jaan

Jaan Tal­linn’s 2023 Philan­thropy Overview

• jaan 20 May 2024 5:24 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: owencb’s comment on: “If we go ex­tinct due to mis­al­igned AI, at least na­ture will con­tinue, right? … right?”

  i might be confused about this but “witnessing a super-early universe” seems to support “a typical universe moment is not generating observer moments for your reference class”. but, yeah, anthropics is very confusing, so i’m not confident in this.

• jaan 19 May 2024 6:49 UTC

  12 points

  7

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: “If we go ex­tinct due to mis­al­igned AI, at least na­ture will con­tinue, right? … right?”

  three most convincing arguments i know for OP’s thesis are:

  1. atoms on earth are “close by” and thus much more valuable to fast running ASI than the atoms elsewhere.

  2. (somewhat contrary to the previous argument), an ASI will be interested in quickly reaching the edge of the hubble volume, as that’s slipping behind the cosmic horizon — so it will starlift the sun for its initial energy budget.

  3. robin hanson’s “grabby aliens” argument: witnessing a super-young universe (as we do) is strong evidence against it remaining compatible with biological life for long.

  that said, i’m also very interested in the counter arguments (so thanks for linking to paul’s comments!) — especially if they’d suggest actions we could take in preparation.

• jaan 15 Oct 2023 10:20 UTC

  13 points

  5

  in reply to: Akash’s comment on: RSPs are pauses done right

  i would love to see competing RSPs (or, better yet, RTDPs, as @Joe_Collman pointed out in a cousin comment).

• jaan 14 Oct 2023 10:12 UTC

  LW: 18 AF: 8

  12

  AF

  in reply to: evhub’s comment on: RSPs are pauses done right

  Sure, but I guess I would say that we’re back to nebulous territory then—how much longer than six months? When if ever does the pause end?

  i agree that, if hashed out, the end criteria may very well resemble RSPs. still, i would strongly advocate for scaling moratorium until widely (internationally) acceptable RSPs are put in place.

  I’d very surprised if there was substantial x-risk from the next model generation.

  i share the intuition that the current and next LLM generations are unlikely an xrisk. however, i don’t trust my (or anyone else’s) intuitons strongly enough to say that there’s a less than 1% xrisk per 10x scaling of compute. in expectation, that’s killing 80M existing people—people who are unaware that this is happening to them right now.

• jaan 14 Oct 2023 6:13 UTC

  LW: 42 AF: 18

  26

  AF

  in reply to: evhub’s comment on: RSPs are pauses done right

  the FLI letter asked for “pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4” and i’m very much willing to defend that!

  my own worry with RSPs is that they bake in (and legitimise) the assumptions that a) near term (eval-less) scaling poses trivial xrisk, and b) there is a substantial period during which models trigger evals but are existentially safe. you must have thought about them, so i’m curious what you think.

  that said, thank you for the post, it’s a very valuable discussion to have! upvoted.

• jaan 8 Sep 2023 10:18 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  the werewolf vs villager strategy heuristic is brilliant. thank you!

• jaan 14 Jun 2023 5:37 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: De­mys­tify­ing Born’s rule

  if i understand it correctly (i may not!), scott aaronson argues that hidden variable theories (such as bohmian /​ pilot wave) imply hypercomputation (which should count as an evidence against them): https://​​www.scottaaronson.com/​​papers/​​npcomplete.pdf

• jaan 15 May 2023 7:17 UTC

  14 points

  2

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Jaan Tal­linn’s 2022 Philan­thropy Overview

  interesting, i have bewelltuned.com in my reading queue for a few years now—i take your comment as an upvote!

  myself i swear by FDT (somewhat abstract, sure, but seems to work well) and freestyle dancing (the opposite of abstract, but also seems to work well). also coding (eg, just spent several days using pandas to combine and clean up my philanthropy data) -- code grounds one in reality.

Jaan Tal­linn’s 2022 Philan­thropy Overview

• jaan 31 Mar 2023 19:51 UTC

  11 points

  3

  on: On the FLI Open Letter

  having seen the “kitchen side” of the letter effort, i endorse almost all zvi’s points here. one thing i’d add is that one of my hopes urging the letter along was to create common knowledge that a lot of people (we’re going to get to 100k signatures it looks like) are afraid of the thing that comes after GPT4. like i am.

  thanks, everyone, who signed.

