I agree that we’ll want some reasonable assumption on the environment (e.g. symmetry of physical laws throughout spacetime) that will enable thinking to generalize well. I don’t think that assumption looks like “it’s hard to cause a lot of destruction” or “the environment is favorable to you in general”. And I’m pretty sure that individual human lives are not the most important level of analysis for thinking about the learning required to avoid civilization-level traps (e.g. with CFCs, handling the situation required scientific and policy knowledge that no one knows at birth and no one could discover by themself over a lifetime)
Consider also, evolution. Evolution can also be regarded as a sort of reinforcement learning algorithm. So why, during billions years of evolution, no gene sequence was created that somehow destroyed all life on Earth? It seems hard to come up with an answer other than “it’s hard to cause a lot of destruction”.
Some speculation:
I think that we have a sequence of reinforcement algorithms: evolution → humanity → individual human / small group (maybe followed by → AGI) s.t. each step inherits the knowledge generated by the previous step and also applies more optimization pressure than the previous step. This suggests formulating a “favorability” assumption of the following form: there is a (possibly infinite) sequence of reinforcement learning algorithms A0, A1, A2… s.t. each algorithm is more powerful than the previous (e.g. has more computing power), and our environment has to be s.t.
(1) Running policy A0 has a small rate (at most ϵ0) of falling into traps.
(2) If we run A0 for some time T0 (s.t. ϵ0T0≪1), and then run A1 after updating on the observations during T0, then A1 has a small rate (at most ϵ1) of falling into traps.
(3) Ditto when we add A2
...And so forth.
The sequence {Ai} may be thought of as a sequence of agents or as just steps in the exploration of the environment by a single agent. So, our condition is that, each new “layer of reality” may be explored safely given that the previous layers were already studied.
Most species have gone extinct in the past. I would not be satisfied with an outcome where all humans die or 99% of humans die, even though technically humans might rebuild if there are any left and other intelligent life can evolve if humanity is extinct. These extinction levels can happen with foreseeable tech. Additionally, avoiding nuclear war requires continual cognitive effort to be put into the problem; it would be insufficient to use trial-and-error to avoid nuclear war.
I don’t see why you would want a long sequence of reinforcement learning algorithms. At some point the algorithms produce things that can think, and then they should use their thinking to steer the future rather than trial-and-error alone. I don’t think RL algorithms would get the right answer on CFCs or nuclear war prevention.
I am pretty sure that we can’t fully explore our current level, e.g. that would include starting nuclear wars to test theories about nuclear deterrence and nuclear winter.
I really think that you are taking the RL analogy too far here; decision-making systems involving humans have some things in common with RL but RL theory only describes a fragment of the reasoning that these systems do.
I don’t think you’re interpreting what I’m saying correctly.
First, when I say “reinforcement learning” I don’t necessarily mean the type of RL algorithms that exist today. I just mean something that is designed to perform well (in some sense) in the face of uncertainty about the environment.
Second, even existing RL algorithms are not pure trial-and-error. For example, posterior sampling maintains a belief state about the environment and runs the optimal policy for some environment sampled from the belief state. So, if the belief state “knows” that something is a bad/good idea then the algorithm doesn’t need to actually try it.
Third, “starting nuclear wars to test theories” is the opposite of I’m trying to describe. What I’m saying is, we already have enough knowledge (acquired by exploring previous levels) to know that nuclear war is a bad idea, so exploring this level will not involve starting nuclear wars. What I’m trying to formalize is, what kind of environments allow this to happen consistently, i.e. being able to acquire enough knowledge to deal with a trap before you arrive at the trap.
First, when I say “reinforcement learning” I don’t necessarily mean the type of RL algorithms that exist today. I just mean something that is designed to perform well (in some sense) in the face of uncertainty about the environment.
That is broad enough to include Bayesianism. I think you are imagining a narrower class of algorithms that can achieve some property like asymptotic optimality. Agree that this narrower class is much broader than current RL, though.
Second, even existing RL algorithms are not pure trial-and-error. For example, posterior sampling maintains a belief state about the environment and runs the optimal policy for some environment sampled from the belief state. So, if the belief state “knows” that something is a bad/good idea then the algorithm doesn’t need to actually try it.
I agree that if it knows for sure that it isn’t in some environment then it doesn’t need to test anything to perform well in that environment. But what if there is a 5% chance that the environment is such that nuclear war is good (e.g. because it eliminates other forms of destructive technology for a long time)? Then this AI would start nuclear war with 5% probability per learning epoch. This is not pure trial-and-error but it is trial-and-error in an important relevant sense.
What I’m trying to formalize is, what kind of environments allow this to happen consistently, i.e. being able to acquire enough knowledge to deal with a trap before you arrive at the trap.
This seems like an interesting research approach and I don’t object to it. I would object to thinking that algorithms that only handle this class of environments are safe to run in our world (which I expect is not of this form). To be clear, while I expect that a Bayesian-ish agent has a good chance to avoid very bad outcomes using the knowledge it has, I don’t think anything that attains asymptotic optimality will be useful while avoiding very bad outcomes with decent probability.
After thinking some more, maybe the following is natural way towards formalizing the optimism condition.
