How far along are the development of autonomous underwater drones in America? I’ve read statements by American military officials about wanting to turn the Taiwan straight into a drone-infested death trap. And I read someone (not an expert) who said that China is racing against time to try and invade before autonomous underwater drones take off. Is that true? Are they on track?
MuZero doesn’t seem categorically different from AlphaZero. It has to do a little bit more work at the beginning, but if you don’t get any reward for breaking the rules: you will learn not to break the rules. If MuZero is continuously learning then so is AlphaZero. Also, the games used were still computationally simple, OOMs more simple than an open-world game, let alone a true World-Model. AFAIK MuZero doesn’t work on open-ended, open-world games. And AlphaStar never got to superhuman performance at human speed either.
hi, thank you! i guess i was thinking about claims that "AGI is imminent and therefore we're doomed." it seems like if you define AGI as "really good at STEM" then it is obviously imminent. but if you define it as "capable of continuous learning like a human or animal," that's not true. we don't know how to build it and we can't even run a fruit-fly connectome on the most powerful computers we have for more than a couple of seconds without the instance breaking down: how would we expect to run something OOMs more complex and intelligent? "being good at STEM" seems like a much, much simpler and less computationally intensive task than continuous, dynamic learning. tourist is great at codeforces, but he obviously doesn't have the ability to take over the world (i am making the assumption that anyone with the capability to take over the world would do so). the second is a much, much fuzzier, more computationally complex task than the first.
i had just been in a deep depression for a while (it's embarassing, but this started with GPT-4) because i thought some AI in the near future was going to wake up, become god, and pwn humanity. but when i think about it from this perspective, that future seems much less likely. in fact, the future (at least in the near-term) looks very bright. and i can actually plan for it, which feels deeply relieving to me.
Apologies in advance if this is a midwit take. Chess engines are “smarter” than humans at chess, but they aren’t automatically better at real-world strategizing as a result. They don’t take over the world. Why couldn’t the same be true for STEMlord LLM-based agents?
It doesn’t seem like any of the companies are anywhere near AI that can “learn” or generalize in real time like a human or animal. Maybe a superintelligent STEMlord could hack their way around learning, but that still doesn’t seem the same as or as dangerous as fooming, and it also seems much easier to monitor. Does it not seem plausible that the current paradigm drastically accelerates scientific research while remaining tools? The counter is that people will just use the tools to try and figure out learning. But we don’t know how hard learning is, and the tools could also enable people to make real progress on alignment before learning is cracked.
You’re probably right but I guess my biggest concern is the first superhuman alignment researchers being aligned/dumb enough to explain to the companies how control works. It really depends on if self-awareness is present as well.
what is the plan for making task-alignment go well? i am much more worried about the possibility of being at the mercy of some god-emperor with a task-aligned AGI slave than I am about having my atoms repurposed by an unaligned AGI. the incentives for blackmail and power-consolidation look awful.
I honestly think the EV of superhumans is lower than the EV for AI. sadism and wills to power are baked into almost every human mind (with the exception of outliers of course). force multiplying those instincts is much worse than an AI which simply decides to repurpose the atoms in a human for something else. i think people oftentimes act like the risk ends at existential risks, which i strongly disagree with. i would argue that everyone dying is actually a pretty great ending compared to hyperexistential risks. it is effectively +inf relative utility.
with AIs we're essentially putting them through selective pressures to promote benevolence (as a hedge by the labs in case they don't figure out intent alignment). that seems like a massive advantage compared to the evolutionary baggage associated with humans.
with humans you'd need the will and capability to engineer in at least +5sd empathy and -10sd sadism into every superbaby. but people wouldn't want their children to make them feel like shitty people so they would want them to "be more normal."
I think that people don’t consider the implications of something like this. This seems to imply that the mathematical object of a malevolent superintelligence exists, and that conscious victims of said superintelligence exist as well. Is that really desirable? do people really prefer that to some sort of teleology?
Yeah something like that, the ASI is an extension of their will.
This just boils down to “humans aren’t aligned,” and that fact is why this would never work, but I still think it’s worth bringing up. Why are you required to get a license to drive, but not to have children? I don’t mean this in a literal way, I’m just referring to how casual the decision to have children is seen by much of society. Bringing someone into existence is vastly higher stakes than driving a car.
I’m sure this isn’t implementable, but parents should at least be screened for personality disorders before they’re allowed to have children. And sure that’s a slippery slope, and sure many of the most powerful people just want workers to furnish their quality of life regardless of the worker’s QOL. But bringing a child into the world who you can’t properly care for can lead to a lifetime of avoidable suffering.
I was just reading about “genomic liberty,” and the idea that parents would choose to make their kids iq lower than possible, that some would even choose for their children to have disabilities like them is completely ridiculous. And it just made me think “those people shouldn’t have the liberty of being parents.” Bringing another life into existence is not casual like where you work/live. And the obligation should be to the children, not the parents.