anithite — LessWrong

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Replying toThe economy is a graph, not a pipeline

The modern economy is quite integrated, so lots of things ultimately require quite a diverse range of raw and transformed materials. How diverse? What's the minimally-reachable (not at tech maturity, but starting where we are now) in-principle fully closed manufacturing loop? How big can it scale, and how soon do other loops get closed?

I believe there's designs that vastly reduce the diversity and/or quantity of expensive inputs. As an example, Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid robots use servohydraulic joints. A small control motor similar in size to ones found in tiny quadrotors can control a lot of power. This vastly reduces power electronics and motor size/weight. There's some compelling reasons to use servohydraulics... (read 716 more words →)

Replying toThe economy is a graph, not a pipeline

anithite1mo

The economy is a graph, not a pipeline

Agreed, there are a number of areas that are super-cursed. soft bodies are one of them. one thing you'll notice in EV manufacturing is a lot of high voltage components are stampings or rigid conductors, not flexible wires. Wiring harnesses require people. stacking/bolting rigid parts to create combined mechanical /electrical connections doesn't.

Product design that does away with flexible wires entirely is a big part of design for manufacture and design for automated assembly.

Anytime you're handling flexible foam sheets ... why aren't you rigidifying them? why aren't you just producing foam in place. Refrigerators are a picture perfect example of how to build with foam, you produce it in the cavity where it's needed, don't handle it manually.

Looks like I have to rush out that next part.

Replying toThe economy is a graph, not a pipeline

anithite1mo

The economy is a graph, not a pipeline

Right now, most of the graph ties back to a single node very strongly. That node is labor.

If tomorrow we found that the productive machinery of society had doubled. Twice as many factories, trains, mines, etc. We wouldn't have the workers to run them.

Efficiency improvements that increase productivity per unit of labor do grow the economy but there's never a true decoupling of labor and productivity that would allow unlimited economic growth. That's the problem.

As I said in my post, and I'll make clearer now, this outcome relies on achieving a narrow form of STEM AGI. Heavy on the engineering. It seems likely that software will be solved sometime in the next... (read 495 more words →)

The economy is a graph, not a pipeline

anithite

1mo

Summary: Analysis claiming that automating X% of the economy can only boost GDP by 1/(1-X) assumes all sectors must scale proportionally. The economy is a graph of processes, not a pipeline. Subgraphs can grow independently if they don't bottleneck on inputs from non-growing sectors. AI-driven automation of physical production could create a nearly self-contained subgraph that grows at rates bounded only by raw material availability and speed of production equipment.

Models being challenged:

This post is a response to Thoughts (by a non-economist) on AI and economics and the broader framing it represents. Related claims appear across LessWrong discussions of AI economic impact:

Amdahl's Law for economics: Automating a sector that represents X% of GDP

... (read 1033 more words →)

Replying toI'll be sad to lose the puzzles

anithite3mo

I'll be sad to lose the puzzles

We're already there for 90% of people.

Unless you strongly identify as part of "humanity" in he same way that someone from a given city cheers for their home team to win at sports, most people are doing the day to day work necessary to keep the lights on, not solving deeply important problems.

If ASI solved all the problems quickly (and doesn't turn us into paperclips). They lose the "we're keeping the lights on" feeling of accomplishment but realistically most people were never going to steer the ship, cure cancer, usher in an age of post scarcity etc.

They might indirectly help by say installing the flooring at the lab where one of those people works but then again, there are also humans who work at TSMC or who build datacenters. Same thing applies. They're contributing at least up until the ASI automates the economy and moves well beyond the initial human built seed capital.

Replying toNATO is dangerously unaware that its military edge is slipping

anithite3mo

NATO is dangerously unaware that its military edge is slipping

Penetrating NATO airspace with small Shahed style drones is easy and can cause a lot of damage.

Sufficient damage would lead to massive NATO retaliation though. Russian air defense systems are stretched thin as is. NATO air forces could suppress what's left and bomb with impunity. Plausibly NATO just bombs the drone factories and some other military targets.