Let H be the space of hypotheses and ξ0∈ΔH be the “unbiased” universal prior. Given any ζ∈ΔH, we denote ^ζ=Eμ∼ζ[μ], i.e. the environment resulting from mixing the environments in the belief state ζ. Given an environment μ, let πμ be the Bayes-optimal policy for μ and πμθ the perturbed Bayes-optimal policy for μ, where θ is a perturbation parameter. Here, “perturbed” probably means something like softmax expected utility, but more thought is needed. Then, the “optimistic” prior ξ is defined as a solution to the following fixed point equation:
ξ(μ)=Z−1ξ0(μ)exp(β(Eμ⋈π^ξθ[U]−Eμ⋈πμ[U]))
Here, Z is a normalization constant and β is an additional parameter.
This equation defines something like a softmax Nash equilibrium in a cooperative game of two players where, one player chooses μ (so that ξ is eir mixed strategy), another player chooses π and the utility is minus regret (alternatively, we might want to choose only Pareto efficient Nash equilibria). The parameter β controls optimism regarding the ability to learn the environment, whereas the parameter θ represents optimism regarding the presence of slack: ability to learn despite making some errors or random exploration (how to choose these parameters is another question).
Possibly, the idea of exploring the environment “layer by layer” can be recovered from combining this with hierarchy assumptions.
This seems like a hack. The equilibrium policy is going to assume that the environment is good to it in general in a magical fashion, rather than assuming the environment is good to it in the specific ways we should expect given our own knowledge of how the environment works. It’s kind of like assuming “things magically end up lower than you expected on priors” instead of having a theory of gravity.
I think there is something like a theory of gravity here. The things I would note about our universe that make it possible to avoid a lot of traps include:
Physical laws are symmetric across spacetime.
Physical laws are spacially local.
The predictable effects of a local action are typically local; most effects “dissipate” after a while (e.g. into heat). The butterfly effect is evidence for this rather than against this, since it means many effects are unpredictable and so can be modeled thermodynamically.
When small changes have big and predictable effects (e.g. in a computer), there is often agentic optimization power towards the creation and maintenance of this system of effects, and in these cases it is possible for at least some agents to understand important things about how the system works.
Some “partially-dissipated” effects are statistical in nature. For example, an earthquake hitting an area has many immediate effects, but over the long term the important effects are things like “this much local productive activity was disrupted”, “this much local human health was lost”, etc.
You have the genes that you do because evolution, which is similar to a reinforcement learning algorithm, believed that these genes would cause you to survive and reproduce. If we construct AI systems, we will give them code (including a prior) that we expect to cause them to do something useful for us. In general, the agency of an agent’s creator should affect the agent’s beliefs.
If there are many copies of an agent, and successful agents are able to repurpose the resources of unsuccessful ones, then different copies can try different strategies; some will fail but the successful ones can then repurpose their resources. (Evolution can be seen as a special case of this)
Some phenemona have a “fractal” nature, where a small thing behaves similar to a big thing. For example, there are a lot of similarities between the dynamics of a nation and the dynamics of a city. Thus small things can be used as models of big things.
If your interests are aligned with those of agents in your local vicinity, then they will mostly try to help you. (This applies to parents making their children’s environment safe)
I don’t have an elegant theory yet but these observations seem like a reasonable starting point for forming one.
I think that we should expect evolution to give us a prior that is a good lossy compression of actual physics (where “actual physics” means, those patterns the universe has that can be described within our computational complexity bounds). Meaning that, on the one hand it should be low description complexity (otherwise it will be hard for evolution to find it), and on the other hand it should be assign high probability to the true environment (in other words, the KL divergence of the true environment from the prior should be small). And also it should be approximately learnable, otherwise it won’t go from assigning high probability to actually performing well.
The principles you outlined seem reasonable overall.
Note that the locality/dissipation/multiagent assumptions amount to a special case of “the environment is effectively reversible (from the perspective of the human species as a whole) as long as you don’t apply too much optimization power” (“optimization power” probably translates to divergence from some baseline policy plus maybe computational complexity considerations). Now, as you noted before, actual macroscopic physics is not reversible, but it might still be effectively reversible if you have a reliable long-term source of negentropy (like the sun). Maybe we can also slightly relax them by allowing irreversible changes as long as they are localized and the available space is sufficiently big.
“If we construct AI systems, we will give them code (including a prior) that we expect to cause them to do something useful for us. In general, the agency of an agent’s creator should affect the agent’s beliefs” is essentially what DRL does: allows transferring our knowledge to the AI without hard-coding it by hand.
“When small changes have big and predictable effects (e.g. in a computer), there is often agentic optimization power towards the creation and maintenance of this system of effects, and in these cases it is possible for at least some agents to understand important things about how the system works” seems like it would allow us to go beyond effective reversibility, but I’m not sure how to formalize it or whether it’s a justified assumption. One way towards formalizing it is, the prior is s.t. studying the initial state approximate communication class allows determining the entire environment, but this seems to point at a very broad class of approximately learnable priors w/o specifying a criterion how to choose among them.
