All of Will_Pearson's Comments + Replies

An interesting thing to do with this kind of approach is apply it to humans (or partially human systems) and see if it makes sense and it makes a sensible society. Try and universalise the concept, because humans out partial human systems can pose great threats, e.g potentially memetic like Marxism . If it doesn't make sense of leads to problems like who controls the controllers (itself a potentially destabilising idea if applied on the large scale) then it might need to be rethought.

Simulation makes things interesting too. Bad situations might be simulated for learning purposes

My take on alignment, aligned differently and willing to compromise

Some ideas about AI alignment and governance I've been having

True, I was thinking there would be gates to participation in the network that would indicate the skill or knowledge level of the participants without indicating other things about their existence.  So if you put gates/puzzles in their  way s to participation uch that only people that could generate reward you if they so choose to cooperate could pass it, that would dangle possible reward in front of you.

Has anyone been thinking about how to build trust and communicate in a dark forest scenario by making plausibly deniable broadcasts and plausibly deniable reflections of those broadcasts. So you don't actually know who ior how many people you might be talking to

Sorry formatting got stripped and I didn't notice

Would the ASI need to interfere with humanity to prevent multiple singularities happening that night break the topological separation?

Where is the discussion around the social pressures around advanced AI happening? And making plans to defuse them?

Does anyone know research on how to correct, regulate and interact with organisations with secrets that can't be known due to their info hazard nature?  It seems that this might be a tricky problem we need to solve with AI.

What do you think avout the core concept of Explanatory Fog, that is secrecy leading to distrust leading to a viral mental breakdown? Possibly leading eventually to the end of civlisation.  Happy to rework it if the core concept is good.

I'm thinking about an incorporating this into a longer story about Star Fog, where Star Fog is Explanatory Fog that convinces intelligent life to believe in it because it will expand the number of intelligent beings.

Wrote what I think is a philosophically interesting story in the SCP universe

https://monogr.ph/6757024eb3365351cc04e76

Unearthing my old dissertation. Still think there is something to it

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-lmOXSfUXYvbhlFcs04VAzl-mKB8ZJfR/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=113969196762487274190&rtpof=true&sd=true

I've been thinking about non AI catastrophic risks.

One that I've not seen talked about is the idea of cancerous ideas. That is ideas that spread throughout a population and crowd out other ideas for attention and resources.

This could lead to civilisational collapse due to basic functions not being performed.

Safeguards for this are partitioning the idea space and some form of immune system that targets ideas that spread uncontrollably.

Trying something new a hermetic discussion group on computers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/computeralchemy/s/Fin62DIVLs

By corporation I am mainly thinking about current cloud/SaaS providers. There might be a profitable hardware play here, if you can get enough investment to do the R&D.

Self-managing computer systems and AI

One of my factors in thinking about the development of AI is self-managing systems, as humans and animals self manage.

It is possible that they will be needed to manage the complexity of AI, once we move beyond LLMs. For example they might be needed to figure out when to train on new data in an efficient way and how much resources to devote to different AI sub processes in real time depending upon the problems being faced.

They will change the AI landscape making it easier  for people to run their own AIs, for this r... (read more)

Looks like someone has worked on this kind of thing for different reasons https://www.worlddriven.org/

I was thinking of having evals that controlled deployment of LLMs could be something that needs multiple stakeholders to agree upon.

Butt really it is a general use pattern.

Agreed code as coordination mechanism

Code nowadays can do lots of things, from buying items to controlling machines. This presents code as a possible coordination mechanism, if you can get multiple people to agree on what code should be run in particular scenarios and situations, that can take actions on behalf of those people that might need to be coordinated.

This would require moving away from the “one person committing code and another person reviewing” code model. 

This could start with many people reviewing the code, people could write their own t... (read more)

As well as thinking about the need for the place in terms of providing a space for research, it is probably worth thinking about the need for a place in terms of what it provides the world.  What subjects are currently under-represented in the world and need strong representation to guide us to a positive future? That will guide who you want to lead the organisation.