Building enough air defenses to stop massed drone attacks is very costly. Deterrence through retaliation is cheaper than building lots of hard kill and jamming systems.

Russia is poking NATO in various ways but a shooting war would go very badly for them.

Regarding nukes, yes, they're scary but if Russia starts bombing NATO cities or military targets... (read 516 more words →)

Replying toWhy I Transitioned: A Case Study

anithite3mo

Why I Transitioned: A Case Study

... Although, of course, my theory also calls into question whether people with my motives should even transition in the first place.

Wanting a specific type of attention and changing yourself to get it isn't strictly speaking bad. Terminal goals don't need justification though they can be incoherent, or in conflict with higher level meta goals (What you'd prefer to want if you could self-modify).

Wanting to be a cute anime girl is:

somewhat incoherent since you live in reality and not the world of anime. Certain tropes just don't work.
Somewhat incompatible with wanting to dominate social hierarchies (by being competent?).

But wanting a desirable body isn't bad. If society forced men to wear really ugly... (read 522 more words →)

Replying toAI #137: An OpenAI App For That

anithite4mo*

AI #137: An OpenAI App For That

General remarks

Semiconductor industry can afford to bid quite high to get the supply they need. Relevant historical example is the neon shortage where russian invasion of ukraine disrupted large air liquification/seperation plants associated with ukrainin steelworks and there was drop in Neon production. Free market did its thing, recycling, alternate suppliers etc. and nothing really happened.

Threatening to restrict critical materials matters very little for commodities like rare earths or high purity silica. Process equipment like lithography machines from ASML or other stuff from applied materials is acutally needed and can't be replaced but high purity ... stuff ... can be substituted, smuggled, whatever given the need. Industry mostly won't care and CN... (read more)

Replying toMy Brush with Superhuman Persuasion

anithite4mo

My Brush with Superhuman Persuasion

Skill issue.

First, IQ 100 is only useful in ruling out easy to persuade IQ <80 people. There are likely other correlates of "easy to persuade" that depend on how the AI is doing the persuading.

Second, super-persuasion is about scalability and cost. Bribery doesn't scale because actors have limited amounts of money. <$100 in inference and amortised training should be able persuade a substantial fraction of people.

Achieving this requires a scalable "training environment" to generate a non-goodhartable reward signal. AI trained to persuade on a large population of real users (EG:for affiliate marketing purposes) would be a super-persuader. Once a large company decides to do this at scale results will be much better... (read more)

Replying toNotes on fatalities from AI takeover

anithite5mo

Notes on fatalities from AI takeover

Even if a coup is meant to capture mineral wealth and the population is irrelevant, coup leaders recognize that mass murder will lead to sanctions stopping them from selling that mineral wealth. Plenty of examples of regimes that kill even low thousands of people being sanctioned.

AI that plans to take over the world does not need to trade with humans or keep them from being horrified and lashing out. Kill approximately everyone is a viable strategy and preferrable in most cases since it removes us as an intelligent adversary.

Replying toAI #115: The Evil Applications Division

anithite9mo

AI #115: The Evil Applications Division

No. o3 estimates that 60% of American jobs are physical such that you would need robotics to automate them, so if half of those fell within a year, that’s quite a lot.

A lot of jobs that can't be fully automated have sub-tasks software agents could eliminate. >30% of total labor hours might be spent in front of a computer (EG:data entry in a testing lab and all the steps needed to generate report.) That ignores email and the time savings once there is a good enough AI secretary.

AGI could eliminate almost all of that.

I'd estimate 1.7x productivity for a lab I worked at previously. Effect on employment depends on demand elasticity of course.

When discussing AI doom barriers propose specific plausible scenarios

anithite

TLDR:When addressing "How would an AI do X" questions, prefer simple existence proofs involving things humans can currently do rather than "magic" seeming things like nanotechnology or the fully general "AI will just be smart enough to figure it out". TLDR:END

Commonly in AI risk conversations questions of the form "how would an AI do X" where X is something like "control physical resources) or (survive without humans) are asked.

There is a "would/could" distinction in these questions.

