I read your linked shortform thread. I agreed with pretty most of your arguments against some common AGI takeover arguments. I agree that they won’t coordinate against us and won’t have “collective grudges” against us.
But I don’t think the arguments for continued stability are very thorough, either. I think we just don’t know how it will play out. And I think there’s a reason to be concerned that takeover will be rational for AGIs, where it’s not for humans.
The central difference in logic is the capacity for self-improvement. In your post, you addressed self-improvement by linking a Christiano piece on slow takeoff. But he noted at the start that he wasn’t arguing against self-improvement, only that the pace of self improvement would be more modest. But the potential implications for a balance of power in the world remain.
Humans are all locked to a similar level of cognitive and physical capabilities. That has implications for game theory where all of the competitors are humans. Cooperation often makes more sense for humans. But the same isn’t necessarily true of AGI. Their cognitive and physical capacities can potentially be expanded on. So it’s (very loosely) like the difference between game theory in chess, and chess where one of the moves is to add new capabilities to your pieces. We can’t learn much about the new game from theory of the old, particularly if we don’t even know all of the capabilities that a player might add to their pieces.
More concretely: it may be quite rational for a human controlling an AGI to tell it to try to self-improve and develop new capacities, strategies and technologies to potentially take over the world. With a first-mover advantage, such a takeover might be entirely possible. Its capacities might remain ahead of the rest of the world’s AI/AGIs if they hadn’t started to aggressively self-improve and develop the capacities to win conflicts. This would be particularly true if the aggressor AGI was willing to cause global catastrophe (e.g., EMPs, bringing down power grids).
The assumption of a stable balance of power in the face of competitors that can improve their capacities in dramatic ways seems unlikely to be true by default, and at the least, worthy of close inspection. Yet I’m afraid it’s the default assumption for many.
Your shortform post is more on-topic for this part of the discussion, so I’m copying this comment there and will continue there if you want. It’s worth more posts; I hope to write one myself if time allows.
Edit: It looks like there’s an extensive discussion there, including my points here, so I won’t bother copying this over. It looked like the point about self-improvement destabilizing the situation had been raised but not really addressed. So I continue to think it needs more thought before we accept a future that includes proliferation of AGI capable of RSI.
I read your linked shortform thread. I agreed with pretty most of your arguments against some common AGI takeover arguments. I agree that they won’t coordinate against us and won’t have “collective grudges” against us.
But I don’t think the arguments for continued stability are very thorough, either. I think we just don’t know how it will play out. And I think there’s a reason to be concerned that takeover will be rational for AGIs, where it’s not for humans.
The central difference in logic is the capacity for self-improvement. In your post, you addressed self-improvement by linking a Christiano piece on slow takeoff. But he noted at the start that he wasn’t arguing against self-improvement, only that the pace of self improvement would be more modest. But the potential implications for a balance of power in the world remain.
Humans are all locked to a similar level of cognitive and physical capabilities. That has implications for game theory where all of the competitors are humans. Cooperation often makes more sense for humans. But the same isn’t necessarily true of AGI. Their cognitive and physical capacities can potentially be expanded on. So it’s (very loosely) like the difference between game theory in chess, and chess where one of the moves is to add new capabilities to your pieces. We can’t learn much about the new game from theory of the old, particularly if we don’t even know all of the capabilities that a player might add to their pieces.
More concretely: it may be quite rational for a human controlling an AGI to tell it to try to self-improve and develop new capacities, strategies and technologies to potentially take over the world. With a first-mover advantage, such a takeover might be entirely possible. Its capacities might remain ahead of the rest of the world’s AI/AGIs if they hadn’t started to aggressively self-improve and develop the capacities to win conflicts. This would be particularly true if the aggressor AGI was willing to cause global catastrophe (e.g., EMPs, bringing down power grids).
The assumption of a stable balance of power in the face of competitors that can improve their capacities in dramatic ways seems unlikely to be true by default, and at the least, worthy of close inspection. Yet I’m afraid it’s the default assumption for many.
Your shortform post is more on-topic for this part of the discussion, so I’m copying this comment there and will continue there if you want. It’s worth more posts; I hope to write one myself if time allows.
Edit: It looks like there’s an extensive discussion there, including my points here, so I won’t bother copying this over. It looked like the point about self-improvement destabilizing the situation had been raised but not really addressed. So I continue to think it needs more thought before we accept a future that includes proliferation of AGI capable of RSI.