Another principle that we can try to use is, the ubiquity of analytic functions. Analytic functions have the property that, knowing the function in a bounded domain allows extrapolating it everywhere. This is different from allowing arbitrary computable functions which may have “if” clauses, so that studying the function in a bounded domain is never enough to be sure about its behavior outside it. In particular, this line of inquiry seems relatively easy to formalize using continuous MDPs (although we run into the problem that finding the optimal policy is infeasible, in general). Also, it might have something to do with the effectiveness of neural networks (although the popular ReLU response function is not analytic).
Actually, I am including Bayesianism in “reinforcement learning” in the broad sense, although I am also advocating for some form of asymptotic optimality (importantly, it is not asymptotic in time like often done in the literature, but asymptotic in the time discount parameter; otherwise you give up on most of the utility, like you pointed out in an earlier discussion we had).
In the scenario you describe, the agent will presumably discard (or, strongly penalize the probability of) the pro-nuclear-war hypothesis first since the initial policy loses value much faster on this hypothesis compared to the anti-nuclear-war hypothesis (since the initial policy is biased towards the more likely anti-nuclear-war hypothesis). It will then remain with the anti-nuclear-war hypothesis and follow the corresponding policy (of not starting nuclear war). Perhaps this can be formalized as searching for a fixed point of some transformation.
Consider a panel with two buttons, A and B. One button sends you to Heaven and one to Hell, but you don’t know which is which and there is no way to check without pressing one. To make it more fun, you have to choose a button within one minute or you go to Hell automatically.
So, there are are two environments: in environment X, button A corresponds to Heaven and in environment Y, button B corresponds to Heaven. Obviously both cannot be in a learnable class simultaneously. So, at least one of them has to be ruled out (and if we also want to preserve symmetry then both). What sort of assumption do you think will rule them out?
I think that “scientific and policy knowledge that no one knows at birth and no one could discover by themself over a lifetime” is absolutely compatible with the hypothesis I outlined, even in its most naive form. If humanity’s progress is episodic RL where each human life is an episode, then of course each human uses the knowledge accumulated by previous humans. This is the whole idea of a learning algorithm in this setting.
Also, I think that success with CFC is not a lot of evidence against the hypothesis since, for one thing, CFC doesn’t allow a small group to easily destroy all of humanity, and for another thing, AFAIK action against CFC was only taken when some damage was already apparent. This is different from risks that have to be handled correctly on the first try.
That said, “doesn’t reflect optimistically on our chances to survive AI risk” wasn’t intended as a strong claim but as something very speculative. Possibly I should have made it clearer.
More generally, the idea of restricting to environments s.t. some base policy doesn’t fall into traps on them is not very restrictive. Indeed, for any learnable class H you can just take the base policy to be the learning algorithm itself and tautologically get a class at least as big as H. It becomes more interesting if we impose some constraints on the base policy, such as maybe restricting its computational complexity.
Intuitively, it seems alluring to say that our environment may contain X-risks, but they are s.t. by the time we face them we have enough knowledge to avoid them. However, this leads to assumptions that depend on the prior as a whole rather than on particular environments (basically, it’s not clear whether this is saying anything besides just assuming the prior is learnable). This complicates things, and in particular it becomes less clear what does it mean for such a prior to be “universal”. Moreover, the notion of a “trap” is not even a function of the prior regarded a single mixed environment, but a function of the particular partition of the prior into constituent hypotheses. In other words, it depends on which uncertainty is considered subjective (a property of the agent’s state of knowledge) and which uncertainty is considered objective (an inherent unpredictability of the world). For example, if we go to the initial example but assume that there is a fair coin inside the environment that decides which button is Heaven, then instead of two environments we get one and tautologically there is no trap.
In short, I think there is a lot more thinking to do about this question.
So, there are are two environments: in environment X, button A corresponds to Heaven and in environment Y, button B corresponds to Heaven. Obviously both cannot be in a learnable class simultaneously. So, at least one of them has to be ruled out (and if we also want to preserve symmetry then both). What sort of assumption do you think will rule them out?
I don’t think we should rule either of these out. The obvious answer is to give up on asymptotic optimality and do something more like utility function optimization instead. That would be moving out of the learning theory setting, which is a good thing.
Asymptotic optimality can apply to bounded optimization problems and can’t apply to civilization-level steering problems.
Well, we could give up on regret bounds and instead just consider algorithms that asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality. (This would not be moving out of the learning theory setting though? At least not the way I use this terminology.) Regret bounds would still be useful in the context of guaranteeing transfer of human knowledge and values to the AGI, but not in the context of defining intelligence.
However, my intuition is that it would be the wrong way to go.
For one thing, it seems that it is computationally feasible (at least in some weak sense, i.e. for a small number of hypotheses s.t. the optimal policy for each is feasible) to get asymptotic Bayes-optimality for certain learnable classes (PSRL is a simple example) but not in general. I don’t have a proof (and I would be very interested to see either a proof or a refutation), but it seems to be the case AFAIK.
For another thing, consider questions such as, why intelligent agents outcompete instinct-based agents, and why general intelligence (i.e. Bayes optimality or at least some notion of good performance w.r.t. a prior that is “universal” or “nearly universal” in some sense) can be developed by evolution in a rather restricted environment. These questions seem much easier to answer if intelligence has some frequentist property (i.e. it is in some sense effective in all or most environments) compared to, if intelligence has only purely Bayesian properties (i.e. it is only good on average w.r.t. some very broad ensemble of environments).
