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XiXiDu comments on [link] [poll] Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence - Less Wrong
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I have read the 22 pages yesterday and haven't seen anything about specific risks? Here is question 4:
Question 3 was about takeoff speeds.
So regarding MIRI, you could say that experts disagreed about one of the 5 theses (intelligence explosion), as only 10% thought a human level AI could reach a strongly superhuman level within 2 years. But what about the other theses? Even though 18% expected an extremely bad outcome, this doesn't mean that they expected it to happen for the same reasons that MIRI expects it to happen, or that they believe friendly AI research to be a viable strategy.
Since I already believed that humans could cause an existential catastrophe by means of AI, but not for the reasons MIRI believes this to happen (very unlikely), this survey doesn't help me much in determining whether my stance towards MIRI is faulty.
Yes, that sounds like an expectation or average outcome: 'overall impact'. Not a worst-case scenario, which would involve different wording.
I'm not sure how much they disagree. Fast takeoff / intelligence explosion has always seemed to me to be the most controversial premise, which the most people object to, which most consigned SIAI/MIRI to being viewed like cranks; to hear that 10% - of fairly general populations which aren't selected for Singulitarian or even transhumanist views - would endorse a takeoff as fast as 'within 2 years' is pretty surprising to me.
In the paper human-level AI was defined as follows:
Given that definition it doesn't seem too surprising to me. I guess I have been less skeptical about this than you...
What sounds crankish is not that a human level AI might reach a superhuman level within 2 years, but the following. In Yudkowsky's own words (emphasis mine):
These kind of very extreme views are what I have a real problem with. And just to substantiate "extreme views", here is Luke Muehlhauser:
The two quotes you gave say two pretty different things. What Yudkowsky said about the time-scale of self improvement being weeks or hours, is controversial. FWIW, I think he's probably right, but I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out otherwise.
What Luke said was about what happens when an already-superhuman AI gets an Internet connection. This should not be controversial at all. This is merely claiming that a "superhuman machine" is capable of doing something that regular humans already do on a fairly routine basis. The opposite claim - that the AI will not spread to everywhere on the Internet - requires us to believe that there will be a significant shift away from the status quo in computer security. Which is certainly possible, but believing the status quo will hold isn't an extreme view.
My problem with Luke's quote was the "moments later" part.
I took that as hyperbole. If I were meant to take it literally, then yes, I'd object - but I have no trouble believing that a superintelligent AI would be out of there in a matter of hours to minutes, modulo bandwidth limits, which is 'instant' enough for my purposes. Humans suck at computer security.
Yes, applying the SI definition of a moment as 1/2π seconds and the ANSI upper bound of a plural before you must change units, we can derive that he was either claiming world takeover in less than 10/(2π)^1/2 ≈ 3.9894 seconds, or speaking somewhat loosely.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Right, and I'm saying: the "moments later" part of what Luke said is not something that should be surprising or controversial, given the premises. It does not require any thinking that can't be done in advance, which means the only limiting input is bandwidth, which is both plentiful and becoming more plentiful every year.
The premise was a superhuman intelligence? I don't see how it could create a large enough botnet, or find enough exploits, in order to be everywhere moments later. Sounds like magic to me (mind you, a complete layman).
If I approximate "superintelligence" as NSA, then I don't see how the NSA could have a trojan everywhere moments after the POTUS asked them to take over the Internet. Now I could go further and imagine the POTUS asking the NSA to take it over within 10 years in order to account for the subjective speed with which a superintelligence might think. But I strongly doubt that such a speed could make up for the data the NSA already possess and which the superintelligence still needs to acquire. It also does not make up for the thousands of drones (humans in meatspace) that the NSA controls. And since the NSA can't take over the Internet within moments I believe it is very extreme to claim that a superintelligence can. Though it might be possible within days.
I hope you don't see this as an attack. I honestly don't see how that could be possible.
Given a backdoor or an appropriate zero-day exploit, I would estimate that it would take no longer than a few minutes to gain control over most of the computers connected to the 'net if you're not worried about detection. It's not hard. Random people routinely build large botnets without any superhuman abilities.
Most computers are not directly connected to the internet.
Assuming we are not talking about computers in cars and factory control systems, this is a pretty meaningless statement. Yes, most computers sit behind routers, but then basically all computers on the 'net sit behind routers, no one is "directly" connected.
Besides, routers are computers and can be taken over as well.
This is not magic, I am not a layman, and your beliefs about computer security are wildly misinformed. Putting trojans on large fractions of the computers on the internet is currently within the reach of, and is actually done by, petty criminals acting alone. While this does involve a fair amount of thinking time, all of this thinking goes into advance preparation, which could be done while still in an AI-box or in advance of an order.
Within moments? I don't take your word for this, sorry. The only possibility that comes to my mind is by somehow hacking the Windows update servers and then somehow forcefully install new "updates" without user permission.
So if I uploaded you onto some alien computer, and you had a billion years of subjective time to think about it, then within moments after you got an "Internet" connection you could put a trojan on most computers of that alien society? How would you e.g. figure out zero day exploits of software that you don't even know exists?
Well, what's going to slow it down? If you have a backdoor or an exploit, to take over a computer requires a few milliseconds for communications latency and a few milliseconds to run the code to execute the takeover. At this point the new zombie becomes a vector for further infection, you have exponential growth and BOOM!
Wouldn't have to be Windows; any popular software package with live updates would do, like Acrobat or Java or any major antivirus package. Or you could find a vulnerability that allows arbitrary code execution in any popular push notification service; find one in Apache or a comparably popular Web service, then corrupt all the servers you can find; exploit one in a popular browser, if you can suborn something like Google or Amazon's front page... there's lots of stuff you could do. If you have hours instead of moments, phishing attacks and the like become practical, and things get even more fun.
