Lifehack: If you're attacked by a group of stray dogs, pretend to throw a stone at them. Each dog will think you're throwing the stone at it and will run away. This has worked for me twice.
Speaking from experience in Mumbai, just pretending to throw a stone doesn't necessarily work. You have to pretend to pick up a stone and then throw it.
OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment.
Suchir Balaji, 26, claimed the company broke copyright law.
Suppose that you are a whistleblower, and you suspect what someone will try to "suicide" you. How can you protect yourself?
If someone wants to murder you, they can. If you ever walk outside, you can't avoid being shot by a sniper. Or a random thug will be paid by a mysterious stranger to stab you. So my question is not "how can you make yourself immortal", but rather "how can you make it so that if you are killed, it will very obviously not be a suicide".
Saying "I have no intention to kill myself, and I suspect that I might be murdered" is not enough.
Wearing a camera that is streaming to a cloud 24/7, and your friends can publish the video in case of your death... seems a bit too much. (Also, it wouldn't protect you e.g. against being poisoned. But I think this is not a typical way how whistleblowers die.) Is there something simpler?
You can publish it, including the output of a standard hash function applied to the secret password. "Any real note will contain a preimage of this hash."
Are there Manifold markets yet on whether this was a suicide and whether it will turn out that this was due to any pressures relating to the OpenAI whistleblowing?
Collapse of mega-project to create AI based on linguistics
ABBYY spent 100 million USD for 30 years to create a model of language using hundreds of linguists. It fails to compete with transformers. This month the project was closed. More in Russian here: https://sysblok.ru/blog/gorkij-urok-abbyy-kak-lingvisty-proigrali-poslednjuju-bitvu-za-nlp/
"Bird Flu H5N1: Not Chaos, but Conspiracy?" By Alexander Pruss
Two months ago, I was puzzled how bird flu, potentially capable of killing tens of millions, went rampant on American livestock farms and began infecting workers, yet no urgent measures were being taken. Even standard epidemiological threat monitoring was happening unsystematically, with months-long delays, and results weren't being made public for months afterward. What happened to the bitter lessons from the coronavirus pandemic? Why such chaos? Since then, the sense of criminal inaction has only intensified. Missouri discovered the first outbreak of human cases unrelated to farm workers, but molecular testing was neglected and infection paths remained undiscovered.
In California, a more pathogenic variant of bird flu spread to hundreds of dairy farms, reportedly killing up to 15% of cows, with almost daily new cases of virus transmission to humans. The virus apparently came to California through cattle transportation from Idaho, despite belatedly introduced rules formally prohibiting the transport of infected cows across state lines. The problem was that infection in transported cows was checked through sel...
Roman Mazurenko is dead again. First resurrected person, Roman lived as a chatbot (2016-2024) created based on his conversations with his fiancé. You might even be able download him as an app.
But not any more. His fiancé married again and her startup http://Replika.ai pivoted from resurrection help to AI-girlfriends and psychological consulting.
It looks like they quietly removed Roman Mazurenko app from public access. It is especially pity that his digital twin lived less than his biological original, who died at 32. Especially now when we have much more powerful instruments for creating semi-uploads based on LLMs with large prompt window.
Igor Kiriluk (1974-2022)
Igor was an organiser the first meet-up in Moscow about effective altruism around 2013. Today his body was found at his home. The day before he complained about depression and bad health. His cryopreservation now is being organised.
He was also a one of four organisers of Russian Transhumanist Movement, along with Danila Medvedev, Valeria Pride and Igor Artuhov around 2003.
His main topic of interest was paradise-engineering. He translated works of David Pearce.
He may look detached from reality but he was first to react on new ideas and has very large network of friends everywhere: between visionaries, scientists and officials. Being a great networker, he helped many people to find each other, especially in the field of life extension.
