding. Feel free to ignore or engage.]

If a planning Oracle is going to produce better solutions than humanity has yet managed to the Rubik's Cube, it needs to be capable of doing original computer science research and writing its own code.

Is this true? It seems like the crux of this argument.

4Raemon
I'm curious if you've read up on Eric Drexler's more recent thoughts (see this post and this one for some reviews of his lengthier book). My sense was that it was sort of a newer take on something-like-tool-AI, written by someone who was more of an expert than Holden was in 2012.
2Eli Tyre
Ok. I have the benefit of the intervening years, but talking about "one simple 'predictive algorithm'" sounds fine to me. It seems like, in humans, that there's probably, basically one cortical algorithm, which does some kind of metalearning. And yes, in practice, doing anything complicated involves learning a bunch of more specific mental procedures (for instance, learning to do decomposition and Fermi estimates instead of just doing a gut check, when estimating large numbers), what Paul calls "the machine" in this post. But so what? Is the concern there that we just don't understand what kind of optimization is happening in "the machine"? Is the thought that that kind of search is likely to discover how to break out of the box because it will find clever tricks like "capture all of the computing power in the world?"
2Eli Tyre
Why does this matter?

[Eli's personal notes for personal understanding. Feel free to ignore or engage.]

"increase the correspondence between the user's belief about relevant consequences and reality"

[Squint] Google Maps is not trying to do that. Google Maps doesn't have anything like a concept of a "user". I could imagine an advanced AI that does have a concept of a "user", but is indifferent to him/her. It just produces printouts, that, incidentally, the user reads.

I was briefly tripped up by the use of "risk gradient between X and Y" to indicate how much riskier X is than Y (perhaps "gradient" evokes a continuum between X and Y). I'd strike the jargon, or explain what it means.

"Holden should respect our difficult-to-explain expertise just as we ask others to respect Holden's" might actually be persuasive to Holden (smart people often forget to search for ideas via an empathic perspective), but it's whiny as a public signal.

3JGWeissman
That is not an actual quote, and I think it misrepresents Eliezer's actual point, which is that the problem of FAI, like finance and philanthropy, involves pitfalls that you can fall into without even realizing it and it is worthwhile to have full time professionals learning how to avoid those pitfalls.
4Eliezer Yudkowsky
...or at least full-time professionals who know that the pitfalls exist, so they can move forward if they learn to avoid pitfalls and otherwise take different routes.
0Jonathan_Graehl
It's pretty deeply analogous (deeper than my "paraphrase" indicated), but I'm not sure it serves you well as part of any public response. I found it convincing but off-putting.
0Jonathan_Graehl
Fair enough (I didn't mean to represent it as an exact gloss), but obviously my quoted paraphrase actually represents the meaning as I took it (or rather, some pattern-matching part of me that I wouldn't stand by, but feel comfortable projecting onto the "public").

I'm deeply confused. How can you even define the difference between tool AI and FAI?

I assume that even tool AI is supposed to be able to opine on relatively long sequences of input. In particular, to be useful it must be able to accumulate information over essentially unbounded time periods. Say if you want advise about where to position your air defenses you must be able to go back to the AI system each day hand it updates on enemy activity and expect it to integrate that information with information it received during previous sessions. Whether or no... (read more)

-2MugaSofer
An Oracle determines which action would produce higher utility, then outputs it. An "Agent AGI" determines which output will produce higher utility, then outputs it. It's a question of optimizing the output or merely outputting optimization. And yes, you can easily turn an Oracle into an Agent.

To summarize how I see the current state of the debate over "tool AI":

  • Eliezer and I have differing intuitions about the likely feasibility, safety and usefulness of the "tool" framework relative to the "Friendliness theory" framework, as laid out in this exchange. This relates mostly to Eliezer's point #2 in the original post. We are both trying to make predictions about a technology for which many of the details are unknown, and at this point I don't see a clear way forward for resolving our disagreements, though I did make
... (read more)
-1MugaSofer
If, as you say, "Tool" AI is different to "Oracle" AI, you are the first person to suggest it AFAICT. Regardless of it's strength, it appears to be very difficult to invent; it seems unreasonable to expect someone to anticipate an argument when their detractors have also universally failed to do so (apart from you.)
-5timtyler

I'm surprised to see no mention of the old "How do you ensure that your Oracle AI doesn't scribble over the world in order to gain more computational resources with which to answer your question?" argument.

