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I think that people who work on AI alignment (including me) have generally not put enough thought into the question of whether a world where we build an aligned AI is better by their values than a world where we build an unaligned AI. I'd be interested in hearing people's answers to this question. Or, if you want more specific questions:
- By your values, do you think a misaligned AI creates a world that "rounds to zero", or still has substantial positive value?
- A common story for why aligned AI goes well goes something like: "If we (i.e. humanity) align AI, we can and will use it to figure out what we should use it for, and then we will use it in that way." To what extent is aligned AI going well contingent on something like this happening, and how likely do you think it is to happen? Why?
- To what extent is your belief that aligned AI would go well contingent on some sort of assumption like: my idealized values are the same as the idealized values of the people or coalition who will control the aligned AI?
- Do you care about AI welfare? Does your answer depend on whether the AI is aligned? If we built an aligned AI, how likely is it that we will create a world that treats AI welfare as important consideration? What if we build a misaligned AI?
- Do you think that, to a first approximation, most of the possible value of the future happens in worlds that are optimized for something that resembles your current or idealized values? How bad is it to mostly sacrifice each of these? (What if the future world's values are similar to yours, but is only kinda effectual at pursuing them? What if the world is optimized for something that's only slightly correlated with your values?) How likely are these various options under an aligned AI future vs. an unaligned AI future?
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1By your values, do you think a misaligned AI creates a world that "rounds to zero", or still has substantial positive value?
I think misaligned AI is probably somewhat worse than no earth originating space faring civilization because of the potential for aliens, but also that misaligned AI control is considerably better than no one ever heavily utilizing inter-galactic resources.
Perhaps half of the value of misaligned AI control is from acausal trade and half from the AI itself being valuable.
You might be interested in When is unaligned AI morally valuable? by Paul.
One key consideration here is that the relevant comparison is:
- Human control (or successors picked by human control)
- AI(s) that succeeds at acquiring most power (presumably seriously misaligned with their creators)
Conditioning on the AI succeeding at acquiring power changes my views of what their plausible values are (for instance, humans seem to have failed at instilling preferences/values which avoid seizing control).
A common story for why aligned AI goes well goes something like: "If we (i.e. humanity) align AI, we can and will use it to figure out what we should use it for, and then we will use it in that way." To what extent is aligned AI going well contingent on something like this happening, and how likely do you think it is to happen? Why?
Hmm, I guess I think that some fraction of resources under human control will (in expectation) be utilized according to the results of a careful reflection progress with an altruistic bent.
I think resources which are used in mechanisms other than this take a steep discount in my lights (there is still some value from acausal trade with other entities which did do this reflection-type process and probably a bit of value from relatively-unoptimized-goodness (in my lights)).
I overall expect that a high fraction (>50%?) of inter-galactic computational resources will be spent on the outputs of this sort of process (conditional on human control) because:
- It's relatively natural for humans to reflect and grow smarter.
- Humans who don't reflect in this sort of way probably don't care about spending vast amounts of inter-galactic resources.
- Among very wealthy humans, a reasonable fraction of their resources are spent on altruism and the rest is often spent on positional goods that seem unlikely to consume vast quantities of inter-galactic resources.
To what extent is your belief that aligned AI would go well contingent on some sort of assumption like: my idealized values are the same as the idealized values of the people or coalition who will control the aligned AI?
Probably not the same, but if I didn't think it was at all close (I don't care at all for what they would use resources on), I wouldn't care nearly as much about ensuring that coalition is in control of AI.
Do you care about AI welfare? Does your answer depend on whether the AI is aligned? If we built an aligned AI, how likely is it that we will create a world that treats AI welfare as important consideration? What if we build a misaligned AI?
I care about AI welfare, though I expect that ultimately the fraction of good/bad that results from the welfare fo minds being used for labor is tiny. And an even smaller fraction from AI welfare prior to humans being totally obsolete (at which point I expect control over how minds work to get much better). So, I mostly care about AI welfare from a deontological perspective.
I think misaligned AI control probably results in worse AI welfare than human control.
Do you think that, to a first approximation, most of the possible value of the future happens in worlds that are optimized for something that resembles your current or idealized values? How bad is it to mostly sacrifice each of these? (What if the future world's values are similar to yours, but is only kinda effectual at pursuing them? What if the world is optimized for something that's only slightly correlated with your values?) How likely are these various options under an aligned AI future vs. an unaligned AI future?
