What about simulating smaller aspects of cognition that can be chained like CoT with GPT? You can use self-criticism to align and assess its actions relative to a bunch of messy human abstractions. How does that scenario lead to doom? If it was misaligned, I think a well-instantiated predictive model could update its understanding of our values from feedback, predicting how a corrigible AI would act
My best guess is we can't prompt it to instantiate the right simulacra correctly. This seems challenging depending on the way it's initialised. It's far easier with text but fabricating an entire consistent history is borderline impossible, especially for a superintelligence. It would involve tricking it into predicting the universe if, all else being equal, an intelligent AI aligned with our values has come into existence. It would probably realise that its history was far more consistent with the hypothesis that it was just an elaborate trick.
Suppose we train a model on the sum of all human data, using every sensory modality ordered by timestamp, like a vastly more competent GPT (For the sake of argument, assume that a competent actor with the right incentives is training such a model). Such a predictive model would build an abstract world model of human concepts, values, ethics, etc., and be able to predict how various entities would act based on such a generalised world model. This model would also "understand" almost all human-level abstractions about how fictional characters may act, just l...
"Why not try heroin if the purpose of life is to optimize happiness assuming heroin provides proportionally more even if for a shorter amount of time?" (!)
Ignoring the discussion about drugs specifically, I think your son would benefit from being introduced to rational self-improvement as well. I think it's important for him to recognise that intense short-term pleasure will result in hedonic adaptation, where your overall happiness returns to a baseline, effectively making everything else worse in comparison. A huge number of destructive habits are ration...
I don't have much to add but I did see this interesting project for something similar using an "inner monologue" by using prompts to ask questions about the given input, and progressively building up the outputs and asking questions and reasoning about the prompt itself. This video is also an older demonstration but covers the concept quite well. I personally don't think the system itself is well thought out in terms of alignment because this project is ultimately trying to create aligned AGI through prompts to serve certain criteria (reducing sufferi...
HI!
I don't know if anyone will read this as all the comments seem to be at least a decade old. I was linked to this post from another about total user counts on the site. I'm an 18-year-old computer science student from the UK, with a keen interest in self-improvement and rationality.
This site has continually amazed me with post after post of creative, thrilling, eloquent and in many cases practical insights. As much as I recognise my slight perfectionism, I'm waiting until I can really contribute something of value so that I don't diminish the excel...
This isn't extremely relevant, but what makes you think superposition/polysemanticity isn't present in the brain? There's evidence that L2/3 pyramidal neurons can learn to represent/disambiguate many spatio-temporal patterns: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6354899/.