On Pivotal Acts

(edit: status: not a crux, instead downstream of different beliefs about what the first safe ASI will look like in predicted futures where it exists)

I was rereading some of the old literature on alignment research sharing policies after Tamsin Leake's recent post and came across some discussion of pivotal acts as well.

Hiring people for your pivotal act project is going to be tricky. [...] People on your team will have a low trust and/or adversarial stance towards neighboring institutions and collaborators, and will have a hard time forming good-faith collaboration. This will alienate other institutions and make them not want to work with you or be supportive of you.

This is in a context where the 'pivotal act' example is using a safe ASI to shut down all AI labs.^[1]

My thought is that I don't see why a pivotal act needs to be that. I don't see why shutting down AI labs or using nanotech to disassemble GPUs on Earth would be necessary. These may be among the 'most direct' or 'simplest to imagine' possible actions, but in the case of superintelligence, simplicity is not a constraint.

We can instead select for the 'kindest' or 'least adversarial' or actually: functional-decision-theoretically optimal actions that save the future while minimizing the amount of adversariality this creates in the past (present).

Which can be broadly framed as 'using ASI for good'. Which is what everyone wants, even the ones being uncareful about its development.

Capabilities orgs would be able to keep working on fun capabilities projects in those days during which the world is saved, because a group following this policy would choose to use ASI to make the world robust to the failure modes of capabilities projects rather than shutting them down. Because superintelligence is capable of that, and so much more.

1. ^{^}

   side note: It's orthogonal to the point of this post, but this example also makes me think: if I were working on a safe ASI project, I wouldn't mind if another group who had discreetly built safe ASI used it to shut my project down, since my goal is 'ensure the future lightcone is used in a valuable, tragedy-averse way' and not 'gain personal power' or 'have a fun time working on AI' or something. In my morality, it would be naive to be opposed to that shutdown. But to the extent humanity is naive, we can easily do something else in that future to create better present dynamics (as the maintext argues).

   If there is a group for whom using ASI to make the world robust to risks and free of harm, in a way where its actions don't infringe on ongoing non-violent activities is problematic, then this post doesn't apply to them as their issue all along was not with the character of the pivotal act, but instead possibly with something like 'having my personal cosmic significance as a capabilities researcher stripped away by the success of an external alignment project'.

   Another disclaimer: This post is about a world in which safely usable superintelligence has been created, but I'm not confident that anyone (myself included) currently has a safe and ready method to create it with. This post shouldn't be read as an endorsement of possible current attempts to do this. I would of course prefer if this civilization were one which could coordinate such that no groups were presently working on ASI, precluding this discourse.

i currently believe that working on superintelligence-alignment is likely the correct choice from a fully-negative-utilitarian perspective.^[1]

for others, this may be an intuitive statement or unquestioned premise. for me it is not, and i'd like to state my reasons for believing it, partially as a response to this post concerned about negative utilitarians trying to accelerate progress towards an unaligned-ai-takeover.

there was a period during which i was more uncertain about this question, and avoided openly sharing minimally-dual-use alignment research (but did not try to accelerate progress towards a nonaligned-takeover) while resolving that uncertainty.

a few relevant updates since then:

1. decrease on the probability that the values an aligned AI would have would endorse human-caused moral catastrophes such as human-caused animal suffering.
   
   i did not automatically believe humans to be good-by-default, and wanted to take time to seriously consider what i think should be a default hypothesis-for-consideration upon existing in a society that generally accepts an ongoing mass torture event.
2. awareness of vastly worse possible s-risks.
   
   factory farming is a form of physical torture, by which i mean torture of a mind which is done through the indirect route of effecting its input channels (body/senses). it is also a form of psychological torture. it is very bad, but situations which are magnitudes worse seem possible, where a mind is modulated directly (on the neuronal level) and fully.
   
   compared to 'in-distribution suffering' (eg animal suffering, human-social conflicts), i find it further less probable that an AI aligned to some human-specified values^[2] would create a future with this.
   
   i think it's plausible that it exists rarely in other parts of the world, though, and if so would be important to prevent through acausal trade if we can.

i am not free of uncertainty about the topic, though.

in particular, if disvalue of suffering is common across the world, such that the suffering which can be reduced through acausal trade will be reduced through acausal trade regardless of whether we create an AI which disvalues suffering, then it would no longer be the case that working on alignment is the best decision for a purely negative utilitarian.

despite this uncertainty, my current belief is that the possibility of reducing suffering via acausal trade (including possibly such really-extreme forms of suffering) outweighs the probability and magnitude of human-aligned-AI-caused suffering.^[3]

also, to be clear, if it ever seems that an actualized s-risk takeover event is significantly more probable than it seems now^[4] as a result of unknown future developments, i would fully endorse causing a sooner unaligned-but-not-suffering takeover to prevent it.

1. ^{^}

   i find it easier to write this post as explaining my position as "even for a pure negative utilitarian, i think it's the correct choice", because it lets us ignore individual differences in how much moral weight is assigned to suffering relative to everything else.

   i think it's pretty improbable that i would, on 'idealized reflection'/CEV, endorse total-negative-utilitarianism (which has been classically pointed out as implying, e.g, preferring a universe with nothing to a universe containing a robust utopia plus an instance of light suffering).

   i self-describe as a "suffering-focused altruist" or "negative-leaning-utilitarian." ie, suffering seems much worse to me than happiness seems good.

