All of NickH's Comments + Replies
The CCP has no reason to believe that the US is even capable of achieving ASI let alone whether they have an advantage over the CCP. No rational actor will go to war over a possibility of a maybe when the numbers could, just as likely be in their favour. E.g. If DeepSeek can almost equal OpenAI with less resources, it would be rational to allocate more resources to DeepSeek before doing anything as risky as trying to sabotage OpenAI that is uncertain to succeeed and more likely to invite uncontrollable retaliatory escalation.
The West doesn't even dare put soldiers on the ground in Ukraine for fear of an escalating Russian response. This renders the whole idea that even the US might premptively attack a Russian ASI development facility totally unbelievable, and if the US can't/won't do that then the whole idea of AI MAD fails and with it goes everything else mentioned here. Maybe you can bully the really small states but it lacks all credibility against a large, economically or militarily powerful state. The comparison to nuclear weapons is also silly in the sense that the outc...
Whilst the title is true, I don't think that it adds much as, for most people, the authority of a researcher is probably as good as it gets. Even other researchers are probably not able to reliably tell who is or is not a good strategic thinker, so, for a layperson, there is no realistic alternative than to take the researcher seriously.
(IMHO a good proxy for strategic thinking is the ability to clearly communicate to a lay audience. )
Sounds backwards to me. It seems more like "our values are those things that we anticipate will bring us reward" than that rewards are what tell us about our values.
When you say “I thought I wanted X, but then I tried it and it was pretty meh.” That just seems wrong. You really DID want X. You valued it then because you thought it would bring you reward. Maybe, You just happened to be wrong. It's fine to be wrong about your anticipations. It's kind of weird to say that you were wrong about your values. Saying that your values change is kind of ...
My problem with this is that I don't believe that many of your examples are actually true.
You say that you value the actual happiness of people who you have never met and yet your actions (and those of everyone else including me) belie that statement. We all know that that there are billions of really poor people suffering in the world and the smart ones of us know that we are in the lucky, rich, 1% and yet we give insignificant ammounts (from our perspective) of money to improve the lot of those poor people. The only way to reconcile this is to realise th...
If your world view requires valuing the ethics of (current) people of lower IQ over those of (future) people of higher IQ then you have a much bigger problem than AI alignment. Whatever IQ is, it is strongly correlated with success which implies a genetic drive towards higher IQ, so your feared future is coming anyway (unless AI ends us first) and there is nothing we can logically do to have any long term influence on the ethics of smarter people coming after us.
Sorry but you said Tetris, not some imaginary minimal thing that you now want to call Tetris but is actually only the base object model with no input or output. You can't just eliminate the graphics processing complexity because Tetris isn't very graphics intensive - It is just as complex to describe a GPU that processes 10 triangles in a month as one that processes 1 billion in a nanosecond.
As an aside, the complexity of most things that we think of as simple these days is dominated by the complexity of their input and output - I'm particularly thin...
- In research you don't usually know your precise destination. Maybe LA but definitely not the hotel.
- research, in general, is about mapping all of California, not just the quickest route between two points and all the friends helped with that.
- You say "Alice tackled the central bottleneck" but you don't say what that was, only her "solution". Alice is only key here with the benefit of hindsight. If the I5 didn't exist or was closed for some reason then one of her friends solutions might have been better.
1Regarding the bad behavour of governments, especially when and why the victimise their own citizens, I recommend you read The Dictator's Handbook.
https://amzn.eu/d/40cwwPx
If Neanderthals could have created a well aligned agent,far more powerful than themselves, they would still be around and we, almost certainly, would not.
The mereset possibility of creating super human, self improving, AGI is a total philosophical game changer.
My personal interest is in the interaction between longtermism and the Fermi paradox - Any such AGIs actions are likely to be dominated by the need to prevail over any alien AGI that it ever encounters as such an encounter is almost certain to end one or the other.
Yes. It will prioritise the future over the present.
The utility of all humans being destroyed by an alien AI in the future is 0.
The utility of populating the future light cone is very, very large and most of that utility is in the far future.
Therefore the AI should sacrifice almost everything in the near term light cone to prevent the 0 outcome. If it could digitise all humans or possibly just have a gene bank then it can still fill most of the future light cone with happy humans once all possible threats have red-shifted out of reach. Living humans are small but non-zero risk to the master plan and hence should be dispensed with.
An AI with potentially limitless lifespan will prioritise the future over the present to an extent that would, almost certainly be bad for us now.
For example it may seem optimal to kill off all humans whilst keeping a copy of our genetic code so as to have more compute power and resources available to produce Von Neumann Probes to maximise the region of the universe it controls before encountering, and hopefully destroying, any similar alien AI diaspora. Only after some time, once all possible threats had been eliminated, would it start to recreate humans ...
