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eli_sennesh comments on Steelmaning AI risk critiques - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's solving a different problem.
Problem One: You know exactly what you want your software to do, at a level of detail sufficient to write the software, but you are concerned that you may introduce bugs in the implementation or that it may be fed bad data by a malicious third party, and that in that case terrible consequences will ensue.
Problem Two: You know in a vague handwavy way what you want your software to do, but you yet don't know with enough precision to write the software. You are concerned that if you get this wrong, the software will do something subtly different from what you really wanted, and terrible consequences will ensue.
Software verification and crypto address Problem One. AI safety is an instance of Problem Two, and potentially an exceptionally difficult one.
I mildly disagree. A certain amount of AI safety specifically involves trying to extend our available tools for dealing with Problem One to the situations that we expect to happen when we deal with powerful learning agents. Goal-system stability, for instance, is a matter of program verification -- hence why all the papers about it deal with mathematical logic.
I haven't read any technical papers on goal-system stability; isn't it the case that real-world attempts at that are going to have at least as much of Problem Two as of Problem One about them? ("Internally" -- in the notion of what counts as self-improvement -- if not "externally" in whatever problem(s) the system is trying to solve.) I haven't thought (or read) enough about this for my opinion to have much weight; I could well be completely wrong about it.
Regardless, you're certainly right that Problem One is going to be important as well as Problem Two, and I should have said something like "AI safety is also an instance of Problem Two".
Kind of. We expect intuitively that a reasoning system can reason about its own goals and successor-agents. Problem is, that actually requires degrees of self-reference that put you into the territory of paradox theorems. So we expect that if we come up with the right way to deal with paradox theorems, the agent's ability to "stay stable" will fall out pretty naturally.
Oh, OK, the Löbstacle thing. You're right, that's a matter of program verification and as such more in the territory of Problem One than of Problem Two.