Well, presumably you're running in an environment that has some nontrivial fraction of that software floating around, or at least has access to repos with it. And there's always fuzzing.
When you are a layman talking to experts, you should actually listen. Don't make us feel like we're wasting our time.
I don't think much of typical humans.
I see.
That's not extreme at all, and also not the same as the EY quote. Have you read any computer security papers? You can literally get people to run programs on their computer as root by offering them pennies! That's the sort of security environment we operate in. Every botnet with millions of computers is a proof of concept.
He wrote it will be moments later everywhere. Do you claim that it could take over the Internet within moments?
With proper preparation, yes. To reuse my example: it doesn't take long to register an Amazon account, offer a high-paying HIT with a binary download which opens up a port on the computer, and within minutes multiple people across the world will have run your trojan (well-paying HITs go very fast & Turkers are geographically diverse, especially if the requester doesn't set requirements on country*); and then one can begin doing all sorts of other things like fuzzing, SMT solvers to automatically extract vulnerabilities from released patches, building botnets, writing flashworms, etc. At that point, the only real question is how stringently one wishes to define 'moments later' and 'everywhere'.
(Within a few seconds? Hard to see how any plausible AI could copy its entire source code & memories over the existing Internet that fast unless it was for some reason already sitting on something like a gigabit link. Within a few minutes? More reasonable. Is there any real difference in safety? No.)
* IIRC a lot of Turk HITs - like for psychology surveys - specify they want Turkers who are from eg America, to reduce variation or get more relevant answers, so Turk requires a declared country for each worker and lets requesters mandate being from particular countries. That said, there's a lot of incentive for Turkers to lie - to qualify for more and more high-paying HITs - so even if the AI were for some reason to restrict by country, it'd wind up with a lot of diverse foreign computers anyway.
Thanks. Looks like my perception is mainly based on my lack of expertise about security and the resulting inferential distance.
Are there good reasons to assume that the first such AI won't be running on a state of the art supercomputer? Take the movie Avatar. The resources needed to render it were: 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of storage. I suppose that it would have been relatively hard to render it on illegally obtained storage and computational resources?
Do we have any estimates on how quickly a superhuman AI's storage requirements would grow? CERN produces 30 petabytes of data per year. If an AI undergoing an intelligence explosion requires to store vast amounts of data then it will be much harder for it to copy itself.
The uncertainties involved here still seem to be too big to claim that a superhuman intelligence will be everywhere moments after you connect it to the Internet.
I don't think so. Consider botnets.
How hard is it to buy time on a botnet? Not too hard, since they exist for the sake of selling their services, after all.
Do they have the capacity? Botnets range in size from a few computers to extremes of 30 million computers; if they're desktops, then average RAM these days tends to be at least 4GB, dual core, and hard drive sizes are >=500GB, briefly looking at the cheapest desktops on Newegg. So to get those specs: 35k cores is 17.5k desktops, for 104tb of RAM you'd need a minimum of
104000 / 4 = 26kcomputers, and the 3pb would be 6k (3000000 / 500); botnets can't use 100% of host resources or their attrition will be even higher than usual, so double the numbers, and the minimum of the biggest is 52k. Well within the range of normal botnets (the WP list has 22 botnets which could've handled that load). And AFAIK CGI rendering is very parallel, so the botnet being high latency and highly distributed might not be as big an issue as it seems.How much would it cost? Because botnets are a market, it's been occasionally studied/reported on by the likes of Brian Krebs (google 'cost of renting a botnet'). For example, https://www.damballa.com/want-to-rent-an-80-120k-ddos-botnet/ says you could rent a 80-120k botnet for $200 a day, or a 12k botnet for $500 a month - so presumably 5 such botnets would cost a quite reasonable $2500 per month.
(That's much cheaper than Amazon AWS, looks like. https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html 17500 t2.medium instances would cost ~$666k a month.)
I don't know. Humans get by adding only a few bits per second to long-term memory, Landauer estimated, but I'm not sure how well that maps onto an AI.
It may not be able to move itself instantly, but given everything we know about botnets and computer security, it would be able to control a lot of remote computers quickly if prepared, and that opens up a lot of avenues one would rather not have to deal with. (Original AI connects to Internet, seizes a few computers across the world, installs a small seed as root with a carefully packaged set of instructions, small database of key facts around the world, and a bunch of Bitcoin private keys for funding while the seed grows to something approaching the original, and lets itself be wiped by its vigilant overseers.)
Why does the AI have to transfer its source code? I assumed we were just talking about taking over machines as effectors.
It will want to -- for safety, to avoid being vulnerable due to having a single point of failure.
However the "take over in moments" refers to just control, I think. Getting the AI to become fully distributed and able to tolerate losing large chunks of hardware will take a fair amount of time and, likely, hardware upgrades.
It's not like it's that hard to hack into servers and run your own computations on them through the internet. Assuming the superintelligence knows enough about the internet to design something like this beforehand (likely since it runs in a server cluster), it seems like the limiting factor here would be bandwidth.
I imagine a highly intelligent human trapped in this sort of situation, with similar prior knowledge and resource access, could build a botnet in a few months. Working on it at full-capacity, non-stop, could bring this down to a few weeks, and it seems plausible to me that with increased intelligence and processing speed, it could build one in a few moments. And of course with access to its own source code, it would be trivial to have it run more copies of itself on the botnet.
Even if you disagree with this line of reasoning, I don't think it's fair to paint it as "*very extreme".
With "very extreme" I was referring to the part where he claims that this will happen "moments later".
Yes, that was clear. My point is that it isn't extreme under the mild assumption that the AI has prepared for such an event beforehand.