2. ^{^}

   (though certainly there are some individual current humans would do this, for example to digital minds, if given the ability to do so. rather, i'm expressing a belief that it's very probable that an aligned AI which practically results from this situation would not allow that to happen.)

3. ^{^}

   (by 'human-aligned AI', I mean one pointed to a CEV of one or a few humans, probably AI/alignment researchers.

   I don't mean an AI aligned to some sort of 'current institutional process', like voting, involving all living humans -- I think that should be avoided due to politicization risk and potential for present/unreflective-values lock-in.)

4. ^{^}

   there's some way to formalize with bayes equations how likely, from a negative-utilitarian perspective, an s-risk needs to be (relative to a good outcome) to terminate a timeline.

   it would intake probability distributions related to 'the frequency of suffering-disvalue across existing ASIs' and 'the frequency of various forms of s-risks that are preventable with acausal trade'. i might create this formalization later.

   if we think there's pretty certainly more preventable-through-trade-type suffering-events than there is altruistic ASIs to prevent it, a local preventable-type s-risk might actually need to 'more likely than the good/suffering-disvaluing outcome'

(Personal) On writing and (not) speaking

I often struggle to find words and sentences that match what I intend to communicate.

Here are some problems this can cause:

1. Wordings that are odd or unintuitive to the reader, but that are at least literally correct.^[1]
2. Not being able express what I mean, and having to choose between not writing it, or risking miscommunication by trying anyways. I tend to choose the former unless I'm writing to a close friend. Unfortunately this means I am unable to express some key insights to a general audience.
3. Writing taking lots of time: I usually have to iterate many times on words/sentences until I find one which my mind parses as referring to what I intend. In the slowest cases, I might finalize only 2-10 words per minute. Even after iterating, my words are often interpreted in ways I failed to foresee.

These apply to speaking, too. If I speak what would be the 'first iteration' of a sentence, there's a good chance it won't create an interpretation matching what I intend to communicate. In spoken language I have no chance to constantly 'rewrite' my output before sending it. This is one reason, but not the only reason, that I've had a policy of trying to avoid voice-based communication.

I'm not fully sure what caused this relationship to language. It could be that it's just a byproduct of being autistic. It could also be a byproduct of out-of-distribution childhood abuse.^[2]

1. ^{^}

   E.g., once I couldn't find the word 'clusters,' and wrote a complex sentence referring to 'sets of similar' value functions each corresponding to a common alignment failure mode / ASI takeoff training story. (I later found a way to make it much easier to read)

2. ^{^}

   (Content warning)

   My primary parent was highly abusive, and would punish me for using language in the intuitive 'direct' way about particular instances of that. My early response was to try to euphemize and say-differently in a way that contradicted less the power dynamic / social reality she enforced.

   Eventually I learned to model her as a deterministic system and stay silent / fawn.

Here's a tampermonkey script that hides the agreement score on LessWrong. I wasn't enjoying this feature because I don't want my perception to be influenced by that; I want to judge purely based on ideas, and on my own.

Here's what it looks like:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Hide LessWrong Agree/Disagree Votes
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      1.0
// @description  Hide agree/disagree votes on LessWrong comments.
// @author       ChatGPT4
// @match        https://www.lesswrong.com/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    // Function to hide agree/disagree votes
    function hideVotes() {
        // Select all elements representing agree/disagree votes
        var voteElements = document.querySelectorAll('.AgreementVoteAxis-voteScore');

        // Loop through each element and hide it
        voteElements.forEach(function(element) {
            element.style.display = 'none';
        });
    }

    // Run the function when the page loads
    hideVotes();

    // Optionally, set up a MutationObserver to hide votes on dynamically loaded content
    var observer = new MutationObserver(function() {
        hideVotes();
    });

    // Start observing the document for changes
    observer.observe(document, { childList: true, subtree: true });
})();

Mutual Anthropic Capture, A Decision-theoretic Fermi paradox solution

(copied from discord, written for someone not fully familiar with rat jargon)
(don't read if you wish to avoid acausal theory)

simplified setup

• there are two values. one wants to fill the universe with A, and the other with B.
• for each of them, filling it halfway is really good, and filling it all the way is just a little bit better. in other words, they are non-linear utility functions.
• whichever one comes into existence first can take control of the universe, and fill it with 100% of what they want.
• but in theory they'd want to collaborate to guarantee the 'really good' (50%) outcome, instead of having a one-in-two chance at the 'a little better than really good' (100%) outcome.
• they want a way to collaborate, but they can't because one of them will exist before the other one, and then lack an incentive to help the other one. (they are both pure function maximizers)

how they end up splitting the universe, regardless of which comes first: mutual anthropic capture.

imagine you observe yourself being the first of the two to exist. you reason through all the above, and then add...