How would an ASI do X -->(predict actions of ASI pursuing goal X)
How could an ASI do X --> (Show that an AI can accomplish X)

The "would" question is correct to answered with (nanotech/super-persuasion/Error:cannot_predict_ASI) but the "could"... (read 852 more words →)

"Copilot" type AI integration could lead to training data needed for AGI

anithite

TLDR:full task completion training data will soon be available, leading to much more capable agentic AI

Capabilities predictions:

Agentic AIs for all white collar tasks
creative problem solving might be solved

Business predictions:

MS/GOOG try to capture all the data (web browsing, (web/native)application interactions)
(maybe)creepy examples attempting better un-black-boxing of humans doing the problem solving
- watching the user's face
- eye tracking

Caveats:

TOS/legal limits on data retention/use for training
security(EG:prompt injection) for finished systems

TLDR_END

Microsoft is introducing copilot for office 365. Google is integrating AI into its products. Economic motivation for automating white collar task labor hours is obvious even if only to sell to workers directly. Where can the needed training data be gathered? Companies using MS tech stack (Windows(OS), Edge(browser), outlook(email), office365(documents))... (read 448 more words →)

Green goo is plausible

anithite

TLDR:If an AI kills all the humans how does it power the datacenters/replace the human economy? Green Goo. (IE:bioengineering)

Natural biotech is amazing
Evolution is dumb and slow
Very simple strategies (EG:vine that climbs a tree and squeezes) are "innovative" and work well in nature.
Designed organisms could very quickly reproduce and then provide necessary resources (EG:biological solar panels to power data centers)

TLDR end

In response to: grey-goo-is-unlikely

Overview of existing natural biology:

Minimum doubling time for
- Plants: single digit days
- Algae: 1.5 days (ideal conditions)
- E.Coli: 20 minutes (nutrient rich conditions)

No single organism (humans aside) has taken over the biosphere because evolution is slow and dumb.

Human agriculture is based on: plant sub 1 gram seeds, (water, pesticides/herbicides, fertilizer etc.) , collect... (read 1050 more words →)

Human level AI can plausibly take over the world

anithite

TL:DR:The world is vulnerable to takeover by a human level AI that can copy/paste itself to run perhaps 1M+ instances across all current large AI inference systems.

Existing governments work because they have a monopoly on violence. People expect the rules will be enforced and rule breakers punished.

Despotic governments exist and are somewhat stable but an AI despot can do much better by copy-pasting itself to fill leadership/management positions + other technological tyranny methods.

The AI will be shut off(killed) upon discovery so doesn't care about legal fallout.^[1]

The Milgram experiments demonstrated most people will commit immoral acts on behalf of what they believe to be legitimate authority

An AI can fake it till it is... (read 418 more words →)

Large Language Models Suggest a Path to Ems

anithite

TL:DR:

Whole brain emulation from first principles isn't happening
LLMs are pretty good/human like
- This suggests neural nets are flexible enough to implement human like cognition despite alien architecture used
Training a (mostly) human shaped neural net on brain implant sourced data would be the fastest way to aligned human level AGI.

TL:DR end

supposition: intelligence learning scale of difficulty:

from scratch in a simulated world via RL(reinforcement learning) (AlphaGo Zero, XLand, Reward is Enough)
from humans via imitation learning (LLMs, RL pretrained on human play(Minecraft), human children)

plus a bit of RL to continuously learn required context to interpret training data and to fine tune after the fact (EG:self play to reach superhuman levels)

Distillation (learn from teacher in white box

... (read 1219 more words →)

Building trusted third parties

anithite

How do two mutually distrusting entities(AGIs, space-faring societies, etc.) enact the results of a negotiated agreement when neither trusts the other? In cryptography there are Trusted third parties. This is a proposal for a protocol allowing them to be built.

This is done by having a replicator supplied by party A(Alice) self replicate. Party B(Bob) chooses one offspring from each generation to inspect destructively and another to continue the process. At each step Bob becomes twice as confident the remaining replicator is trustable. This is similar to a split and choose zero knowledge proof.

This protocol is carried out by smaller agents that Alice and Bob both trust. These entities must meet a few

... (read 843 more words →)