Because the rules are meant for humans, with our habits and morals and limitations, and our explicit understanding of them only works because they operate in an ecosystem full of other humans. I think our rules/norms would fail to work if we tried to port them to a society of octopuses, even if those octopuses were to observe humans to try to improve their understanding of the object-level impact of the rules.
I think there’s something to this, but I think perhaps it only applies strongly if and when most of the economy is run by or delegated to AI services? My intuition is that for the near-to-medium term, AI systems will mostly be used to aid / augment humans in existing tasks and services (e.g. the list in the section on Designing roles and norms), for which we can either either use existing laws and norms, or extensions of them. If we are successful in applying that alignment approach in the near-to-medium term, as well as the associated governance problems, then it seems to me that we can much more carefully control the transition to a mostly-automated economy as well, giving us leeway to gradually adjust our norms and laws.
No doubt, that’s a big “if”. If the transition to a mostly/fully-automated economy is sharper than laid out above, then I think your concerns about norm/contract learning are very relevant (but also that the preference-based alternative is more difficult still). And if we did end up with a single actor like OpenAI building transformative AI before everyone else, my recommendation would be still be to adopt something like the pluralistic approach outlined here, perhaps by gradually introducing AI systems into well-understood and well-governed social and institutional roles, rather than initiating a sharp shift to a fully-automated economy.
While listening to the latest Inside View podcast, it occurred to me that this perspective on AI safety has some natural advantages when translating into regulation that present governments might be able to implement to prepare for the future. If AI governance people aren’t already thinking about this, maybe bother some / convince people in this comment section to bother some?
Yes, it seems like a number of AI policy people at least noticed the tweet I made about this talk! If you have suggestions for who in particular I should get the attention of, do let me know.
I think there’s something to this, but I think perhaps it only applies strongly if and when most of the economy is run by or delegated to AI services? My intuition is that for the near-to-medium term, AI systems will mostly be used to aid / augment humans in existing tasks and services (e.g. the list in the section on Designing roles and norms), for which we can either either use existing laws and norms, or extensions of them. If we are successful in applying that alignment approach in the near-to-medium term, as well as the associated governance problems, then it seems to me that we can much more carefully control the transition to a mostly-automated economy as well, giving us leeway to gradually adjust our norms and laws.
No doubt, that’s a big “if”. If the transition to a mostly/fully-automated economy is sharper than laid out above, then I think your concerns about norm/contract learning are very relevant (but also that the preference-based alternative is more difficult still). And if we did end up with a single actor like OpenAI building transformative AI before everyone else, my recommendation would be still be to adopt something like the pluralistic approach outlined here, perhaps by gradually introducing AI systems into well-understood and well-governed social and institutional roles, rather than initiating a sharp shift to a fully-automated economy.
Yes, it seems like a number of AI policy people at least noticed the tweet I made about this talk! If you have suggestions for who in particular I should get the attention of, do let me know.