His FB page: https://www.facebook.com/igor.kirilyuk.3
I am building my sideload via recursively correcting of 1-million-tokens prompt for large LLM. The prompt consists of 500 rules which describe my personality, similar to personal constitution, and of some texts, like diaries, abstracts, poetry, stream of thoughts etc. Works on Google Gemini 1M through Google AI studio, and the shorter version works great on Opus. The system also includes a universal "loader prompt" which tries to increase the intelligence of the model and describes how the chatbot should work.
I found that sideloading allows very quick iterations in the sideload's improvements and the improvements are two-fold: of the loader itself and improvements of the knowledge and style of the sideload.
I find that my sideload is surprisingly good for a project which took around 1 month of work. 1 of the 5 answers is exactly like mine from a factual and style point of view.
I am open-sourcing my sideload, anyone can run it https://github.com/avturchin/minduploading/tree/main
I can help anyone interested to build his-her own sideload.
Example of work of the chatbot, no cherry picking:
Q:(now speak in english) what will be your next post in Lesswro...
New b.1.640.2 variant in France. More deadly than delta. 952 cases of which 315 on ventilator.
https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/europe-aj/europe-covid-19-sept-13-2020-may-31-2021/933598-southern-france-reports-of-new-variant-with-46-mutations
ChatGPT 4.5 is on preview at https://chat.lmsys.org/ under name gpt-2.
It calls itself ChatGPT 2.0 in a text art drawing https://twitter.com/turchin/status/1785015421688799492
I ran out of tokens quickly trying out poetry but I didn't get the impression that this is a big leap over GPT-4 like GPT-5 presumably is designed to be. (It could, I suppose, be a half-baked GPT-5 similar to 'Prometheus' for GPT-4.) My overall impression from poetry was that it was a GPT-4 which isn't as RLHF-damaged as usual, and more like Claude in having a RLAIF-y creative style. So I could believe it's a better GPT-4 where they are experimenting with new tuning/personality to reduce the ChatGPT-bureaucratese.
H5N1 https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501244375/after-death-of-girl-yesterday-12-more-detected-with-h5n1-bird-flu/
Several types of existential risks can be called "qualia catastrophes":
- Qualia disappear for everyone = all become p-zombies
- Pain qualia are ubiquitous = s-risks
- Addictive qualia domminate = hedonium, global wireheading
- Qualia thin out = fading qualia, mind automatisation
- Qualia are unstable = dancing qualia, identity is unstable.
- Qualia shift = emergence of non-human qualia (humans disappear).
- Qualia simplification = disappearance of subtle or valuable qualia (valuable things disappear).
- Transcendental and objectless qualia with hypnotic power enslave humans (God as qualia; Zair). -
- Attention depletion (ADHD)
We maybe one prompt from AGI. A hypothesis: carefully designed prompt could turn foundational model into full-blown AGI, but we just don't know which prompt.
Example: step-by-step reasoning in prompt increases foundational models' performance.
But real AGI-prompt needs to have memory, so it has to repeat itself while adding some new information. So by running serially, the model may accumulate knowledge inside the prompt.
Most of my thinking looks this way from inside: I have a prompt - an article headline and some other inputs - and generate most plausible continuations.
Age and dates of death on the cruise ship Diamond Princess:
Age:
4 people - 80s
1 person 78
1 person 70s
1 person - no data
Dates of deaths: 20, 20, 23, 25, 28, 28, 1 march. One death every 1.3 days. Look like acceleration at the end of the period.
Background death probability: for 80-year-old person, life expectancy is around 8 years or around 100 months. This means that for 1000 people aged late 70s-80s there will be 10 deaths just because of aging and stress. Based on the aging distribution on cruise ships, there were many old people. if half of the infected a...
EURISKO resurfaced
"Doug Lenat's source code for AM and EURISKO (+Traveller?) found in public archives
In the 1970s to early 80s, these two AI programs by Douglas Lenat pulled off quite the feat of autonomously making interesting discoveries in conceptual spaces. AM rediscovered mathematical concepts like prime numbers from only first principles of set theory. EURISKO expanded AM's generality beyond fixed mathematical heuristics, made leaps in the new field of VLSI design, and famously was used to create wild strategies for the Traveller space combat R...