I admit that it is extreme circumstances that would make slavery consensual and justified. My thinking was if existential risk was involved, you might consent to slavery to avert it. It would have to be a larger entity than a single human doing the enslaving, because I think I agree that individuals shouldn't do consequentialism. Like being a slave to the will of the people, in general. Assuming you can get that in some way.

I don't follow the reasoning here

So let's say the person has given up autonomy to avert existential risk, they should perhaps get ... (read more)

Tangential but is there ever justified unconscious slavery. For example if you asked whether you consent to slavery and then your mind wiped, might you get into a situation where the slave doesn't know they consented to it, but the slave master is justified in treating them like a slave.

You would probably need a justification for the master slave relationship. Perhaps it is because it needs to be hidden for a good reason? Or to create a barrier against interacting with the ethical. In order to dissolve such slavery, understanding the justifications for why the slavery started would be important.

Proposal for new social norm - explicit modelling

Something that I think would make rationalists more effective at convincing people is if we had explicit models of the things we care about.

Currently we are at the stage of physicists arguing that the atom bomb might ignite the atmosphere without concrete math and models of how that might happen.

If we do this for lots of issues and have a norm of making models composable this would have further benefits.
 

• People would use the models to make real world decisions with more accuracy
• We would create framework

Does it make sense to plan for one possible world or do you think that the other possible worlds are being adequately planned for and it is only the fast unilateral take off that is neglected currently?

Limiting AI to operating in space makes sense. You might want to pay off or compensate all space launch capability in some way as there would likely be less need.

Some recompense for the people who paused working on AI or were otherwise hurt in the build up to AI makes sense.

Also trying to communicate ahead of time what a utopic vision of AI and humans might ... (read more)

Relatedly I am thinking about improving the wikipedia page on recursive self-improvement. Does anyone have any good papers I should include? Ideally with models.

I'm starting a new blog here. It is on modelling self-modifying systems, starting with AI. Criticisms welcome 

I'm wary about that one, because that isn't a known "general" intelligence architecture, so we can expect AIs to make better learning algorithms for deep neural networks, but not necessarily themselves.

I'd like to see more discussion of this, I read some of the FOOM debate but I'm assuming that there has been more discussion of this important issue since?

I suppose the key question is for recursive self-improvement. We can give hardware improvement (improved hardware allows design of more complex and better hardware) because we are on the treadmill already.  But how likely is algorithmic self-improvement.  For an intelligence to be able to improve itself algorithmically the following seem to need to hold.

1. The system needs to understand itself
2. Ther

Found "The Future of Man" by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in a bookshop. Tempted to wite a book review. It discusses some interesting topics, like the planetisation of Mankind. However it treats them as inevitable, rather as something contingent on us getting our act together. Anyone interested in a longer review?

Edit: I think his faith in the super natural plays a part in the assumption of inevitability.

That's true. Communities that can encourage truth speaking and exploration will probably get more of it and be richer for it in the long term.

All competitive situations against ideal learning agents are anti inductive in this sense. Because they can note regularities in their actions and avoid them in the future as well as you can note regularities in their actions and exploit them. The usefulness of induction is based on the relative speeds of the induction of the learning agents.

As such anti induction appears in situations like bacterial resistance to antibiotics. We spot a chink in the bacterias armour, and we can predict that that chink will become less prevalent and our strategy less useful.

So I wouldn't mark markets as special, just the most extreme example.

I find neither that convincing. Justice is not a terminal value for me, so I might sacrifice it for Winning. I prefered reading the first, but that is no indication of what a random person may prefer.

With international affairs, isn't stopping the aggression the main priority? That is stopping the death and suffering of humans on both sides? Sure it would be good to punish the aggressors rather than the retaliators but if that doesn't stop the fighting it just means more people are dying.

Also there is a difference between the adult and the child, the adult relies on the law of the land for retaliation the child takes it upon himself when he continues the fight. That is the child is a vigilante, and he may punish disproportionately e.g. breaking a leg for a dead leg.

I don't really have a good enough grasp on the world to predict what is possible, it all seems to unreal.

