All of Aegeus's Comments + Replies

Is it something like the AI-box argument? "If I share my AI breakout strategy, people will think 'I just won't fall for that strategy' instead of noticing the general problem that there are strategies they didn't think of"?  I'm not a huge fan of that idea, but I won't argue it further.

I'm not expecting a complete explanation, but I'd like to see a story that doesn't skip directly to "AI can reformat reality at will" without at least one intermediate step.  Like, this is the third time I've seen an author pull this trick and I'm starting to wonde... (read more)

3Edouard Harris
I see — perhaps I did misinterpret your earlier comment. It sounds like the transition you are more interested in is closer to (AI has ~free rein over the internet) => (AI invents nanotech). I don't think this is a step we should expect to be able to model especially well, but the best story/analogy I know of for it is probably the end part of That Alien Message. i.e., what sorts of approaches would we come up with, if all of human civilization was bent on solving the equivalent problem from our point of view? If instead you're thinking more about a transition like (AI is superintelligent but in a box) => (AI has ~free rein over the internet), then I'd say that I'd expect us to skip the "in a box" step entirely.
0Ozyrus
I really don't get how you can go from being online to having a ball of nanomachines, truly. Imagine AI goes rogue today. I can't imagine one plausible scenario where it can take out humanity without triggering any bells on the way, even without anyone paying attention to such things. But we should pay attention to the bells, and for that we need to think of them. What the signs might look like? I think it's really, really counterproductive to not take that into account at all and thinking all is lost if it fooms. It's not lost. It will need humans, infrastructure, money (which is very controllable) to accomplish its goals. Governments already pay a lot of attention to their adversaries who are trying to do similar things and counteract them semi-successfully. Any reason why they can't do the same to a very intelligent AI? Mind you, if your answer is to simulate and just do what it takes, true to life simulations will take a lot of compute and time; that won't be available from the start.  We should stop thinking of rogue AI as God, it would only help it accomplish it's goals.

This is well-written, but I feel like it falls into the same problem a lot of AI-risk stories do.  It follows this pattern:

  1. Plausible (or at least not impossible) near-future developments in AI that could happen if all our current predictions pan out.
  2. ???
  3. Nanotech-enabled fully-general superintelligence converts the universe into paperclips at a significant fraction of lightspeed.

And like, the Step 1 stuff is fascinating and a worthy sci-fi story on its own, but the big question everyone has about AI risk is "How does the AI get from Step 1 to Step 3?"

(T... (read more)

1Ozyrus
I agree, since it's hard to imagine for me how could step 2 look like. Maybe you or anyone else has any content on that? See this post -- it didn't seem to get a lot of traction or any meaningful answers, but I still think this question is worth answering.
7Edouard Harris
Thanks! I agree with this critique. Note that Daniel also points out something similar in point 12 of his comment — see my response. To elaborate a bit more on the "missing step" problem though: 1. I suspect many of the most plausible risk models have features that make it undesirable for them to be shared too widely. Please feel free to DM me if you'd like to chat more about this. 2. There will always be some point between Step 1 and Step 3 at which human-legible explanations fail. i.e., it would be extremely surprising if we could tell a coherent story about the whole process — the best we can do is assume the AI gets to the end state because it's highly competent, but we should expect it to do things we can't understand. (To be clear, I don't think this is quite what your comment was about. But it is a fundamental reason why we can't ever expect a complete explanation.)

Real stock markets work the same way. If markets really were able to predict the future with perfect accuracy, no bubbles would ever form, and no one would have ever invested in Enron or Lehman Bros or Bernie Madoff. I don't see how you can demand that a market make predictions based on information that doesn't exist yet.

Have you ever driven your readers insane? If yes, I'd like to hear that story. And are we talking "mildly unsettled" or "get a straitjacket"?

1KvmanThinking
I certainly believe he could. After reading Tamsin Leake's "everything is okay" (click the link if you dare), I felt a little unstable, and felt like I had to expend deliberate effort to not think about the described world in sufficient detail in order to protect my sanity. I felt like I was reading something that had been maximized by a semi-powerful AI to be moving, almost infohazardously moving, but not quite; that this approached the upper bound of what humans could read while still accepting the imperfection of their current conditions.
3lessdazed
I think that's almost certainly true. But if you did hear the story, would you wish you hadn't?

That actually seems like a good idea. Choice paralysis seems like it would be a serious problem for any "Do anything you can imagine" utopia, because I can't think of what I'd do if I had the power to do anything.

Or, put another way, Minecraft became a lot more fun once it took away the infinite supply of blocks.

0DSimon
How about "myself twice as smart, check to see if I still have don't have a really good idea what to do, do it if so, if not repeat the process"?