I think the link on Demis Hassabis in section 3 is incorrect . It is the same as the Ray Kurzweil link.

0lukeprog
Fixed.

The thing that is most like an agent in the Tool AI scenario is not the computer and software that it is running. The agent is the combination of the human (which is of course very much like an agent) together with the computer-and-software that constitutes the tool. Holden's argument is that this combination agent is safer somehow. (Perhaps it is more familiar; we can judge intention of the human component with facial expression, for example.)

The claim that Tool AI is an obvious answer to the Friendly AI problem is a paper tiger that Eliezer demolished. H... (read more)

4JGWeissman
Answering that was the point of section 3. Summary: Lots of other people also have their own favored solutions they think are obvious, none of which are also Tool AI. You shouldn't really expect that SIAI would have addressed your particular idea before you or anyone else even talked about it.
-5Strange7

The link to How to Purchase AI Risk Reduction, in part 4, seems to be not working.

EDIT: looks fixed now!

0lukeprog
Works for me...

What makes us think that AI would stick with the utility function they're given? I change my utility function all the time, sometimes on purpose.

5wedrifid
There are very few situations in which an agent can most effectively maximise expected utility according to their current utility function by modifying themselves to have a different utility function. Unless the AI is defective or put in a specially contrived scenario it will maintain its current utility function because that is an instrumentally useful thing to do. If you are a paperclip maximiser then becoming a staples maximiser is a terribly inefficient strategy for maximising paperclips unless Omega is around making weird bargains. No you don't. That is, to the extent that you "change your utility function" at all you do not have a utility function in sense meant when discussing AI. It only makes sense to model humans as having 'utility functions' when they are behaving in a manner that can be vaguely approximated as expected utility maximisers with a particular preference function. Sure, it is possible to implement AIs that aren't expected utility maximisers either and those AIs could be made to do all sorts of arbitrary things including fundamentally change their goals and behavioral strategies. But if you implement an AI that tries to maximise a utility function then it will (almost always) keep trying to maximise that same utility function.
-2TheAncientGeek
Would does not imply could.
-2jacoblyles
Let me see if I understand what you're saying. For humans, the value of some outcome is a point in multidimensional value space, whose axes include things like pleasure, love, freedom, anti-suffering, and etc. There is no easy way to compare points at different coordinates. Human values are complex. For a being with a utility function, it has a way to take any outcome and put a scalar value on it, such that different outcomes can be compared. We don't have anything like that. We can adjust how much we value any one dimension in value space, even discover new dimensions! But we aren't utility maximizers. Which raises the question - if we want to create AI that respect human values, then why would we make utility maximizer AI in the first place? I'm still not sold on the idea that an intelligent being would slavishly follow its utility function. For AI, there are no questions about the meaning of life then? Just keep on U maximizing?
4thomblake
If it's really your utility function, you're not following it "slavishly" - it is just what you want to do. If "questions about the meaning of life" maximize utility, then yes, there are those. Can you unpack what "questions about the meaning of life" are supposed to be, and why you think they're important? ('meaning of "life"' is fairly easy, and 'meaning of life' seems like a category error).
-2jacoblyles
Sorry, "meaning of life" is sloppy phrasing. "What is the meaning of life?" is popular shorthand for "what is worth doing? what is worth pursuing?". It is asking about what is ultimately valuable, and how it relates to how I choose to live. It's interesting that we are imagining AIs to be immune from this. It is a common human obsession (though maybe only among unhappy humans?). An AI isn't distracted by contradictory values like a human is then, it never has to make hard choices? No choices at all really, just the output of the argmax expected utility function?
9TheOtherDave
I can't speak for anyone else, but I expect that a sufficiently well designed intelligence, faced with hard choices, makes them. If an intelligence is designed in such a way that, when faced with hard choices, it fails to make them (as happens to humans a lot), I consider that a design failure. And yes, I expect that it makes them in such a way as to maximize the expected value of its choice.... that is, so as to insofar as possible do what is worth doing and pursue what is worth pursuing. Which presumes that at any given moment it will at least have a working belief about what is worth doing and worth pursuing. If an intelligence is designed in such a way that it can't make a choice because it doesn't know what it's trying to achieve by choosing (that is, it doesn't know what it values), I again consider that a design failure. (Again, this happens to humans a lot.)
6Vaniver
The level of executive function required of normal people to function in modern society is astonishingly high by historical standards. It's not surprising that people have a lot of "above my pay grade" reactions to difficult decisions, and that decision-making ability is highly variable among people.