For another thing, consider questions such as, why intelligent agents outcompete instinct-based agents, and why general intelligence (i.e. Bayes optimality or at least some notion of good performance w.r.t. a prior that is “universal” or “nearly universal” in some sense) can be developed by evolution in a rather restricted environment. These questions seem much easier to answer if intelligence has some frequentist property (i.e. it is in some sense effective in all or most environments) compared to, if intelligence has only purely Bayesian properties (i.e. it is only good on average w.r.t. some very broad ensemble of environments).
I don’t understand why you think this. Suppose there is some simple “naturalized AIXI”-ish thing that is parameterized on a prior, and there exists a simple prior for which an animal running this algorithm with this prior does pretty well in our world. Then evolution may produce an animal running something like naturalized AIXI with this prior. But naturalized AIXI is only good on average rather than guaranteeing effectiveness in almost all environments.
My intuition is that it must not be just a coincidence that the agent happens to works well in our world, otherwise your formalism doesn’t capture the concept of intelligence in full. For example, we are worried that a UFAI would be very likely to kill us in this particular universe, not just in some counterfactual universes. Moreover, Bayesian agents with simple priors often do very poorly in particular worlds, because of what I call “Bayesian paranoia”. That is, if your agent thinks that lifting its left arm will plausibly send it to hell (a rather simple hypothesis), it will never lift its left arm and learn otherwise.
In fact, I suspect that a certain degree of “optimism” is inherent in our intuitive notion of rationality, and it also has a good track record. For example, when scientists did early experiments with electricity, or magnetism, or chemical reactions, their understanding of physics at the time was arguably insufficient to know this will not destroy the world. However, there were few other ways to go forward. AFAIK the first time anyone seriously worried about a physics experiment was the RHIC (unless you also count the Manhattan project, when Edward Teller suggested the atom bomb might create a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction that will envelope the entire atmosphere). These latter concerns were only raised because we already knew enough to point at specific dangers. Of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about X-risks! But I think that some form of a priori optimism is likely to be correct, in some philosophical sense. (There was also some thinking in that direction by Sunehag and Hutter although I’m not sold on the particular formalism they consider).
I think I understand your point better now. It isn’t a coincidence that an agent produced by evolution has a good prior for our world (because evolution tries many priors, and there are lots of simple priors to try). But the fact that there exists a simple prior that does well in our universe is a fact that needs an explanation. It can’t be proven from Bayesianism; the closest thing to a proof of this form is that computationally unbounded agents can just be born with knowledge of physics if physics is sufficiently simple, but there is no similar argument for computationally bounded agents.
My intuition is that it must not be just a coincidence that the agent happens to works well in our world, otherwise your formalism doesn’t capture the concept of intelligence in full.
It’s not a coincidence because evolution selects the prior, and evolution tries lots of priors. (There are lots of simple priors)
Well, we could give up on regret bounds and instead just consider algorithms that asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality.
I am not proposing this. I am proposing doing something more like AIXI, which has a fixed prior and does not obtain optimality properties on a broad class of environments. It seems like directly specifying the right prior is hard, and it’s plausible that learning theory research would help give intuitions/models about which prior to use or what non-Bayesian algorithm would get good performance in the world we actually live in, but I don’t expect learning theory to directly produce an algorithm we would be happy with running to make big decisions in our universe.
Yes, I think that we’re talking about the same thing. When I say “asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality” I mean the equation from Proposition A.0 here. I refer to this instead of just Bayes-optimality, because exact Bayes-optimality is computationally intractable even for a small number of hypothesis each of which is a small MDP. However, even asymptotic Bayes-optimality is usually only tractable for some learnable classes, AFAIK: for example if you have environments without traps then PSRL is asymptotically Bayes-optimal.
I think that “scientific and policy knowledge that no one knows at birth and no one could discover by themself over a lifetime” is absolutely compatible with the hypothesis I outlined, even in its most naive form. If humanity’s progress is episodic RL where each human life is an episode, then of course each human uses the knowledge accumulated by previous humans. This is the whole idea of a learning algorithm in this setting.
If RL is using human lives as episodes then humans should already be born with the relevant knowledge. There would be no need for history since all learning is encoded in the policy. History isn’t RL; it’s data summarization, model building, and intertemporal communication.
This seems to be interpreting the analogy too literally. Humans are not born with the knowledge, but they acquire the knowledge through some protocol that is designed to be much easier than rediscovering it. Moreover, by “reinforcement learning” I don’t mean the same type of algorithms used for RL today, I only mean that the performance guarantee this process satisfies is of a certain form.
No, it doesn’t rule out any particular environment. A class that consists only of one environment is tautologically learnable, by the optimal policy for this environment. You might be thinking of learnability by anytime algorithms whereas I’m thinking of learnability by non-anytime algorithms (what I called “metapolicies”), the way I defined it here (see Definition 1).