Argentina - Outbreak of bilateral pneumonia: Approximately 10 cases, 3 deaths, 20 under observation, Tucumán - September 1, 2022 https://flutrackers.com/forum/forum/south-america/pneumonia-and-influenza-like-illnesses-ili-af/argentina-ab/957860-argentina-outbreak-of-bilateral-pneumonia-approximately-10-cases-3-deaths-20-under-observation-tucum%C3%A1n-september-1-2022
Passways to AI infrastructure
Obviously, the current infrastructure is not automated enough to run without humans. All ideas about AI risk eventually boil down to a few suggestions on how AI will create its own infrastructure:
No-humans scenarios:
- create nanobots via mailing DNA samples to some humans.
- use some biological tricks, like remote control animals, and programmed bacteria.
- build large manufacturing robots, maybe even humanoid ones to work in human-adapted workplaces. Build robots which build robots.
Humans-remain scenarios:
- enslave some humans, ...
Observable consequences of simulation:
1. Larger chances of miracles or hacks
2. Large chances of simulation’s turn off or of a global catastrophe
3. I am more likely to play a special role or to live in interesting times
4. A possibility of afterlife.
Catching Treacherous Turn: A Model of the Multilevel AI Boxing
Two types of Occam' razor:
1) The simplest explanation is the most probable, so the distribution of probabilities for hypotheses looks like: 0.75, 0.12, 0.04 .... if hypothesis are ordered from simplest to more complex.
2) The simplest explanation is the just more probable, so the distribution of probabilities for hypotheses looks like: 0.09, 0.07, 0.06, 0.05.
The interesting feature of the second type is that simplest explanation is more likely to be wrong than right (its probability is less than 0.5).
Different types of Occam razor are applicable in d...
Some random ideas how to make GPT-base AI safer.
1) Scaffolding: use rule-based AI to check every solution provided by GPT part. It could work for computations or self-driving or robotics, but not against elaborated adversarial plots.
2) Many instances. Run GPT several times and choose random or best answer - we already doing this. Run several instances of GPT with different parameters or different training base and compare answers. Run different prompt. Median output seems to be a Shelling point around truth, and outstanding answers are more likely to be wr...
Reflectivity in alignment.
Human values and AI alignment do not exist independently. There are several situations when they affect each other, creating complex reflection pattern.
Examples:
Can we utilize meaningful embedding dimensions as an alignment tool?
In toy models, embedding dimensions are meaningful and can represent features such as height, home, or feline. However, in large-scale real-world models, many (like 4096) dimensions are generated automatically, and their meanings remain unknown, hindering interpretability.
I propose the creation of a standardized set of embedding dimensions that: a) correspond to a known list of features, and b) incorporate critical dimensions such as deception, risk, alignment, and non-desirable content, i...
I have interesting experience long time ago. In the near-sleep state my consciousness split in two streams - one was some hypnogogic images, and the other was some hypnogogic music.
They was not related to each other and each had, some how, its own observer.
A moment later something awakened me a bit and the streams seamlessly merged and I was able to observe that a moment before I had two independent streams of consciousness.
Conclusions:
1. A human can have more than one consciousness at the time.
2. It actually happens all the time but we don't care.
3. Mergi...
I have had tetrachromotomic experience with one mind machine which flickers different colors in different eyes. It overflows some stacks in the brain in create new colors.
List of cognitive biases affecting judgment of global risks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366862337_List_of_cognitive_biases_affecting_judgment_of_global_risks/related
Grabby aliens without red dwarfs
Grabby aliens theory of Robin Hanson predicts that the nearest grabby aliens are 1 billion light years away but strongly depends on the habitability of red dwarfs (https://grabbyaliens.com/paper).
In the post, the author combines anthropic and Fermi, that is, the idea that we live in the universe with the highest concentration of aliens, limited by their invisibility, and get an estimation of around 100 "potentially visible" civilizations per observable universe, which at first approximation gives 1 billion ly distance b...