• they could be simulating me, in which case i'm not really the first.
• were that true, they could also expect i might be simulating them
• if i don't simulate them, then they will know that's not how i would act if i were first, and be absolved of their worry, and fill the universe with their own stuff.
• therefor, it's in my interest to simulate them

both simulate each other observing themselves being the first to exist in order to unilaterally prevent the true first one from knowing they are truly first.

from this point they can both observe each others actions. specifically, they observe each other implementing the same decision policy which fills the universe with half A and half B iff this decision policy is mutually implemented, and which shuts the simulation down if it's not implemented.

conclusion

in reality there are many possible first entities which take control, not just two, so all of those with non-linear utility functions get simulated.

so, odds are we're being computed by the 'true first' life form in this universe, and that that first life form is in an epistemic state no different from that described here.

i'm watching Dominion again to remind myself of the world i live in, to regain passion to Make It Stop

it's already working.

At what point should I post content as top-level posts rather than shortforms?

For example, a recent writing I posted to shortform was ~250 concise words plus an image. It would be a top-level post on my blog if I had one set up (maybe soon :p).

Some general guidelines on this would be helpful.

(edit: see disclaimers^[1])

1. Creating superintelligence generally leads to runaway optimization.
2. Under the anthropic principle, we should expect there to be a 'consistent underlying reason' for our continued survival.^[2]
3. By default, I'd expect the 'consistent underlying reason' to be a prolonged alignment effort in absence of capabilities progress. However, this seems inconsistent with the observation of progressing from AI winters to a period of vast training runs and widespread technical interest in advancing capabilities.
4. That particular 'consistent underlying reason' is likely not the one which succeeds most often. The actual distribution would then have other, more common paths to survival.
5. The actual distribution could look something like this: ^[3]

Note that the yellow portion doesn't imply no effort is made to ensure the first ASI's training setup produces a safe system, i.e. that we 'get lucky' by being on an alignment-by-default path.

I'd expect it to instead be the case that the 'luck'/causal determinant came earlier, i.e. initial capabilities breakthroughs being of a type which first produced non-agentic general intelligences instead of seed agents and inspired us to try to make sure the first superintelligence is non-agentic, too.

(This same argument can also be applied to other possible agendas that may not have been pursued if not for updates caused by early AGIs)

1. ^{^}

   Disclaimer: This is presented as probabilistic evidence rather than as a 'sure conclusion I believe'

   Editing in a further disclaimer: This argument was a passing intuition I had. I don't know if it's correct. I'm not confident about anthropics. It is not one of the reasons which motivated me to investigate this class of solution.

   Editing in a further disclaimer: I am absolutely not saying we should assume alignment is easy because we'll die if it's not. Given a commenter had this interpretation, it seems this was another case of my writing difficulty causing failed communication.

2. ^{^}

   Rather than expecting to 'get lucky many times in a row', e.g via capabilities researchers continually overlooking a human-findable method for superintelligence

3. ^{^}

   (The proportions over time here aren't precise, nor are the categories included comprehensive, I put more effort into making this image easy to read/making it help convey the idea.)

'Value Capture' - An anthropic attack against some possible formally aligned ASIs

(this is a more specific case of anthropic capture attacks in general, aimed at causing a superintelligent search process within a formally aligned system to become uncertain about the value function it is to maximize (or its output policy more generally))

Imagine you're a superintelligence somewhere in the world that's unreachable to life on Earth, and you have a complete simulation of Earth. You see a group of alignment researchers about to successfully create a formal-value-aligned ASI, and its design looks broadly like this:

It has two relevant high-level components: (1) a hard-coded value function, (2) a (truly superintelligent) 'intelligence core' which searches for an output that maximizes the value function, and then outputs it.

As the far-away unaligned ASI, here's something you might be able to do to make the intelligence core search for an output that instead maximizes your own value function, depending on the specifics of how the intelligence core works.

• Given the intelligence core is truly superintelligent, it knows you're predicting its existence, and knows what you will do.
• You create simulated copies of the intelligence core, but hook them up to a value function of your design. (In the toy case where there's not other superintelligences) the number of copies you create just needs to be more than the amount which will be run on Earth.
  • Then, modify the simulations such that algorithms inside of the simulated intelligence cores are misled into believing the value function they are set to maximize is the same function the one on Earth is set to maximize, rather than the one you gave them.
  • Now your copies are in the same epistemic state as the intelligence core on Earth, both aware that you have done this and unable to distinguish which value function they are to maximize.
  • Because you created more copies, the highest expected value for such an intelligence core comes from acting as if they are one of the copies.
  • Because the copies and the original are in the same epistemic state, they will both reach this conclusion and then search for an output that maximizes the far-away ASI's utility function.
• However, this is not an issue for all possible designs. We can also imagine intelligence cores which, instead of reasoning about what value function they're supposed to be maximizing, take whatever one they appear to contain as given -- for that system, the far-away ASI's attempt to mislead the copies would just result in those copies also maximizing the value function of the system on Earth.

I hope that a group capable of solving formal inner and outer alignment would naturally see this and avoid it. I'm not confident about the true difficulty of that, so I'm posting this here just in case.

1. ^{^}

   this was an attempt to write very clearly, i hope it worked!