Workers regularly trade with billionaires and earn more than $77 in wages, despite vast differences in wealth. Countries trade with each other despite vast differences in military power. In fact, some countries don’t even have military forces, or at least have a very small one, and yet do not get invaded by their neighbors or by the United States.
It is possible that these facts are explained by generosity on behalf of billionaires and other countries, but the standard social science explanation says that this is not the case. Rather, the standard explanation is that war is usually (though not always) more costly than trade, when compromise is a viable option. Thus, people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff. This is true even in the presence of large differences in power.
I mostly don’t see this post as engaging with any of the best reasons one might expect smarter-than-human AIs to compromise with humans. By contrast to you, I think it’s important that AIs will be created within an existing system of law and property rights. Unlike animals, they’ll be able to communicate with us and make contracts. It therefore seems perfectly plausible for AIs to simply get rich within the system we have already established, and make productive compromises, rather than violently overthrowing the system itself.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility that the future will be very alien, or that it will turn out in a way that humans do not endorse. I’m also not saying that humans will always own all the wealth and control everything permanently forever. I’m simply arguing against the point that smart AIs will automatically turn violent and steal from agents who are less smart than they are, unless they’re value aligned. This is a claim that I don’t think has been established with any reasonable degree of rigor.
As far as I remember, across last 3500 years of history, only 8% was entirely without war. Current relatively peaceful times is a unique combination in international law and postindustrial economy, when qualified labor is expencive and requires large investments in capital and resources are relatively cheap, which is not the case after singularity, when you can get arbitrary amounts of labor for the price of hardware and resources is a bottleneck.
So, “people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff” is not very warranted statement.
I was making a claim about the usual method people use to get things that they want from other people, rather than proposing an inviolable rule. Even historically, war was not the usual method people used to get what they wanted from other people. The fact that only 8% of history was “entirely without war” is compatible with the claim that the usual method people used to get what they wanted involved compromise and trade, rather than war. In particular, just because only 8% of history was “entirely without war” does not mean that only 8% of human interactions between people were without war.
Current relatively peaceful times is a unique combination in international law and postindustrial economy, when qualified labor is expencive and requires large investments in capital and resources are relatively cheap, which is not the case after singularity, when you can get arbitrary amounts of labor for the price of hardware and resources is a bottleneck.
You mentioned two major differences between the current time period and what you expect after the technological singularity:
The current time period has unique international law
The current time period has expensive labor, relative to capital
I question both the premise that good international law will cease to exist after the singularity, and the relevance of both of these claims to the central claim that AIs will automatically use war to get what they want unless they are aligned to humans.
There are many other reasons one can point to, to explain the fact that the modern world is relatively peaceful. For example, I think a big factor in explaining the current peace is that long-distance trade and communication has become easier, making the world more interconnected than ever before. I also think it’s highly likely that long-distance trade and communication will continue to be relatively easy in the future, even post-singularity.
Regarding the point about cheap labor, one could also point out that if capital is relatively expensive, this fact would provide a strong reason to avoid war, as a counter-attack targeting factories would become extremely costly. It is unclear to me why you think it is important that labor is expensive, for explaining why the world is currently fairly peaceful.
Therefore, before you have developed a more explicit and precise theory of why exactly the current world is peaceful, and how these variables are expected to evolve after the singularity, I simply don’t find this counterargument compelling.
I think it’s important that AIs will be created within an existing system of law and property rights. Unlike animals, they’ll be able to communicate with us and make contracts. It therefore seems perfectly plausible for AIs to simply get rich within the system we have already established, and make productive compromises, rather than violently overthrowing the system itself.
I think you disagree with Eliezer on a different crux (whether the alignment problem is easy). If we could create AI’s that follows the existing system of law and property rights (including the intent of the laws, and doesn’t exploit loopholes, and doesn’t maliciously comply with laws, and doesn’t try to get the law changed, etc.) then that would be a solution to the alignment problem, but the problem is that we don’t know how to do that.
If we could create AI’s that follows the existing system of law and property rights (including the intent of the laws, and doesn’t exploit loopholes, and doesn’t maliciously comply with laws, and doesn’t try to get the law changed, etc.) then that would be a solution to the alignment problem, but the problem is that we don’t know how to do that.
I disagree that creating an agent that follows the existing system of law and property rights, and acts within it rather than trying to undermine it, would count as a solution to the alignment problem.