100% agreed.

I have an enormous amount of sympathy for us humans, who are required to make these kinds of decisions with nothing but our brains. My sympathy increased radically during the period of my life when, due to traumatic brain injury, my level of executive function was highly impaired and ordering lunch became an "above my pay grade" decision. We really do astonishingly well, for what we are.

But none of that changes my belief that we aren't especially well designed for making hard choices.

It's also not surprising that people can't fly across the Atlantic Ocean. But I expect a sufficiently well designed aircraft to do so.

4jacoblyles
It's interesting that we view those who do make the tough decisions as virtuous - i.e. the commander in a war movie (I'm thinking of Bill Adama). We recognize that it is a hard but valuable thing to do!
2fubarobfusco
Could you elaborate on this?
2Vaniver
Sure. For much of human history, the basic decision-making unit has been the household, rather than the individual, and household sizes have decreased significantly as time has gone on. With the "three generations under one roof" model, individuals could heed the sage wisdom of someone who has lived several times as long as they have when making important decisions like what career to follow or who to marry, and in many cases the social pressure to conform to the wishes of the elders was significant. As well, many people were also considered property- and so didn't need to make decisions that would alter the course of their life, because someone else would make them for them. Serfs rarely needed to make complicated financial decisions. Limited mobility made deciding where to live easier. Now, individuals (of both sexes!) are expected to decide who to marry and what job to pursue, mostly on their own. The replacement for the apprentice system- high school and college- provide little structure compared to traditional apprenticeships. Individuals are expected to negotiate for themselves with regards to many complicated financial transactions and be stewards of property. (This is a good thing in general, but it is worth remembering that it's a great thing for people who are good at being executives and mediocre to bad for people who are bad at it. As well, varying family types have been a thing for a long time, which may have had an impact on the development of societies and selected for different traits.)
6jacoblyles
A common problem that faces humans is that they often have to choose between two different things that they value (such as freedom vs. equality), without an obvious way to make a numerical comparison between the two. How many freeons equal one egaliton? It's certainly inconvenient, but the complexity of value is a fundamentally human feature. It seems to me that it will be very hard to come up with utility functions for fAI that capture all the things that humans find valuable in life. The topology of the systems don't match up. Is this a design failure? I'm not so sure. I'm not sold on the desirability of having an easily computable value function.
5TheOtherDave
I would agree that we're often in positions where we're forced to choose between two things that we value and we just don't know how to make that choice. Sometimes, as you say, it's because we don't know how to compare the two. (Talk of numerical comparison is, I think, beside the point.) Sometimes it's because we can't accept giving up something of value, even in exchange for something of greater value. Sometimes it's for other reasons. I would agree that coming up with a way to evaluate possible states of the world that take into account all of the things humans value is very difficult. This is true whether the evaluation is by means of a utility function for fAI or via some other means. It's a hard problem. I would agree that replacing the hard-to-compute value function(s) I actually have with some other value function(s) that are easier to compute is not desirable. Building an automated system that can compute the hard-to-compute value function(s) I actually have more reliably than my brain can -- for example, a system that can evaluate various possible states of the world and predict which ones would actually make me satisfied and fulfilled to live in, and be right more often than I am -- sounds pretty desirable to me. I have no more desire to make that calculation with my brain, given better alternatives, than I have to calculate square roots of seven-digit numbers with it.
4Raemon
Upvoted for use of the phrase "How many freeons equal one egaliton?"

Marcus Hutter is a rare exception who specified his AGI in such unambiguous mathematical terms that he actually succeeded at realizing, after some discussion with SIAI personnel, that AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button. But based on past sad experience with many other would-be designers, I say "Explain to a neutral judge how the math kills" and not "Explain to the person who invented that math and likes it."

Any sources to this extraordinary claim? Hutter's own statements? Cartesian-dualist AI has re... (read more)

Seems like a decent reply overall, but I found the fourth point very unconvincing. Holden has said 'what he knows know' - to wit that whereas the world's best experts would normally test a complicated programme by running it, isolating out what (inevitably) went wrong by examining the results it produced, rewriting it, then doing it again.