Ok, I am confused by what you mean by “trap”. I thought “trap” meant a set of states you can’t get out of. And if the second law of thermodynamics is true, you can’t get from a high-entropy state to a low-entropy state. What do you mean by “trap”?
To first approximation, a “trap” is a an action s.t. taking it loses long-term value in expectation, i.e an action which is outside the set A0M that I defined here (see the end of Definition 1). This set is always non-empty, since it at least has to contain the optimal action. However, this definition is not very useful when, for example, your environment contains a state that you cannot escape and you also cannot avoid (for example, the heat death of the universe might be such a state), since, in this case, nothing is a trap. To be more precise we need to go from an analysis which is asymptotic in the time discount parameter to an analysis with a fixed, finite time discount parameter (similarly to how with time complexity, we usually start from analyzing the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm, but ultimately we are interested in particular inputs of finite size). For a fixed time time discount parameter, the concept of a trap becomes “fuzzy”: a trap is an action which loses a substantial fraction of the value.
I agree that we’ll want some reasonable assumption on the environment (e.g. symmetry of physical laws throughout spacetime) that will enable thinking to generalize well. I don’t think that assumption looks like “it’s hard to cause a lot of destruction” or “the environment is favorable to you in general”. And I’m pretty sure that individual human lives are not the most important level of analysis for thinking about the learning required to avoid civilization-level traps (e.g. with CFCs, handling the situation required scientific and policy knowledge that no one knows at birth and no one could discover by themself over a lifetime)
Consider also, evolution. Evolution can also be regarded as a sort of reinforcement learning algorithm. So why, during billions years of evolution, no gene sequence was created that somehow destroyed all life on Earth? It seems hard to come up with an answer other than “it’s hard to cause a lot of destruction”.
Some speculation:
I think that we have a sequence of reinforcement algorithms: evolution → humanity → individual human / small group (maybe followed by → AGI) s.t. each step inherits the knowledge generated by the previous step and also applies more optimization pressure than the previous step. This suggests formulating a “favorability” assumption of the following form: there is a (possibly infinite) sequence of reinforcement learning algorithms A0, A1, A2… s.t. each algorithm is more powerful than the previous (e.g. has more computing power), and our environment has to be s.t.
(1) Running policy A0 has a small rate (at most ϵ0) of falling into traps. (2) If we run A0 for some time T0 (s.t. ϵ0T0≪1), and then run A1 after updating on the observations during T0, then A1 has a small rate (at most ϵ1) of falling into traps. (3) Ditto when we add A2
...And so forth.
The sequence {Ai} may be thought of as a sequence of agents or as just steps in the exploration of the environment by a single agent. So, our condition is that, each new “layer of reality” may be explored safely given that the previous layers were already studied.
Most species have gone extinct in the past. I would not be satisfied with an outcome where all humans die or 99% of humans die, even though technically humans might rebuild if there are any left and other intelligent life can evolve if humanity is extinct. These extinction levels can happen with foreseeable tech. Additionally, avoiding nuclear war requires continual cognitive effort to be put into the problem; it would be insufficient to use trial-and-error to avoid nuclear war.
I don’t see why you would want a long sequence of reinforcement learning algorithms. At some point the algorithms produce things that can think, and then they should use their thinking to steer the future rather than trial-and-error alone. I don’t think RL algorithms would get the right answer on CFCs or nuclear war prevention.
I am pretty sure that we can’t fully explore our current level, e.g. that would include starting nuclear wars to test theories about nuclear deterrence and nuclear winter.
I really think that you are taking the RL analogy too far here; decision-making systems involving humans have some things in common with RL but RL theory only describes a fragment of the reasoning that these systems do.
I don’t think you’re interpreting what I’m saying correctly.
First, when I say “reinforcement learning” I don’t necessarily mean the type of RL algorithms that exist today. I just mean something that is designed to perform well (in some sense) in the face of uncertainty about the environment.
Second, even existing RL algorithms are not pure trial-and-error. For example, posterior sampling maintains a belief state about the environment and runs the optimal policy for some environment sampled from the belief state. So, if the belief state “knows” that something is a bad/good idea then the algorithm doesn’t need to actually try it.
Third, “starting nuclear wars to test theories” is the opposite of I’m trying to describe. What I’m saying is, we already have enough knowledge (acquired by exploring previous levels) to know that nuclear war is a bad idea, so exploring this level will not involve starting nuclear wars. What I’m trying to formalize is, what kind of environments allow this to happen consistently, i.e. being able to acquire enough knowledge to deal with a trap before you arrive at the trap.
That is broad enough to include Bayesianism. I think you are imagining a narrower class of algorithms that can achieve some property like asymptotic optimality. Agree that this narrower class is much broader than current RL, though.
I agree that if it knows for sure that it isn’t in some environment then it doesn’t need to test anything to perform well in that environment. But what if there is a 5% chance that the environment is such that nuclear war is good (e.g. because it eliminates other forms of destructive technology for a long time)? Then this AI would start nuclear war with 5% probability per learning epoch. This is not pure trial-and-error but it is trial-and-error in an important relevant sense.
