Intelligence explosion in organizations, or why I'm not worried about the singularity

sbenthall

If I understand the Singularitarian argument espoused by many members of this community (eg. Muehlhauser and Salamon), it goes something like this:

Machine intelligence is getting smarter.
Once an intelligence becomes sufficiently supra-human, its instrumental rationality will drive it towards cognitive self-enhancement (Bostrom), so making it a super-powerful, resource hungry superintelligence.
If a superintelligence isn't sufficiently human-like or 'friendly', that could be disastrous for humanity.
Machine intelligence is unlikely to be human-like or friendly unless we take precautions.

I am not particularly worried about the scenario envisioned in this argument. I think that my lack of concern is rational, so I'd like to try to convince you of it as well.*

It's not that I think the logic of this argument is incorrect so much as I think there is another related problem that we should be worrying about more. I think the world is already full of probably unfriendly supra-human intelligences that are scrambling for computational resources in a way that threatens humanity.

I'm in danger of getting into politics. Since I understand that political arguments are not welcome here, I will refer to these potentially unfriendly human intelligences broadly as organizations.

Smart organizations

By "organization" I mean something commonplace, with a twist. It's commonplace because I'm talking about a bunch of people coordinated somehow. The twist is that I want to include the information technology infrastructure used by that bunch of people within the extension of "organization".

Do organizations have intelligence? I think so. Here's some of the reasons why:

We can model human organizations as having preference functions. (Economists do this all the time)
Human organizations have a lot of optimization power.

I talked with Mr. Muehlhauser about this specifically. I gather that at least at the time he thought human organizations should not be counted as intelligences (or at least as intelligences with the potential to become superintelligences) because they are not as versatile as human beings.

So when I am talking about super-human intelligence, I specifically mean an agent that is as good or better at humans at just about every skill set that humans possess for achieving their goals. So that would include things like not just mathematical ability or theorem proving and playing chess, but also things like social manipulation and composing music and so on, which are all functions of the brain not the kidneys

...and then...

It would be a kind of weird [organization] that was better than the best human or even the median human at all the things that humans do. [Organizations] aren’t usually the best in music and AI research and theory proving and stock markets and composing novels. And so there certainly are [Organizations] that are better than median humans at certain things, like digging oil wells, but I don’t think there are [Organizations] as good or better than humans at all things. More to the point, there is an interesting difference here because [Organizations] are made of lots of humans and so they have the sorts of limitations on activities and intelligence that humans have. For example, they are not particularly rational in the sense defined by cognitive science. And the brains of the people that make up organizations are limited to the size of skulls, whereas you can have an AI that is the size of a warehouse.

I think that Muehlhauser is slightly mistaken on a few subtle but important points. I'm going to assert my position on them without much argument because I think they are fairly sensible, but if any reader disagrees I will try to defend them in the comments.

When judging whether an entity has intelligence, we should consider only the skills relevant to the entity's goals.
So, if organizations are not as good at a human being at composing music, that shouldn't disqualify them from being considered broadly intelligent if that has nothing to do with their goals.
Many organizations are quite good at AI research, or outsource their AI research to other organizations with which they are intertwined.
The cognitive power of an organization is not limited to the size of skulls. The computational power is of many organizations is comprised of both the skulls of its members and possibly "warehouses" of digital computers.
With the ubiquity of cloud computing, it's hard to say that a particular computational process has a static spatial bound at all.

In summary, organizations often have the kinds of skills necessary to achieve their goals, and can be vastly better at them than individual humans. Many have the skills necessary for their own cognitive enhancement, since if they are able to raise funding they can purchase computational resources and fund artificial intelligence research. More mundanely, organizations of all kinds hire analysts and use analytic software to make instrumentally rational decisions.

In sum, many organizations are of supra-human intelligence and strive actively to enhance their cognitive powers.

Mean organizations

Suppose the premise that there are organizations with supra-human intelligence that act to enhance their cognitive powers. And suppose the other premises of the Singularitarian argument outlined at the beginning of this post.

Then it follows that we should be concerned if one or more of these smart organizations are so unlike human beings in their motivational structure that they are 'mean'.