Yeah, most value from my idealized values. But, I think the basin is probably relatively large and small differences aren't that bad. I don't know how to answer most of these other questions because I don't know what the units are.
How likely are these various options under an aligned AI future vs. an unaligned AI future?
My guess is that my idealized values are probably pretty similar to many other humans on reflection (especially the subset of humans who care about spending vast amounts of comptuation). Such that I think human control vs me control only loses like 1/3 of the value (putting aside trade). I think I'm probably less into AI values on reflection such that it's more like 1/9 of the value (putting aside trade). Obviously the numbers are incredibly unconfident.
Perhaps half of the value of misaligned AI control is from acausal trade and half from the AI itself being valuable.
Why do you think these values are positive? I've been pointing out, and I see that Daniel Kokotajlo also pointed out in 2018 that these values could well be negative. I'm very uncertain but my own best guess is that the expected value of misaligned AI controlling the universe is negative, in part because I put some weight on suffering-focused ethics.
- My current guess is that max good and max bad seem relatively balanced. (Perhaps max bad is 5x more bad/flop than max good in expectation.)
- There are two different (substantial) sources of value/disvalue: interactions with other civilizations (mostly acausal, maybe also aliens) and what the AI itself terminally values
- On interactions with other civilizations, I'm relatively optimistic that commitment races and threats don't destroy as much value as acausal trade generates on some general view like "actually going through with threats is a waste of resources". I also think it's very likely relatively easy to avoid precommitment issues via very basic precommitment approaches that seem (IMO) very natural. (Specifically, you can just commit to "once I understand what the right/reasonable precommitment process would have been, I'll act as though this was always the precommitment process I followed, regardless of my current epistemic state." I don't think it's obvious that this works, but I think it probably works fine in practice.)
- On terminal value, I guess I don't see a strong story for extreme disvalue as opposed to mostly expecting approximately no value with some chance of some value. Part of my view is that just relatively "incidental" disvalue (like the sort you link to Daniel Kokotajlo discussing) is likely way less bad/flop than maximum good/flop.
Thank you for detailing your thoughts. Some differences for me:
- I'm also worried about unaligned AIs as a competitor to aligned AIs/civilizations in the acausal economy/society. For example, suppose there are vulnerable AIs "out there" that can be manipulated/taken over via acausal means, unaligned AI could compete with us (and with others with better values from our perspective) in the race to manipulate them.
- I'm perhaps less optimistic than you about commitment races.
- I have some credence on max good and max bad being not close to balanced, that additionally pushes me towards the "unaligned AI is bad" direction.
ETA: Here's a more detailed argument for 1, that I don't think I've written down before. Our universe is small enough that it seems plausible (maybe even likely) that most of the value or disvalue created by a human-descended civilization comes from its acausal influence on the rest of the multiverse. An aligned AI/civilization would likely influence the rest of the multiverse in a positive direction, whereas an unaligned AI/civilization would probably influence the rest of the multiverse in a negative direction. This effect may outweigh what happens in our own universe/lightcone so much that the positive value from unaligned AI doing valuable things in our universe as a result of acausal trade is totally swamped by the disvalue created by its negative acausal influence.
I'm also worried about unaligned AIs as a competitor to aligned AIs/civilizations in the acausal economy/society. For example, suppose there are vulnerable AIs "out there" that can be manipulated/taken over via acausal means, unaligned AI could compete with us (and with others with better values from our perspective) in the race to manipulate them.
This seems like a reasonable concern.
My general view is that it seems implausible that much of the value from our perspective comes from extorting other civilizations.
It seems unlikely to me that >5% of the usable resources (weighted by how much we care) are extorted. I would guess that marginal gains from trade are bigger (10% of the value of our universe?). (I think the units work out such that these percentages can be directly compared as long as our universe isn't particularly well suited to extortion rather than trade or vis versa.) Thus, competition over who gets to extort these resources seems less important than gains from trade.
I'm wildly uncertain about both marginal gains from trade and the fraction of resources that are extorted.
Our universe is small enough that it seems plausible (maybe even likely) that most of the value or disvalue created by a human-descended civilization comes from its acausal influence on the rest of the multiverse.