This seems like an interesting research approach and I don’t object to it. I would object to thinking that algorithms that only handle this class of environments are safe to run in our world (which I expect is not of this form). To be clear, while I expect that a Bayesian-ish agent has a good chance to avoid very bad outcomes using the knowledge it has, I don’t think anything that attains asymptotic optimality will be useful while avoiding very bad outcomes with decent probability.
After thinking some more, maybe the following is natural way towards formalizing the optimism condition.
Let H be the space of hypotheses and ξ0∈ΔH be the “unbiased” universal prior. Given any ζ∈ΔH, we denote ^ζ=Eμ∼ζ[μ], i.e. the environment resulting from mixing the environments in the belief state ζ. Given an environment μ, let πμ be the Bayes-optimal policy for μ and πμθ the perturbed Bayes-optimal policy for μ, where θ is a perturbation parameter. Here, “perturbed” probably means something like softmax expected utility, but more thought is needed. Then, the “optimistic” prior ξ is defined as a solution to the following fixed point equation:
ξ(μ)=Z−1ξ0(μ)exp(β(Eμ⋈π^ξθ[U]−Eμ⋈πμ[U]))
Here, Z is a normalization constant and β is an additional parameter.
This equation defines something like a softmax Nash equilibrium in a cooperative game of two players where, one player chooses μ (so that ξ is eir mixed strategy), another player chooses π and the utility is minus regret (alternatively, we might want to choose only Pareto efficient Nash equilibria). The parameter β controls optimism regarding the ability to learn the environment, whereas the parameter θ represents optimism regarding the presence of slack: ability to learn despite making some errors or random exploration (how to choose these parameters is another question).
Possibly, the idea of exploring the environment “layer by layer” can be recovered from combining this with hierarchy assumptions.
This seems like a hack. The equilibrium policy is going to assume that the environment is good to it in general in a magical fashion, rather than assuming the environment is good to it in the specific ways we should expect given our own knowledge of how the environment works. It’s kind of like assuming “things magically end up lower than you expected on priors” instead of having a theory of gravity.
I think there is something like a theory of gravity here. The things I would note about our universe that make it possible to avoid a lot of traps include:
Physical laws are symmetric across spacetime.
Physical laws are spacially local.
The predictable effects of a local action are typically local; most effects “dissipate” after a while (e.g. into heat). The butterfly effect is evidence for this rather than against this, since it means many effects are unpredictable and so can be modeled thermodynamically.
When small changes have big and predictable effects (e.g. in a computer), there is often agentic optimization power towards the creation and maintenance of this system of effects, and in these cases it is possible for at least some agents to understand important things about how the system works.
Some “partially-dissipated” effects are statistical in nature. For example, an earthquake hitting an area has many immediate effects, but over the long term the important effects are things like “this much local productive activity was disrupted”, “this much local human health was lost”, etc.
You have the genes that you do because evolution, which is similar to a reinforcement learning algorithm, believed that these genes would cause you to survive and reproduce. If we construct AI systems, we will give them code (including a prior) that we expect to cause them to do something useful for us. In general, the agency of an agent’s creator should affect the agent’s beliefs.
If there are many copies of an agent, and successful agents are able to repurpose the resources of unsuccessful ones, then different copies can try different strategies; some will fail but the successful ones can then repurpose their resources. (Evolution can be seen as a special case of this)
Some phenemona have a “fractal” nature, where a small thing behaves similar to a big thing. For example, there are a lot of similarities between the dynamics of a nation and the dynamics of a city. Thus small things can be used as models of big things.
If your interests are aligned with those of agents in your local vicinity, then they will mostly try to help you. (This applies to parents making their children’s environment safe)
I don’t have an elegant theory yet but these observations seem like a reasonable starting point for forming one.
I think that we should expect evolution to give us a prior that is a good lossy compression of actual physics (where “actual physics” means, those patterns the universe has that can be described within our computational complexity bounds). Meaning that, on the one hand it should be low description complexity (otherwise it will be hard for evolution to find it), and on the other hand it should be assign high probability to the true environment (in other words, the KL divergence of the true environment from the prior should be small). And also it should be approximately learnable, otherwise it won’t go from assigning high probability to actually performing well.
The principles you outlined seem reasonable overall.
Note that the locality/dissipation/multiagent assumptions amount to a special case of “the environment is effectively reversible (from the perspective of the human species as a whole) as long as you don’t apply too much optimization power” (“optimization power” probably translates to divergence from some baseline policy plus maybe computational complexity considerations). Now, as you noted before, actual macroscopic physics is not reversible, but it might still be effectively reversible if you have a reliable long-term source of negentropy (like the sun). Maybe we can also slightly relax them by allowing irreversible changes as long as they are localized and the available space is sufficiently big.
“If we construct AI systems, we will give them code (including a prior) that we expect to cause them to do something useful for us. In general, the agency of an agent’s creator should affect the agent’s beliefs” is essentially what DRL does: allows transferring our knowledge to the AI without hard-coding it by hand.
“When small changes have big and predictable effects (e.g. in a computer), there is often agentic optimization power towards the creation and maintenance of this system of effects, and in these cases it is possible for at least some agents to understand important things about how the system works” seems like it would allow us to go beyond effective reversibility, but I’m not sure how to formalize it or whether it’s a justified assumption. One way towards formalizing it is, the prior is s.t. studying the initial state approximate communication class allows determining the entire environment, but this seems to point at a very broad class of approximately learnable priors w/o specifying a criterion how to choose among them.
