Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Debunking Fallacies in the Theory of AI Motivation - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Richard_Loosemore 05 May 2015 02:46AM

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Comment author: Richard_Loosemore 06 May 2015 04:08:27PM 5 points [-]

I see where you are coming from in what you have just said, but to give a good answer I need to take a high-level stance toward what you are saying. This is because there is a theme running through your ideas, here, and it is the theme, rather than the specifics, that I need to address.

You have mentioned on the serval occasions the idea that "AGI-concepts" and "Human-concepts" might not align, with the result that we might have difficulty understanding what they are really meaning when they use a given concept. In particular, you use the idea that there could be some bad misalignments of concepts - for example, when the AGI makes a conceptual distinction between "giving choices to people" and "forcing them to do something", and even though our own version of that same distinction corresponds closely to the AGI's version most of the time, there are some peculiar circumstances (edge cases) where there is a massive or unexpectedly sharp discrepancy.

Putting this idea in the form of an exaggerated, fictional example, it is as if we meet a new culture out in the middle of Darkest Africa, and in the course of translating their words into ours we find a verb that seems to mean "cook". But even though there are many examples (cooking rice, cooking bread, cooking meat, and even brewing a cup of tea) that seem to correspond quite closely, we suddenly find that they ALSO use this to refer to a situation where someone writes their initials on a tree, and another case where they smash someone's head with a rock. And the natives claim that this is not because the new cases are homonyms, they claim that this is the very same concept in all cases.

We might call this a case of "alien semantics".

The first thing to say about this, is that it is a conceptual minefield. The semantics (or ontological grounding) of AI systems is, in my opinion, one of the least-well developed parts of the whole field. People often pay lip-service to some kind of model-theoretical justification for an AI's semantic foundations, but in practice this actually means very little, since the theoretical ideas shade off into philosophy, have some huge unresolved gaps in them, and frequently take recourse in infinitely large (i.e. uncomputable) mappings between sets of 'possible worlds'. Worst of all, the area is rife with question-begging (like using technical vocabulary which itself has a poorly defined semantics to try to specify exactly what 'semantics' is!).

Why does that matter? Because many of the statements that people make about semantic issues (like the alien semantics problem) are predicated on precisely which semantic theory they subscribe to. And, it is usually the case that their chosen semantic theory is just a vague idea that goes somewhat in the direction of Tarski, or in the direction of Montague, or maybe just what they read in Russell and Norvig. The problem is that those semantic theories have challengers (some of them not very well defined, but even so...), such as Cognitive Semantics, and those other semantic formalisms have a truly gigantic impact on some of the issues we are discussing here.

So, for example, there is an interpretation of semantics that says that it is not even coherent to talk about two concept landscapes that are semantic aliens. To be sure, this can happen in language -- things expressible in one language can be very hard to say in another language -- but the idea that two concept spaces can be in some way irreconcilable, or untranslatable, would be incoherent (not "unlikely" but actually not possible).

[A brief word about how that could be the case. If concepts are defined by large clusters of constraints between concepts, rather than precise, atomic relations of the sort you find in logical formalisms, then you can always deal with situations in which two concepts seem near to one another but do not properly overlap: you can form some new, translator concepts that take a complex union of the two. There is a lot of talk that can be given about how that complex union takes place, but here is one very important takeaway: it can always be made to happen in such a way that there will not, in the future, be any Gotcha cases (those where you thought you did completely merge the two concepts, but where you suddenly find a peculiar situation where you got it disastrously wrong). The reason why you won't get any Gotcha cases is that the concepts are defined by large numbers of weak constraints, and no strong constraints -- in such systems, the effect of smaller and smaller numbers of concepts can be guaranteed to converge to zero. (This happens for the same reason that the effect of smaller and smaller sub-populations of the molecules in a gas will converge to zero as the population sizes go to zero). Finally, you will notice the appearance of the key phrase "large clusters of constraints" in what I just explained ...... that should be familiar. This is precisely the semantics of those Swarm Relaxation systems that I talked about in the paper.]