It's even worse than that:
1) "we" know that "our" values now are, at least slightly, different to what they were 10,000 years ago.
2) We have no reason to believe that we are currently at a state of peak, absolute values (whatever that might mean) and therefore expect that, absent SGI, our values will be different in 10,000 years.
3) If we turn over power to an SGI, perfectly aligned with our current values then they will be frozen for the rest of time. Alternatively, if we want it to allow our values to change "naturally" over time it will be compelled to d...
Sorry but you lost me on the second paragraph "For example, the Tetris game fits in a 6.5 kB file, so the Kolmogorov complexity of Tetris is at most 6.5 kB". This is just wrong. The Kolmogorov complexity of Tetris has to include the operating system and hardware that runs the program. The proof is trivial by counterexample - If you were correct I could reduce the complexity to 0B by creating an empty file and an OS that interprets an empty file as a command to run the Tetris code embedded in the OS
What is the probability that there are not 3^^^3 anti-muggers out there who will kill 3^^^^^^3 people if I submit to the mugger? Not 0.
The original argument against Pascal's Wager does not require you to actually believe in any of the other god's, just that the probability of them existing and having the reverse utility is enough to cancel out the probability of Pascal being right.
My counter thought experiment to CEV is to consider our distant ancestors. I mean so far distant that we wouldn't call them human, maybe even as far back as some sort of fish-like creature. Suppose a super AI somehow offered this fish the chance to rapidly "advance", following its CEV and it showed it a vision of the future, us, and asked the fishy thing whether to go ahead. Do you think the fishy thing would say yes?
Similarly, if an AI offered to evolve humankind, in 50 years, into telepathic little green men that it assured us was the result of our CEV, ...
I like this except for the reference to "Newcomblike" problems, which, I feel, is misleading and obfuscates the whole point of Newcomb's paradox. Newcomb's paradox is about decision theory - If you allow cheating then it is no longer Newcomb's paradox. This article is about psychology (and possibly deceptive AI) - cheating is always a possible solution .
The words stand for abstractions and abstractions suffer from the abstraction uncertainty principle i.e. an abstraction cannot be simultaneously, very useful/widely applicable and very precise. The more useful a word is, the less precise it will be and vise versa. Dictionary definitions are a compromise - They never use the most precise definitions even when such are available (e.g. for scientific terms) because such definitions are not useful for communication between most users of the dictionary. For example, If we defined red to be light with a frequenc...
Food costs are not even slightly comparable. When I was kid (in the UK) they ran national advertising campaigns on TV for brands of flour, sugar and sliced bread. Nowadays the only reason these things aren't effectively free is because they take up valuable shelf space. Instead people are buying imported fruit and vegetables and ready-meals. It's like comparing the price of wood in the 1960's to the price of a fitted kitchen today.
Large groups of people can only live together by forming social hierarchies.
The people at the top of the hierarchy want to maintain their position both for themselves AND for their children (It's a pretty good definition of a good parent).
Fundamentally the problem is that it is not really about resources - It's a zero sum game for status and money is just the main indicator of status in the modern world.
The common solution to the problem of first timers is to make the first time explicitly free.
This is also applicable to clubs with fixed buy in costs but unknown (to the newbie) benefits and works well whenever the cost is realtively small (as it should be if it is optional). If they don't like the price they won't come again.
I think we can all agree on the thoughts about conflationary alliances.
On consciousness, I don't see a lot of value here apart from demonstrating the gulf in understanding between different people. The main problem I see, and this is common to most discussions of word definitions, is that only the extremes are considered. In this essay I see several comparisons of people to rocks, which is as extreme as you can get, and a few comparing people to animals, which is slightly less so, but nothing at all about the real fuzzy cases that we need to probe to decid...
Before we can even start to try to align AIs to human flourishing, we first need a clear definition of what that means. This has been a topic accessible to philosophical thought for millenia and yet still has no, universally accepted definition so how can you consider AI alignment helpful. Even if that we could all agree on what "human flourishing" meant, you would still have the problem of lock-in i.e. our AI overlords will never allow that definition to evolve once they have assumed control. Would you want to be trapped in the Utopia of someone born 3000 years ago? Better than being exterminated but still not what we want.
As a counterargument, consider mapping our ontology onto that of a baby. We can, kind of, explain some things in baby terms and, to that extent, a baby could theoretically see our neurons mapping to similar concepts in their ontology lighting up when we do or say things related to that ontology. At the same time our true goals are utterly alien to the baby.