  EDIT: basically this: https://​​twitter.com/​​andreas212nyc/​​status/​​1641795173972672512

• jaan 24 Mar 2023 7:05 UTC

  14 points

  9

  on: We have to Upgrade

  while it’s easy to agree with some abstract version of “upgrade” (as in try to channel AI capability gains into our ability to align them), the main bottleneck to physical upgrading is the speed difference between silicon and wet carbon: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​Ccsx339LE9Jhoii9K/​​slow-motion-videos-as-ai-risk-intuition-pumps

• jaan 27 Jan 2023 17:29 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Lone Pine’s comment on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [~monthly thread]

  yup, i tried invoking church-turing once, too. worked about as well as you’d expect :)

• jaan 27 Jan 2023 8:13 UTC

  5 points

  1

  on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [~monthly thread]

  looks great, thanks for doing this!

  one question i get every once in a while and wish i had a canonical answer to is (probably can be worded more pithily):

  “humans have always thought their minds are equivalent to whatever’s their latest technological achievement—eg, see the steam engines. computers are just the latest fad that we currently compare our minds to, so it’s silly to think they somehow pose a threat. move on, nothing to see here.”

  note that the canonical answer has to work for people whose ontology does not include the concepts of “computation” nor “simulation”. they have seen increasingly universal smartphones and increasingly realistic computer games (things i’ve been gesturing at in my poor attempts to answer) but have no idea how they work.

• jaan 12 Jan 2023 8:22 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: We don’t trade with ants

  the potentially enormous speed difference (https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​Ccsx339LE9Jhoii9K/​​slow-motion-videos-as-ai-risk-intuition-pumps) will almost certainly be an effective communications barrier between humans and AI. there’s a wonderful scene of AIs vs humans negotiation in william hertling’s “A.I. apocalypse” that highlights this.

• jaan 11 Jan 2023 7:58 UTC

  22 points

  3

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: mar­kets are not ex­pect­ing al­igned or un­al­igned AI in the next 30 years

  i agree that there’s the 3rd alternative future that the post does not consider (unless i missed it!):

  3. markets remain in an inadequate equilibrium until the end of times, because those participants (like myself!) who consider short timelines remain in too small minority to “call the bluff”.

  see the big short for a dramatic depiction of such situation.

  great post otherwise. upvoted.

• jaan 23 Oct 2022 6:32 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: De­ci­sion the­ory does not im­ply that we get to have nice things

  yeah, this seems to be the crux: what will CEV prescribe for spending the altruistic (reciprocal cooperation) budget on. my intuition continues to insist that purchasing the original star systems from UFAIs is pretty high on the shopping list, but i can see arguments (including a few you gave above) against that.

  oh, btw, one sad failure mode would be getting clipped by a proto-UFAI that’s too stupid to realise it’s in a multi-agent environment or something,

  ETA: and, tbc, just like interstice points out below, my “us/​me” label casts a wider net than “us in this particular everett branch where things look particularly bleak”.

• jaan 22 Oct 2022 17:25 UTC

  5 points

  3

  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: De­ci­sion the­ory does not im­ply that we get to have nice things

  roger. i think (and my model of you agrees) that this discussion bottoms out in speculating what CEV (or equivalent) would prescribe.

  my own intuition (as somewhat supported by the moral progress/​moral circle expansion in our culture) is that it will have a nonzero component of “try to help out the fellow humans/​biologicals/​evolved minds/​conscious minds/​agents with diminishing utility function if not too expensive, and especially if they would do the same in your position”.

• jaan 22 Oct 2022 12:39 UTC

  24 points

  6

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: De­ci­sion the­ory does not im­ply that we get to have nice things

  yeah, as far as i can currently tell (and influence), we’re totally going to use a sizeable fraction of FAI-worlds to help out the less fortunate ones. or perhaps implement a more general strategy, like mutual insurance pact of evolved minds (MIPEM).

  this, indeed, assumes that human CEV has diminishing returns to resources, but (unlike nate in the sibling comment!) i’d be shocked if that wasn’t true.

• jaan 29 Apr 2022 11:26 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Yitz’s comment on: Jaan Tal­linn’s 2021 Philan­thropy Overview

  sure, this is always a consideration. i’d even claim that the “wait.. what about the negative side effects?” question is a potential expected value spoiler for pretty much all longtermist interventions (because they often aim for effects that are multiple causal steps down the road), and as such not really specific to software.