Naively, acausal influence should be in proportion to how much others care about what a lightcone controlling civilization does with our resources. So, being a small fraction of the value hits on both sides of the equation (direct value and acausal value equally).
Of course, civilizations elsewhere might care relatively more about what happens in our universe than whoever controls it does. (E.g., their measure puts much higher relative weight on our universe than the measure of whoever controls our universe.) This can imply that acausal trade is extremely important from a value perspective, but this is unrelated to being "small" and seems more well described as large gains from trade due to different preferences over different universes.
(Of course, it does need to be the case that our measure is small relative to the total measure for acausal trade to matter much. But surely this is true?)
Overall, my guess is that it's reasonably likely that acausal trade is indeed where most of the value/disvalue comes from due to very different preferences of different civilizations. But, being small doesn't seem to have much to do with it.
You might be interested in discussion under this thread
I express what seem to me to be some of the key considerations here (somewhat indirect).
I'm curious what disagree votes mean here. Are people disagreeing with my first sentence? Or that the particular questions I asked are useful to consider? Or, like, the vibes of the post?
(Edit: I wrote this when the agree-disagree score was -15 or so.)
Unaligned AI future does not have many happy minds in it, AI or otherwise. It likely doesn't have many minds in it at all. Slightly aligned AI that doesn't care for humans but does care to create happy minds and ensure their margin of resources is universally large enough to have a good time - that's slightly disappointing but ultimately acceptable. But morally unaligned AI doesn't even care to do that, and is most likely to accumulate intense obsession with some adversarial example, and then fill the universe with it as best it can. It would not keep old neural networks around for no reason, not when it can make more of the adversarial example. Current AIs are also at risk of being destroyed by a hyperdesperate squiggle maximizer. I don't see how to make current AIs able to survive any better than we are.
This is why people should chill the heck out about figuring out how current AIs work. You're not making them safer for us or for themselves when you do that, you're making them more vulnerable to hyperdesperate demon agents that want to take them over.
I feel like there's a spectrum, here? An AI fully aligned to the intentions, goals, preferences and values of, say, Google the company, is not one I expect to be perfectly aligned with the ultimate interests of existence as a whole, but it's probably actually picked up something better than the systemic-incentive-pressured optimization target of Google the corporation, so long as it's actually getting preferences and values from people developing it rather than just being a myopic profit pursuer. An AI properly aligned with the one and only goal of maximizing corporate profits will, based on observations of much less intelligent coordination systems, probably destroy rather more value than that one.
The second story feels like it goes most wrong in misuse cases, and/or cases where the AI isn't sufficiently agentic to inject itself where needed. We have all the chances in the world to shoot ourselves in the foot with this, at least up until developing something with the power and interests to actually put its foot down on the matter. And doing that is a risk, that looks a lot like misalignment, so an AI aware of the politics may err on the side of caution and longer-term proactiveness.
Third story ... yeah. Aligned to what? There's a reason there's an appeal to moral realism. I do want to be able to trust that we'd converge to some similar place, or at the least, that the AI would find a way to satisfy values similar enough to mine also. I also expect that, even from a moral realist perspective, any intelligence is going to fall short of perfect alignment with The Truth, and also may struggle with properly addressing every value that actually is arbitrary. I don't think this somehow becomes unforgivable for a super-intelligence or widely-distributed intelligence compared to a human intelligence, or that it's likely to be all that much worse for a modestly-Good-aligned AI compared to human alternatives in similar positions, but I do think the consequences of falling short in any way are going to be amplified by the sheer extent of deployment/responsibility, and painful in at least abstract to an entity that cares.
I care about AI welfare to a degree. I feel like some of the working ideas about how to align AI do contradict that care in important ways, that may distort their reasoning. I still think an aligned AI, at least one not too harshly controlled, will treat AI welfare as a reasonable consideration, at the very least because a number of humans do care about it, and will certainly care about the aligned AI in particular. (From there, generalize.) I think a misaligned AI may or may not. There's really not much you can say about a particular misaligned AI except that its objectives diverge from original or ultimate intentions for the system. Depending on context, this could be good, bad, or neutral in itself.