Alternatively, imagine that you are sent back to the time of the pharaohs and had a discussion with Cheops/Khufu about the weather and forthcoming harvest - Even trying to explain it in terms of chaos th...
Have I missed something or is everyone ignoring the obvious problem with a superhuman AI with potentially limitless lifespan? It seems to me that such an AI, whatever its terminal goals, must, as an instrumental goal, prioritise seeking out and destroying any alien AI because, in simple terms, the greatest threat to it tiling the universe with tiny smiling human faces is an alien AI set on tiling the universe with tiny, smiling alien faces and, in a race for dominance, every second counts.
The usual arguments about logarithmic future discounting do not seem appropriate for an immortal intelligence.
The whole "utilizing our atoms" argument is unnecessarily extreme. It makes for a much clearer argument and doesn't even require super human intelligence to argue that the paperclip maximiser can obviously make more paperclips if it just takes all the electricity and metal that we humans currently use for other things and uses them to make more paperclips in a totally ordinary paperclip factory. We wouldn't necessarily be dead at that point but we would be as good as dead and have no way to seize back control.
I'm pretty dissapointed by the state of AI in bridge. IMHO the key milestones for AI would be:
1) Able to read and understand a standard convention card and play with/against that convention.
2) Decide the best existing convention.
3) Invent new, superior conventions. This is where we should be really scared.
"is it better to suffer an hour of torture on your deathbed, or 60 years of unpleasant allergic reaction to common environmental particles?"
This only seems difficult to you because you haven't assigned numbers to the pain of torture or unpleasant reaction. Once you do so (as any AI utility function must) it is just math. You are not really talking about procrastination at all here.
IMHO this is a key area for AI research because people seem to think that making a machine, with potentially infinite lifespan, behave like a human being whose entire existence is built around their finite lifespan, is the way forward. It seems obvious to me that if you gave the most wise, kind and saintly person in the world, infinite power and immortality, their behaviour would very rapidly deviate from any democratic ideal of the rest of humanity.
When considering time discounting people do not push the idea far enough - They say that we should con...
This is confused about who/what the agent is and about assumed goals.
The final question suggests that the agent is gravity. Nobody thinks that the goal/value function of gravity is to make the pinball fall in the hole - At a first approximation, its goal is to have ALL objects fall to earth and we observe it thwarted in that goal almost all the time, the pinball happens to be a rare success.
If we were to suggest that the pinball machine were the agent that might make more sense but then we would say that the pinball machine does not make any decisions and ...
This is a great article that I would like to see go further with respect to both people and AGI.
With respect to people, it seems to me that, once we assume intent, we build on that error by then assuming the stability of that intent (because peoples intents tend to be fairly stable) which then causes us to feel shock when that intent suddenly changes. We might then see this as intentional deceit and wander ever further from the truth - that it was only an unconscious whim in the first place.
Regarding AGI, this is linked to unwarranted anthropomorpism, agai...
I don't think this is relevant. It only seems odd if you believe that the job of developers is to please everyone rather than to make money. User Stories are reasonable for the goal of creating software that will make a large proportion of the target market want to buy that software. Numerous studies and real world evidence, show that the top few percent of products capture the vast majority of the market and therefore software companies would be unhappy if their developers did not show a clear bias. There would only be a downside if the market showed the ...
Why no discussion of the world view? IMHO AI cannot be paused because, if the US & EU pause AI development to pursue AI safety research then other state actors such as Russia & China will just see this as an opportunity to get ahead with the added benefit that the rest of the world will freely give away their safety research. It's a political no-brainer unless the leaders of those countries have extreme AI safety concerns themselves. Does anyone really believe that the US would either go to war or impose serious economic sanctions on countries that did not pause?
The problem is interesting but you can view it in so many ways, many of which are contradictory.
Everyone applied theory of mind to make assumptions about what was or was not implied about the scope of the problem. The obvious lesson here is that we should never try to apply our own theory of (human) mind to an AI mind but this is too harsh on the participants as the problem solver was definitely not an AI and assumptions about the scope of a question are "usually" justified when answering questions posed by humans, except that sometimes we need to delve de...
From a practical perspective, maybe you are looking at the problem the wrong way around. A lot of prompt engineering seems to be about asking LLMs to play a role. I would try to tell the LLM that it was a hacker and to design an exploit to attack the given system (this is the sort of mental perspective I used to use to find bugs when I was a software engineer). Another common technique is "generate then prune" : Have a separate model/prompt remove all the results of the first one that are only "possibilities". It seems, from my reading, that this sort of two stage approach can work because it bypasses LLMs typical attempts to "be helpful" by inventing stuff or spouting banal filler rather than just admitting ignorance.