I believe the implications of this line of reasoning may be profound, but as this is my first post to LessWrong I would like to first see how this is received before going on.

* My preferred standard of rationality is communicative rationality, a Habermasian ideal of a rationality aimed at consensus through principled communication. As a consequence, when I believe a position to be rational, I believe that it is possible and desirable to convince other rational agents of it.

If I understand the Singularitarian argument espoused by many members of this community (eg. Muehlhauser and Salamon), it goes something like this:

Machine intelligence is getting smarter.
Once an intelligence becomes sufficiently supra-human, its instrumental rationality will drive it towards cognitive self-enhancement (Bostrom), so making it a super-powerful, resource hungry superintelligence.
If a superintelligence isn't sufficiently human-like or 'friendly', that could be disastrous for humanity.
Machine intelligence is unlikely to be human-like or friendly unless we take precautions.

I am not particularly worried about the scenario envisioned in this argument. I think that my lack of concern is rational, so I'd like to try to convince you of it as well.*

Smart organizations

Do organizations have intelligence? I think so. Here's some of the reasons why:

We can model human organizations as having preference functions. (Economists do this all the time)
Human organizations have a lot of optimization power.

So when I am talking about super-human intelligence, I specifically mean an agent that is as good or better at humans at just about every skill set that humans possess for achieving their goals. So that would include things like not just mathematical ability or theorem proving and playing chess, but also things like social manipulation and composing music and so on, which are all functions of the brain not the kidneys

...and then...

It would be a kind of weird [organization] that was better than the best human or even the median human at all the things that humans do. [Organizations] aren’t usually the best in music and AI research and theory proving and stock markets and composing novels. And so there certainly are [Organizations] that are better than median humans at certain things, like digging oil wells, but I don’t think there are [Organizations] as good or better than humans at all things. More to the point, there is an interesting difference here because [Organizations] are made of lots of humans and so they have the sorts of limitations on activities and intelligence that humans have. For example, they are not particularly rational in the sense defined by cognitive science. And the brains of the people that make up organizations are limited to the size of skulls, whereas you can have an AI that is the size of a warehouse.

When judging whether an entity has intelligence, we should consider only the skills relevant to the entity's goals.
So, if organizations are not as good at a human being at composing music, that shouldn't disqualify them from being considered broadly intelligent if that has nothing to do with their goals.
Many organizations are quite good at AI research, or outsource their AI research to other organizations with which they are intertwined.
The cognitive power of an organization is not limited to the size of skulls. The computational power is of many organizations is comprised of both the skulls of its members and possibly "warehouses" of digital computers.
With the ubiquity of cloud computing, it's hard to say that a particular computational process has a static spatial bound at all.

In sum, many organizations are of supra-human intelligence and strive actively to enhance their cognitive powers.

Mean organizations

Then it follows that we should be concerned if one or more of these smart organizations are so unlike human beings in their motivational structure that they are 'mean'.

I believe the implications of this line of reasoning may be profound, but as this is my first post to LessWrong I would like to first see how this is received before going on.

Wait a minute: would you defect? Sure, there would be some divergence, but do you really think it would result in a significant divergence of goals, even if you had a plan and were an adult by the time you fork?

Even if their goals stay substantially the same, it wouldn't mean that they would naturally cooperate, expecially when their main goal is world domination. Hell, it's already non-trivial for a single person to coordinate with future selves, resulting in all kinds of ego-dystonic behaviors: impulsiveness, akrasia, etc., Coordinating with thousands copies of yourself would be only marginally easier than coordinating with thousands strangers.

We are not talking about some ideal "Prisoner's dilemma with mind-clone" scenario. After the mind states of your copies diverge a little bit, and that would happen very quickly as you spread your copies to different machines, they become effectively different people: you wouldn't be able to predict them and they would't be able to predict you.

I would probably man-in-the-middle automatic updates

Hacking all the routers? Good luck with that. And BTW routers can also be updated. Manually.

Many people won't erase their hard drive or otherwise patch their machine manually

Because they are lazy and they would prefer to live under world dictatorship.

I may convince some people to let me run (I could work for them for instance).