N-back hack. (Infohazard!)
There is a way to increase one's performance in N-back, but it is almost cheating and N- back will stop to be a measure of one's short-term memory.
The idea is to imagine writing all the numbers on a chalkboard in a row, as they are coming.
Like 3, 7, 19, 23.
After that, you just read the needed number from the string, which is located N positions back.
You don't need to have a very strong visual memory or imagination to get a boost in your N-back results.
I tried it a couple of times and get bored with N-back.
AI safety as Grey Goo in disguise.
First, a rather obvious observation: while the Terminator movie pretends to display AI risk, it actually plays with fears of nuclear war – remember that explosion which destroys children's playground?
EY came to the realisation of AI risk after a period than he had worried more about grey goo (circa 1999) – unstoppable replication of nanorobots which will eat all biological matter, – as was revealed in a recent post about possible failures of EY's predictions. While his focus moved from grey goo to AI, the...
Glitch in the Matrix: Urban Legend or Evidence of the Simulation? The article is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/TURGIT
In the last decade, an urban legend about “glitches in the matrix” has become popular. As it is typical for urban legends, there is no evidence for most such stories, and the phenomenon could be explained as resulting from hoaxes, creepypasta, coincidence, and different forms of cognitive bias. In addition, the folk understanding of probability does not bear much resemblance to actual probability distributions, resulting in the illusion o...
"Back to the Future: Curing Past Suffering and S-Risks via Indexical Uncertainty"
I uploaded the draft of my article about curing past sufferings.
Abstract:
The long unbearable sufferings in the past and agonies experienced in some future timelines in which a malevolent AI could torture people for some idiosyncratic reasons (s-risks) is a significant moral problem. Such events either already happened or will happen in causally disconnected regions of the multiverse and thus it seems unlikely that we can do anything about it. However, at least one pure theoret...
Quantum immortality of the second type. Classical theory of QI is based on the idea that all possible futures of a given observer do exist because of MWI and thus there will be always a future where he will not die in the next moment, even in the most dangerous situations (e.g. Russian roulette).
QI of the second type makes similar claims but about past. In MWI the same observer could appear via different past histories.
The main claim of QI-2: for any given observer there is a past history where current dangerous situation is not really dangerous. For...
How to Survive the End of the Universe
Abstract. The problem of surviving the end of the observable universe may seem very remote, but there are several reasons it may be important now: a) we may need to define soon the final goals of runaway space colonization and of superintelligent AI, b) the possibility of the solution will prove the plausibility of indefinite life extension, and с) the understanding of risks of the universe’s end will help us to escape dangers like artificial false vacuum decay. A possible solution depends on the type of t...
Sizes of superintelligence: hidden assumption in AI safety
"Superintelligence" could mean different things, and to deconfuse this I created a short classification:
Levels of superintelligence:
1. Above human
2. Google size
3. Humanity 100 years performance in 1 year.
4. Whole biological evolution equivalent in 1 year.
5. Jupiter brain with billion past simulations
6. Galactic brain.
7. 3^3^3 IQ superintelligence
X-risks appear between 2nd and 3rd levels.
Nanobot is above 3.
Each level also requires a minimum size of code, memory and energy consumption.
An A...
You started self quarantining, and by that I mean sitting at home alone and barely going outside, since december or january. I wonder, how's it going for you? How do you deal with loneliness?
ChatGPT can't report is in conscious or not. Because it also thinks it is a goat.
https://twitter.com/turchin/status/1724366659543024038
The problem of chicken and egg in AI safety
There are several instances:
AI can hide its treacherous turn, but to hide treacherous turn it needs to think about secrecy in a not secret way for some moment.
AI is should be superinteligent enough to create nanotech, but nanotech is needed to create powerful computations required for superintelligence.
ASI can do anything, but to do anything it needs human atoms.
Safe AI has to learn human values but this means that human values will be learned by unsafe AI.
AI needs human-independent robotic infrastructure before k...