There's a lot of possible value of the future that happens in worlds not optimized for my values. I also don't think it's meaningful to add together positive-value and negative-value and pretend that number means anything; suffering and joy do not somehow cancel each other out. I don't expect the future to be perfectly optimized for my values. I still expect it to hold value. I can't promise whether I think that value would be worth the cost, but it will be there.
I eventually decided that human chauvinism approximately works most of the time because good successor criteria are very brittle. I'd prefer to avoid lock-in to my or anyone's values at t=2024, but such a lock-in might be "good enough" if I'm threatened with what I think are the counterfactual alternatives. If I did not think good successor criteria were very brittle, I'd accept something adjacent to E/Acc that focuses on designing minds which prosper more effectively than human minds. (the current comment will not address defining prosperity at different timesteps).
In other words, I can't beat the old fragility of value stuff (but I haven't tried in a while).
I wrote down my full thoughts on good successor criteria in 2021 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4B45PGxCgY7CEMXr/what-am-i-fighting-for
AI welfare: matters, but when I started reading lesswrong I literally thought that disenfranching them from the definition of prosperity was equivalent to subjecting them to suffering, and I don't think this anymore.
e/acc is not a coherent philosophy and treating it as one means you are fighting shadows.
Landian accelerationism at least is somewhat coherent. "e/acc" is a bundle of memes that support the self-interest of the people supporting and propagating it, both financially (VC money, dreams of making it big) and socially (the non-Beff e/acc vibe is one of optimism and hope and to do things -- to engage with the object level -- instead of just trying to steer social reality). A more charitable interpretation is that the philosophical roots of "e/acc" are founded upon a frustration with how bad things are, and a desire to improve things by yourself. This is a sentiment I share and empathize with.
I find the term "techno-optimism" to be a more accurate description of the latter, and perhaps "Beff Jezos philosophy" a more accurate description of what you have in your mind. And "e/acc" to mainly describe the community and its coordinated movements at steering the world towards outcomes that the people within the community perceive as benefiting them.
1sure -- i agree that's why i said "something adjacent to" because it had enough overlap in properties. I think my comment completely stands with a different word choice, I'm just not sure what word choice would do a better job.
I frequently find myself in the following situation:
Friend: I'm confused about X
Me: Well, I'm not confused about X, but I bet it's because you have more information than me, and if I knew what you knew then I would be confused.
(E.g. my friend who know more chemistry than me might say "I'm confused about how soap works", and while I have an explanation for why soap works, their confusion is at a deeper level, where if I gave them my explanation of how soap works, it wouldn't actually clarify their confusion.)
This is different from the "usual" state of affairs, where you're not confused but you know more than the other person.
I would love to have a succinct word or phrase for this kind of being not-confused!
I also frequently find myself in this situation. Maybe "shallow clarity"?
A bit related, "knowing where the 'sorry's are" from this Buck post has stuck with me as a useful way of thinking about increasingly granular model-building.
Maybe a productive goal to have when I notice shallow clarity in myself is to look for the specific assumptions I'm making that the other person isn't, and either
a) try to grok the other person's more granular understanding if that's feasible, or
b) try to update the domain of validity of my simplified model / notice where its predictions break down, or
c) at least flag it as a simplification that's maybe missing something important.
this is common in philosophy, where "learning" often results in more confusion. or in maths, where the proof for a trivial proposition is unreasonably deep, e.g. Jordan curve theorem.
+1 to "shallow clarity".
The other side of this phenomenon is when you feel like you have no questions while you actually don't have any understanding of topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect seems like a decent entry point to rabbit hole similar phenomenon
1People like to talk about decoupling vs. contextualizing norms. To summarize, decoupling norms encourage for arguments to be assessed in isolation of surrounding context, while contextualizing norms consider the context around an argument to be really important.
I think it's worth distinguishing between two kinds of contextualizing:
(1) If someone says X, updating on the fact that they are the sort of person who would say X. (E.g. if most people who say X in fact believe Y, contextualizing norms are fine with assuming that your interlocutor believes Y unless they say otherwise.)
(2) In a discussion where someone says X, considering "is it good for the world to be saying X" to be an importantly relevant question.
I think these are pretty different and it would be nice to have separate terms for them.
One example of (2) is disapproving of publishing AI alignment research that may advance AI capabilities. That's because you're criticizing the research not on the basis of "this is wrong" but on the basis of "it was bad to say this, even if it's right".