Another principle that we can try to use is, the ubiquity of analytic functions. Analytic functions have the property that, knowing the function in a bounded domain allows extrapolating it everywhere. This is different from allowing arbitrary computable functions which may have “if” clauses, so that studying the function in a bounded domain is never enough to be sure about its behavior outside it. In particular, this line of inquiry seems relatively easy to formalize using continuous MDPs (although we run into the problem that finding the optimal policy is infeasible, in general). Also, it might have something to do with the effectiveness of neural networks (although the popular ReLU response function is not analytic).
Actually, I am including Bayesianism in “reinforcement learning” in the broad sense, although I am also advocating for some form of asymptotic optimality (importantly, it is not asymptotic in time like often done in the literature, but asymptotic in the time discount parameter; otherwise you give up on most of the utility, like you pointed out in an earlier discussion we had).
In the scenario you describe, the agent will presumably discard (or, strongly penalize the probability of) the pro-nuclear-war hypothesis first since the initial policy loses value much faster on this hypothesis compared to the anti-nuclear-war hypothesis (since the initial policy is biased towards the more likely anti-nuclear-war hypothesis). It will then remain with the anti-nuclear-war hypothesis and follow the corresponding policy (of not starting nuclear war). Perhaps this can be formalized as searching for a fixed point of some transformation.
Consider a panel with two buttons, A and B. One button sends you to Heaven and one to Hell, but you don’t know which is which and there is no way to check without pressing one. To make it more fun, you have to choose a button within one minute or you go to Hell automatically.
So, there are are two environments: in environment X, button A corresponds to Heaven and in environment Y, button B corresponds to Heaven. Obviously both cannot be in a learnable class simultaneously. So, at least one of them has to be ruled out (and if we also want to preserve symmetry then both). What sort of assumption do you think will rule them out?
I think that “scientific and policy knowledge that no one knows at birth and no one could discover by themself over a lifetime” is absolutely compatible with the hypothesis I outlined, even in its most naive form. If humanity’s progress is episodic RL where each human life is an episode, then of course each human uses the knowledge accumulated by previous humans. This is the whole idea of a learning algorithm in this setting.
Also, I think that success with CFC is not a lot of evidence against the hypothesis since, for one thing, CFC doesn’t allow a small group to easily destroy all of humanity, and for another thing, AFAIK action against CFC was only taken when some damage was already apparent. This is different from risks that have to be handled correctly on the first try.
That said, “doesn’t reflect optimistically on our chances to survive AI risk” wasn’t intended as a strong claim but as something very speculative. Possibly I should have made it clearer.
More generally, the idea of restricting to environments s.t. some base policy doesn’t fall into traps on them is not very restrictive. Indeed, for any learnable class H you can just take the base policy to be the learning algorithm itself and tautologically get a class at least as big as H. It becomes more interesting if we impose some constraints on the base policy, such as maybe restricting its computational complexity.
Intuitively, it seems alluring to say that our environment may contain X-risks, but they are s.t. by the time we face them we have enough knowledge to avoid them. However, this leads to assumptions that depend on the prior as a whole rather than on particular environments (basically, it’s not clear whether this is saying anything besides just assuming the prior is learnable). This complicates things, and in particular it becomes less clear what does it mean for such a prior to be “universal”. Moreover, the notion of a “trap” is not even a function of the prior regarded a single mixed environment, but a function of the particular partition of the prior into constituent hypotheses. In other words, it depends on which uncertainty is considered subjective (a property of the agent’s state of knowledge) and which uncertainty is considered objective (an inherent unpredictability of the world). For example, if we go to the initial example but assume that there is a fair coin inside the environment that decides which button is Heaven, then instead of two environments we get one and tautologically there is no trap.
In short, I think there is a lot more thinking to do about this question.
I don’t think we should rule either of these out. The obvious answer is to give up on asymptotic optimality and do something more like utility function optimization instead. That would be moving out of the learning theory setting, which is a good thing.
Asymptotic optimality can apply to bounded optimization problems and can’t apply to civilization-level steering problems.
Well, we could give up on regret bounds and instead just consider algorithms that asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality. (This would not be moving out of the learning theory setting though? At least not the way I use this terminology.) Regret bounds would still be useful in the context of guaranteeing transfer of human knowledge and values to the AGI, but not in the context of defining intelligence.
However, my intuition is that it would be the wrong way to go.
For one thing, it seems that it is computationally feasible (at least in some weak sense, i.e. for a small number of hypotheses s.t. the optimal policy for each is feasible) to get asymptotic Bayes-optimality for certain learnable classes (PSRL is a simple example) but not in general. I don’t have a proof (and I would be very interested to see either a proof or a refutation), but it seems to be the case AFAIK.