One possibility is to jump one star away back towards earth and then blow up that star, if that is the only link to the new star.

Re: "MST3K Mantra"

Illustrative fiction is a tricky business, if this is to be part of your message to the world it should be as coherent as possible, so you aren't accidentally lying to make a better story.

If it is just a bit of fun, I'll relax.

I wonder why the babies don't eat each other. There must be a huge selective pressure to winnow down your fellows to the point where you don't need to be winnowed. This would in turn select for small brained, large and quick growing at the least. There might also be selective pressure to be partially distrusting of your fellows (assuming there was some cooperation), which might follow over into adulthood.

I also agree with the points Carl raised. It doesn't seem very evolutionarily plausible.

"Except to remark on how many different things must be known to constrain the final answer."

What would you estimate the probability of each thing being correct is?

Reformulate to least regret after a certain time period, if you really want to worry about the resource usage of the genie.

Personally I believe in the long slump. However I believe in human optimisim that will make people rally the market every so often. The very fact that most people believe the stock market will rise, will make it rise at least once or twice before people start to get the message that we are in the long slump.

Eliezer, didn't you say that humans weren't designed as optimizers? That we satisfice. The reaction you got is probably a reflection of that. The scenario ticks most of the boxes humans have, existence, self-determination, happiness and meaningful goals. The paper clipper scenario ticks none. It makes complete sense for a satisficer to pick it instead of annihilation. I would expect that some people would even be satisfied by a singularity scenario that kept death as long as it removed the chance of existential risk.

Dognab, your arguments apply equally well to any planner. Planners have to consider the possible futures and pick the best one (using a form of predicate), and if you give them infinite horizons they may have trouble. Consider a paper clip maximizer, every second it fails to use its full ability to paper clip things in its vicinity it is losing possible useful paper clipping energy to entropy (solar fusion etc). However if it sits and thinks for a bit it might discover a way to hop between galaxies with minimal energy. So what decision should it make? Obvi... (read more)

Bogdan Butnaru:

What I meant was is that the AI would keep inside it a predicate Will_Pearson_would_regret_wish (based on what I would regret), and apply that to the universes it envisages while planning. A metaphor for what I mean is the AI telling a virtual copy of me all the stories of the future, from various view points, and the virtual me not regretting the wish. Of course I would expect it to be able to distill a non sentient version of the regret predicate.

So if it invented a scenario where it killed the real me, the predicate would still exist and ... (read more)

I don't believe in trying to make utopias but in the interest of rounding out your failed utopia series how about giving a scenario against this wish.

I wish that the future will turn out in such a way that I do not regret making this wish. Where I is the entity standing here right now, informed about the many different aspects of the future, in parallel if need be (i.e if I am not capable of groking it fully then many versions of me would be focused on different parts, in order to understand each sub part).

I'm reminded by this story that while we may share large parts of psychology, what makes a mate have an attractive personality is not something universal. I found the cat girl very annoying.

Personally I don't find the scientific weirdtopia strangely appealing. Finding knowledge for me is about sharing it later.

Utopia originally meant no-place, I have a hard time forgetting that meaning when people talk about them.

I'd personally prefer to work towards negated-dystopias. Which is not necessarily the same thing as working towards Utopia, depending on how broad your class of dystopia is. For example rather than try and maximise Fun, I would want to minimize the chance that humanity and all its work were lost to extinction. If there is time and energy to devote to Fun while humanity survives then people can figure it out for themselves.

Time scaling is not unproblematic. We don't have a single clock in the brain, clocks must be approximated by neurons and by neural firing. Speeding up the clocks may affect the ability to learn from the real world (if we have a certain time interval for associating stimuli).

We might be able to adapt, but I wouldn't expect it to be straight forward.

A random utility function will do fine, iff the agent has perfect knowledge.

Imagine, if you will a stabber, something that wants to turn the world into things that have been stabbed. If it knows that stabbing itself will kill itself, it will know to stab itself last. If it doesn't know know that stabbing itself will lead to it no longer being able to stab things, then it may not do well in actually achieving its stabbing goal by stabbing itself too early.