Since a few people have mentioned the Miller/Rootclaim debate:

My hourly rate is $200. I will accept a donation of $5000 to sit down and watch the entire Miller/Rootclaim debate (17 hours of video content plus various supporting materials) and write a 2000 word piece describing how I updated on it and why.

Anyone can feel free to message me if they want to go ahead and fund this.

Whilst the LEDs are not around the corner, I think the Kr-Cl excimer lamps might already be good enough.

When we wrote the original post on this, it was not clear how quickly covid was spreading through the air, but I think it is now clear that covid can hang around for a long time (on the order of minutes or hours rather than seconds) and still infect people.

It seems that a power density of 0.25W/m^2 would probably be enough to sterilize air in 1-2 minutes, meaning that a 5m x 8m room would need a 10W source. Assuming 2% efficiency that 10W source needs 500W electrical, which is certainly possible and in the days of incandescent lights you would have had a few 100W bulbs anyway.

EDIT: Having looked into this a bit more, it seems that right now the low efficiency of excimer lamps is not a binding constraint because the legally allowed far-UVC exposure is so low.

"TLV exposure limit for 222 nm (23 mJ cm^−2)"

23 mJ per cm^2 per day is just 0.002 W/m^2 , so you really don't need much power until you hit legal limitations.

Source

You can't guarantee whether it will stop acting that way in the future, which is what is predicted by deceptive alignment.

yes, that's true. But in fact if your AI is merely supposed to imitate a human it will be much easier to prevent deceptive alignment because you can find the minimal model that mimics a human, and that minimality excludes exotic behaviors.

This is essentially why machine learning works at all - you don't pick a random model that fits your training data well, you pick the smallest one.

If one king-person

yes. But this is a very unusual arrangement.

that's true, however I don't think it's necessary that the person is good.

asking why inner alignment is hard

I don't think "inner alignment" is applicable here.

If the clone behaves indistinguishably from the human it is based on, then there is simply nothing more to say. It doesn't matter what is going on inside.

The most important thing here is that we can at least achieve an outcome with AI that is equal to the outcome we would get without AI, and as far as I know nobody has suggested a system that has that property.

The famous "list of lethalities" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities) piece would consider that a strong success.

just because it's possible in theory doesn't mean we are anywhere close to doing it

that's a good point, but then you have to explain why it would be hard to make a functional digital copy of a human given that we can make AIs like ChatGPT-o1 that are at 99th percentile human performance on most short-term tasks. What is the blocker? 

Of course this question can be settled empirically.... 

 

All three of these are hard, and all three fail catastrophically.

I would be very surprised if all three of these are equally hard, and I suspect that (1) is the easiest and by a long shot.

Making a human imitator AI, once you already have weakly superhuman AI is a matter of cutting down capabilities and I suspect that it can be achieved by distillation, i.e. using the weakly superhuman AI that we will soon have to make a controlled synthetic dataset for pretraining and finetuning and then a much larger and more thorough RLHF dataset.

Finally you'd need to make sure the model didn't have too many parameters.

Perhaps you could rephrase this post as an implication:

IF you can make a machine that constructs human-imitator-AI systems,

THEN AI alignment in the technical sense is mostly trivialized and you just have the usual political human-politics problems plus the problem of preventing anyone else from making superintelligent black box systems.

So, out of these three problems which is the hard one?

(1) Make a machine that constructs human-imitator-AI systems

(2) Solve usual political human-politics problems

(3) Prevent anyone else from making superintelligent black box systems