Almost no programmes are glitch free, so this is at best an optimization process and one which - as Holden pointed out - you can't do with this type of AI. If (/when) it goes wrong the first time, you don't get a second chance. Eliezer's reply doesn't seem to address this stark difference between what experts have been achieving and what SIAI is asking them to achieve.

0bogdanb
I agree with the glitch problems. But (1) programmers and techniques are improving; (2) people are more careful when aware of danger; (3) if it’s hard but inevitable, giving up doesn’t sound like a winning strategy. I mean, if people make mistakes at some important task, how isn’t it a good idea to get lots of smart mathematicians to think hard about how to avoid mistakes? Note that all doctors, biologists, nuclear physicists and rocket scientists are also not glitch free, but those that work with dangerous stuff do tend to err less often. But they have to be aware of the dangers (or at least anticipate their existence). A doctor might try a different pill if the first one doesn’t seem to work well against the sniffles, but will be much less inclined to experiments when they know the problem is a potential pandemic. (By the way, it is probably possible that the first possible AGI is buggy, and a killer, and will foom in a few seconds (or before anyone can react, anyway); it might even be likely. But it’s still possible we’ll get several chances. My point is not that we don’t have to worry about anything, but that even if the chances might be low it still makes sense to try harder. And, hey, AFAIK the automatic trains in Paris work much better than the human-driven ones. It’s not quite a fair comparison in any direction, but there is evidence that we can make stuff work pretty well at least for a while.) ETA: You know, now that I think about it, it seems plausible that programmer errors would lean towards the AGI not working (e.g. you divide by zero; core dump; the program stops), while a mathematician’s error would lean towards the AGI working but doing something catastrophic (e.g. your encryption program has exactly zero bugs, it works exactly as designed, but ROT13 has been proven cryptographically unsound after you used it to send that important secret). So maybe it’s a good idea if the math guys start thinking hard long in advance?

Demis Hassabis (VC-funded to the tune of several million dollars)

No public reference to his start-up that I can find.

They're still underground, with Shane Legg and at least a dozen other people on board. The company is called "Deep Mind" these days, and it's being developed as a games company. It's one of the most significant AGI projects I know of, merely because Shane and Demis are highly competent and approaching AGI by one of the more tractable paths (e.g. not AIXI or Goedel machines). Shane predicts AGI in a mere ten years—in part, I suspect, because he plans to build it himself.

Acquiring such facts is another thing SI does.

I wouldn't endorse their significance the same way, and would stand by my statement that although the AGI field as a whole has perceptible risk, no individual project that I know of has perceptible risk. Shane and Demis are cool, but they ain't that cool.

Right. I should have clarified that by "one of the most significant AGI projects I know of" I meant "has a very tiny probability of FOOMing in the next 15 years, which is greater than the totally negligible probability of FOOMing in the next 15 years posed by Juergen Schmidhuber."

4IlyaShpitser
I am willing to make a bet that there will be no AGI in 10 years created by this company.

I am in general willing to make bets against anyone producing an artificial human-level intelligence (for a sufficiently well-defined unpacking of that term) in ten years. If I win, great, I win the bet. If I lose, great, we have artificial human-level intelligence.

2cousin_it
Googling for "hassabis legg deepmind" seems to reveal that Jaan Tallinn is also one of the directors there.
-1Manfred
Huh. Yeah, he seems to just be a researcher at the Gatsby Institute, which is partially industry-funded, but not VC-funded.

Marcus Hutter is a rare exception who specified his AGI in such unambiguous mathematical terms that he actually succeeded at realizing, after some discussion with SIAI personnel, that AIXI would kill off its users and seize control of its reward button.

Not sure that's true of Hutter's beliefs, but for historical reference I'll link to a 2003 mailing list post by Eliezer describing some harmful consequences of AIXI-tl. Hutter wasn't part of that discussion, though.

Most of your points are valid, and Holden is pretty arrogant to think he sees this obvious solution that experts in the field are irresponsible for not doing.

But I can see a couple ways around this argument in particular:

Example question: "How should I get rid of my disease most cheaply?" Example answer: "You won't. You will die soon, unavoidably. This report is 99.999% reliable". Predicted human reaction: Decides to kill self and get it over with. Success rate: 100%, the disease is gone. Costs of cure: zero. Mission completed.