For another thing, consider questions such as, why intelligent agents outcompete instinct-based agents, and why general intelligence (i.e. Bayes optimality or at least some notion of good performance w.r.t. a prior that is “universal” or “nearly universal” in some sense) can be developed by evolution in a rather restricted environment. These questions seem much easier to answer if intelligence has some frequentist property (i.e. it is in some sense effective in all or most environments) compared to, if intelligence has only purely Bayesian properties (i.e. it is only good on average w.r.t. some very broad ensemble of environments).
I don’t understand why you think this. Suppose there is some simple “naturalized AIXI”-ish thing that is parameterized on a prior, and there exists a simple prior for which an animal running this algorithm with this prior does pretty well in our world. Then evolution may produce an animal running something like naturalized AIXI with this prior. But naturalized AIXI is only good on average rather than guaranteeing effectiveness in almost all environments.
My intuition is that it must not be just a coincidence that the agent happens to works well in our world, otherwise your formalism doesn’t capture the concept of intelligence in full. For example, we are worried that a UFAI would be very likely to kill us in this particular universe, not just in some counterfactual universes. Moreover, Bayesian agents with simple priors often do very poorly in particular worlds, because of what I call “Bayesian paranoia”. That is, if your agent thinks that lifting its left arm will plausibly send it to hell (a rather simple hypothesis), it will never lift its left arm and learn otherwise.
In fact, I suspect that a certain degree of “optimism” is inherent in our intuitive notion of rationality, and it also has a good track record. For example, when scientists did early experiments with electricity, or magnetism, or chemical reactions, their understanding of physics at the time was arguably insufficient to know this will not destroy the world. However, there were few other ways to go forward. AFAIK the first time anyone seriously worried about a physics experiment was the RHIC (unless you also count the Manhattan project, when Edward Teller suggested the atom bomb might create a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction that will envelope the entire atmosphere). These latter concerns were only raised because we already knew enough to point at specific dangers. Of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about X-risks! But I think that some form of a priori optimism is likely to be correct, in some philosophical sense. (There was also some thinking in that direction by Sunehag and Hutter although I’m not sold on the particular formalism they consider).
I think I understand your point better now. It isn’t a coincidence that an agent produced by evolution has a good prior for our world (because evolution tries many priors, and there are lots of simple priors to try). But the fact that there exists a simple prior that does well in our universe is a fact that needs an explanation. It can’t be proven from Bayesianism; the closest thing to a proof of this form is that computationally unbounded agents can just be born with knowledge of physics if physics is sufficiently simple, but there is no similar argument for computationally bounded agents.
It’s not a coincidence because evolution selects the prior, and evolution tries lots of priors. (There are lots of simple priors)
I am not proposing this. I am proposing doing something more like AIXI, which has a fixed prior and does not obtain optimality properties on a broad class of environments. It seems like directly specifying the right prior is hard, and it’s plausible that learning theory research would help give intuitions/models about which prior to use or what non-Bayesian algorithm would get good performance in the world we actually live in, but I don’t expect learning theory to directly produce an algorithm we would be happy with running to make big decisions in our universe.
Yes, I think that we’re talking about the same thing. When I say “asymptotically approach Bayes-optimality” I mean the equation from Proposition A.0 here. I refer to this instead of just Bayes-optimality, because exact Bayes-optimality is computationally intractable even for a small number of hypothesis each of which is a small MDP. However, even asymptotic Bayes-optimality is usually only tractable for some learnable classes, AFAIK: for example if you have environments without traps then PSRL is asymptotically Bayes-optimal.
If RL is using human lives as episodes then humans should already be born with the relevant knowledge. There would be no need for history since all learning is encoded in the policy. History isn’t RL; it’s data summarization, model building, and intertemporal communication.
This seems to be interpreting the analogy too literally. Humans are not born with the knowledge, but they acquire the knowledge through some protocol that is designed to be much easier than rediscovering it. Moreover, by “reinforcement learning” I don’t mean the same type of algorithms used for RL today, I only mean that the performance guarantee this process satisfies is of a certain form.
This rules out environments in which the second law of thermodynamics holds.
No, it doesn’t rule out any particular environment. A class that consists only of one environment is tautologically learnable, by the optimal policy for this environment. You might be thinking of learnability by anytime algorithms whereas I’m thinking of learnability by non-anytime algorithms (what I called “metapolicies”), the way I defined it here (see Definition 1).
Ok, I am confused by what you mean by “trap”. I thought “trap” meant a set of states you can’t get out of. And if the second law of thermodynamics is true, you can’t get from a high-entropy state to a low-entropy state. What do you mean by “trap”?
To first approximation, a “trap” is a an action s.t. taking it loses long-term value in expectation, i.e an action which is outside the set A0M that I defined here (see the end of Definition 1). This set is always non-empty, since it at least has to contain the optimal action. However, this definition is not very useful when, for example, your environment contains a state that you cannot escape and you also cannot avoid (for example, the heat death of the universe might be such a state), since, in this case, nothing is a trap. To be more precise we need to go from an analysis which is asymptotic in the time discount parameter to an analysis with a fixed, finite time discount parameter (similarly to how with time complexity, we usually start from analyzing the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm, but ultimately we are interested in particular inputs of finite size). For a fixed time time discount parameter, the concept of a trap becomes “fuzzy”: a trap is an action which loses a substantial fraction of the value.