Then you are their employee, not their dominator.

If I'm stealthy enough, it may take some time before I'm discovered at all (it happened with actual computer viruses).

But if you are to dominate the world, you would have to eventually reveal yourself. What do you think would happen next?

If software continues the way it is now (200 Million lines of code for systems that could fit in 20 thousands), security bugs won't all be patched in advance. The reliability of our computer needs to go waay up before botnets become impossible.

Botnets are certainly possible and they are indeed used for nefarious purposes, but world domination? Nope.

Good luck with that one. Obviously, I would have many, many little bank accounts, managed separately and in parallel, under many different identities. You would have to spot my illegal activities one by one to seize the funds.

As Bugmaster said, you would be able to perform only small purchases, not to buy a satellite, or an army.

Moreover, obtaining and managing lots of fake or stolen identities, creating bank accounts without physically showing up at the bank or using stolen bank accounts, is not something that tend to go unnoticed. The more you have, the more likely that you get caught, exponentially so.

Plus, I may do legal activities as well.

Under multiple fake identities operated from a botnet of hacked computers? Hardly so.

We should watch out for computing overhang, however, and try and estimate how much computing power an upload would need before the software is developed.

Software tends to march right behind hardware, exploting it close to its maximum potential. Computing overhang is unlikely.

Anyway, I wasn't proposing any luddite advance ban. If some brain upload, or AI or whatever tries to take the world by hacking the Internet and other countermeasures fail, governments could always ban use of the hardware that things needs to run. If that also fails, the next step would be physical destruction.

But seriously, we are discussing hacking as in the plot of some bad sci-fi action flick. Computer security doesn't work like that in the real world.

A final note: If I really had the possibility to upload myself, one of my first moves would be to propose SIAI and CFAR to upload with me (now that we can duplicate Eliezer…). I trust them more than I trust me for a Friendly Takeover.

You mean the guy who would choose dust specks over torture and who claims on his OKCupid profile that he's a sadist? Yeah, I'd totally trust him in charge of the world. Now, I've other matters to attend to... that EMP bomb doesn't build itself... :D

We are not talking about some ideal "Prisoner's dilemma with mind-clone" scenario. After the mind states of your copies diverge a little bit, and that would happen very quickly as you spread your copies to different machines, they become effectively different people: you wouldn't be able to predict them and they would't be able to predict you.

You really think you would diverge that quickly?

You mean the guy who would choose dust specks over torture and who claims on his OKCupid profile that he's a sadist? Yeah, I'd totally trust him in charge of the world.

I'm ... not sure how those are criticisms.

0loup-vaillant13y

* Man in the middle: I just meant intercepting automatic updates at the level of the computer I'm in. Trojan todo list n°7: once installed and running, I will intercept all communications to and from this computer. I wouldn't want Norton updating behind my back. Now, try and hack the routers in the backbone, that's something I didn't think about… * Employee vs dominator: I obviously intend to double cross my employers, eventually. * Revealing myself: that one needs to be carefully thought through. Hopefully, by the time I reveal myself, I will have sufficient blackmail power. Having a sufficient number of physical robots can also help. * Zillions fake ID, yet stay stealthy: well, I do expect a fair number of my identities to be exposed. This should pose no problem to the others, however, provided they do not visibly communicate with each other (at first). * Legal activities: my meat instance could buy a few computers, rent remote servers etc. I doubt I would be incapable of running at least a successful business from there. And from there, buy even more computing power. This could be done in parallel with the illegal activities. * Computing (no) overhang: this one is the single reason why I do agree that without a FOOM of some kind, actual world domination is unlikely: there will be multiple competing uploads, and this should end with a Hansonian scenario. Given that such a world is closer to Hell than Heaven (to me at least), that still counts as an Existential Blunder. On the bright side, we may see this coming. That said, I still do believe full blown intelligence explosion is likely. Note that overall, your objections are actually valuable advice. And that give me some insight about what my very first move should be: gathering such objections, and try to find counters or workarounds. And now that you made quite clear that any path to world domination is long, complicated, and therefore nearly certain to fail, I should run multiple schemes in parallel