So, one of the implications of that kind of semantics is that different intelligent systems that use the basic idea of massive, weak constraint clusters to build concepts is that those systems will tend to converge on the same semantics.

[continued in next comment......]

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 10 May 2015 11:25:01PM 1 point [-]

If concepts are defined by large clusters of constraints between concepts [...] then you can always deal with situations in which two concepts seem near to one another but do not properly overlap.

Am I correct that this refers to topological convergence results like those in section 2.8 in this ref?: http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/arbogast/appMath08c.pdf

Comment author: Richard_Loosemore 12 May 2015 02:23:22PM 3 points [-]

I confess that it is would take me some time to establish whether weak constraint systems of the sort I have in mind can be mapped onto normed linear spaces. I suspect not: this is more the business of partial orderings than it is topological spaces.

To clarify what I was meaning in the above: if concept A is defined by a set A* of weak constraints that are defined over the set of concepts, and another concept B has a similar B, where B and A* have substantial overlap, one can introduce new concepts that sit above the differences and act as translation concepts, with the result that eventually you can find a single concept Z that allows A and B to be seen as special cases of Z.

All of this is made less tractable because the weak constraints (1) do not have to be pairwise (although most of them probably will be), and (2) can belong to different classes, with different properties associated with them (so, the constraints themselves are not just links, they can have structure). It is for these reasons that I doubt whether this could easily be made to map onto theorems from topology.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 12 May 2015 02:51:51PM 1 point [-]

Thanks for your answer. I trust your knowledge. I just want to read up on the math behind that.

Comment author: Richard_Loosemore 13 May 2015 04:38:01PM 3 points [-]

Actually it turns out that my knowledge was a little rusty on one point, because apparently the topic of orderings and lattice theory are considered a sub branch of general topology.

Small point, but I wanted to correct myself.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 13 May 2015 05:42:35PM 1 point [-]

Hm. Does that mean that my reference is the right one? I'm explicitly asking because I still can't reliably map your terminolgy ('concept', 'translation') to topological terms.

Comment author: Richard_Loosemore 13 May 2015 07:30:42PM 2 points [-]

Oh no, that wasn't where I was going. I was just making a small correction to something I said about orderings vs. topology. Not important.

The larger problem stands: concepts are active entities (for which read: they have structure, and they are adaptive, and their properties depend on mechanisms inside, with which they interact with other concepts). Some people use the word 'concept' to denote something very much simpler than that (a point in concept space, with perhaps a definable measure of distance to other concepts). If my usage were close to the latter, you might get some traction from using topology. But that really isn't remotely true, so I do not think there is any way to make use of topology here.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 13 May 2015 09:18:09PM 0 points [-]

I think I recognize what you mean from something I wrote in 2007 about the vaguesness of concepts:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120121185331/http://grault.net/adjunct/index.cgi?VaguesDependingOnVagues (note the wayback-link; the original site no longer exists).

But your reply still doesn't answer my question: You claim that the concepts are stable and that a "o gotcha" result can be proven - and I assume mathematically proven. And for that I'd really like to see a reference to the relevant math as I want to integrate that into my own understanding of concepts that are 'composed' from vague features.

Comment author: Richard_Loosemore 13 May 2015 11:36:53PM 1 point [-]

Yes to your link. And Hofstadter, of course, riffs on this idea continuously.

(It is fun, btw, to try to invent games in which 'concepts' are defined by more and more exotic requirements, then watch the mind as it gets used to the requirements and starts supplying you with instances).

When I was saying mathematically proven, this is something I am still working on, but cannot get there yet (otherwise I would have published it already) because it involves being more specific about the relevant classes of concept mechanism. When the proof comes it will be a statistical-mechanics-style proof, however.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 14 May 2015 06:20:35AM 1 point [-]

OK. Now I understand what kind of proof you mean. Thank you for you answer and your passion. Also thanks for the feedback on my old post.