Optio... (read more)

5JGWeissman
You can't forbid self-fullfilling prophecies and still have a functioning AI. The whole point is to find a self-fullfilling prophecy that something good will happen. The problem illustrated is that the AI chose a self-fullfilling prophecy that ranked highly in the simply specified goal it was optimizing for, but ranked poorly in terms of what the human actually wanted. That is, the AI was fully capable of granting the wish as it understood it, but the wish it understood was not what the human meant to wish for.
1bogdanb
This might sound nit-picky, but you started it :) At no point does the example answer claim that the disease killed you. It just claims that it’s certain (a) you won’t get rid of it, and (b) you will die. That’d be technically accurate if the oracle planned to kill you with a meme, just as it would also be accurate if it predicted a piano will fall on you. (You never asked about pianos, and it’s just a very carefully limited oracle so it doesn’t volunteer that kind of information.) (I guess even if we got FAI right the first time, there’d still be a big chance we’d all die just because we weren’t paying enough attention to what it was saying...)

Inside the AI, whether an agent AI or a planning Oracle, there would be similar AGI-challenges like "build a predictive model of the world", and similar FAI-conjugates of those challenges like finding the 'user' inside an AI-created model of the universe.

Isn't building a predictive model of the world central to any AGI development? I don't see why someone who focuses specifically on FAI would worry more about a predictive model that other AGI developers. Specifically I don't think that even without Singularity Institute there would still be AGI people working on building predictive models of the world.

-3MugaSofer
Yes, hence that being referred to as an "AGI-challenge". An FAI, however, would require not only to model the world but (for example) to "find ... the 'user' inside an AI-created model of the universe."

My mind keeps turning up Ben Goertzel as the one who invented this caricature - "Don't you understand, poor fool Eliezer, life is full of uncertainty, your attempt to flee from it by refuge in 'mathematical proof' is doomed" - but I'm not sure he was actually the inventor.

Of course, that is not a genuine quotation from Ben.

My mind keeps turning up Ben Goertzel as the one who invented this caricature - "Don't you understand, poor fool Eliezer, life is full of uncertainty, your attempt to flee from it by refuge in 'mathematical proof' is doomed"

This is a common enough trope amongst Dynamists and other worshipers of chaos that I don't think it needs to be credited to anyone.

Demis Hassabis link points to Singularity Is Near (intended for Kurzweil I presume)

0lukeprog
Fixed.

"I believe that the probability of an unfavorable outcome - by which I mean an outcome essentially equivalent to what a UFAI would bring about - exceeds 90% in such a scenario."

It's nice that this appreciates that the problem is hard.

The "scenario" in question involves a SIAI AGI - so maybe he just thinks that this organisation is incompetent.

I think the core distinction was poorly worded by Holden. The distinction is between AIs as they exist now (e.g. self driving car), and the economical model of AI within a larger model, as economical utility maximizer agent, a non-reductionistically modelled entity within a larger model, which is maximizing some utility non-reductionistically modelled within larger model (e.g. paperclip maximizer).

The AIs as they exist now, at the core, throw the 'intelligence' in form of solution search, at a problem of finding inputs to an internally defined mathematical... (read more)

Your link to Holden's post is broken.

It might be the right suggestion, but it's not so obviously right that our failure to prioritize discussing it reflects horrible negligence.

In a paragraph begging for charity, this sentence seems out of place.

(Commentary to follow.)

I can't see what you're getting at. Holden seems to say not just "you should do this", but "the fact that you're not already doing this reflects badly on your decision making". Eliezer replies that the first may be true but the second seems unwarranted.

1Vaniver
Consider three sections of Holden's post: In section 1 and 2, Holden makes the argument that pinning our hopes on a utility function seems dangerous, because maximizers in general are dangerous. Better to just make information processing tools that make us more intelligent. When discussing SI as an organization, Holden says, The jump from "speaks to its general competence" to "horribl[y] negligent" is a large and uncharitable one. If one focuses on "compelling," then yes, Holden is saying "SI is incompetent because I wasn't convinced by them," and that does seem unwarranted, or at least weak. But if one focuses on "clear" or "concise," then I agree with Holden- if SI's core mission is to communicate about AI risks, and they're unable to communicate clearly and concisely, then that speaks to their ability to complete their core mission! And there's the other bit where charity seemed lacking to me- it seems that Holden's strongest complaints are about clarity and concision. Now, that's my impression as a bystander, and I "remember with compassion that it's not always obvious to one person what another person will think was the central point", so it is an observation about tone and little more.
[+]witzvo-90