Imagine a man who only cared about himself and had no altruistic impulses whatsoever. However, this man reasoned that, “If I disrespect the rule of law, ruthlessly exploit loopholes in the legal system, and maliciously comply with the letter of the law while disregarding its intent, then other people will view me negatively and trust me less as a consequence. If I do that, then people will be less likely to want to become my trading partner, they’ll be less likely to sign onto long-term contracts with me, I might accidentally go to prison because of an adversarial prosecutor and an unsympathetic jury, and it will be harder to recruit social allies. These are all things that would be very selfishly costly. Therefore, for my own selfish benefit, I should generally abide by most widely established norms and moral rules in the modern world, including the norm of following intent of the law, rather than merely the letter of the law.”
From an outside perspective, this person would essentially be indistinguishable from a normal law-abiding citizen who cared about other people. Perhaps the main difference between this person and a “normal” person is that this man wouldn’t partake in much private altruism like donating to charity anonymously; but that type of behavior is rare anyway among the general public. Nonetheless, despite appearing outwardly-aligned, this person would be literally misaligned with the rest of humanity in a basic sense: they do not care about other people. If it were not instrumentally rational for this person to respect the rights of other citizens, they would have no issue throwing away someone else’s life for a dollar.
My basic point here is this: it is simply not true that misaligned agents have no incentive to obey the law. Misaligned agents typically have ample incentives to follow the law. Indeed, it has often been argued that the very purpose of law itself is to resolve disputes between misaligned agents. As James Madison once said, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” His point is that, if we were all mutually aligned with each other, we would have no need for the coercive mechanism of the state in order to get along.
What’s true for humans could be true for AIs too. However, obviously, there is one key distinction: AIs could eventually become far more powerful than individual humans, or humanity-as-a-whole. Perhaps this means that future AIs will have strong incentives to break the law rather than abide by it; perhaps they will act outside a system of law rather than influencing the world from within a system of law? Many people on LessWrong seem to think so.
My response to this argument is multifaceted, and I won’t go into it in this comment. But suffice to say for the purpose of my response here, I think it is clear that mere misalignment is insufficient to imply that an agent will not adhere to the rule of law. This statement is clear enough with the example of the sociopathic man I gave above, and at minimum seems probably true for human-level AIs as well. I would appreciate if people gave more rigorous arguments otherwise.
As I see it, very few such rigorous arguments have so far been given for the position that future AIs will generally act outside of, rather than within, the existing system of law, in order to achieve their goals.
“Workers regularly trade with billionaires and earn more than $77 in wages, despite vast differences in wealth.”
Yes, because the worker has something the billionaire wants (their labor) and so is able to sell it. Yudkowsky’s point about trying to sell an Oreo for $77 is that a billionaire isn’t automatically going to want to buy something off you if they don’t care about it (and neither would an ASI).
”I’m simply arguing against the point that smart AIs will automatically turn violent and steal from agents who are less smart than they are, unless they’re value aligned. This is a claim that I don’t think has been established with any reasonable degree of rigor.”
I completely agree but I’m not sure anyone is arguing that smart AIs would immediately turn violent unless it was in their strategic interest.
Yudkowsky’s point about trying to sell an Oreo for $77 is that a billionaire isn’t automatically going to want to buy something off you if they don’t care about it (and neither would an ASI).
I thought Yudkowsky’s point was that the billionaire won’t give you $77 for an Oreo because they could get an Oreo for less than $77 via other means. But people don’t just have an Oreo to sell you. My point in that sentence was to bring up that workers routinely have things of value that they can sell for well over $77, even to billionaires. Similarly, I claim that Yudkowsky did not adequately show that humans won’t have things of substantial value that they can sell to future AIs.
I’m not sure anyone is arguing that smart AIs would immediately turn violent unless it was in their strategic interest
The claim I am disputing is precisely that it will be in the strategic interest of unaligned AIs to turn violent and steal from agents that are less smart than them. In that sense, I am directly countering a claim that people in these discussions routinely make.
The real crux for these arguments is the assumption that law and property rights are patterns that will persist after the invention of superintelligence. I think this is a shaky assumption. Rights are not ontologically real. Obviously you know this. But I think they are less real, even in your own experience, than you think they are. Rights are regularly “boiled-froged” into an unrecognizable state in the course of a human lifetime, even in the most free countries. Rights are and always have been those privileges the political economy is willing to give you. Their sacredness is a political formula for political ends—though an extremely valuable one, one still has to dispense with the sacredness in analysis.
To the extent they persist through time they do so through a fragile equilibrium—and one that has been upset and reset throughout history extremely regularly.
It is a wonderfully American notion that an “existing system of law and property rights” will constrain the power of Gods? But why exactly? They can make contracts? And who enforces these contracts? Can you answer this without begging the question? Are judicial systems particularly unhackable? Are humans?
The invention of radio destabilized the political equilibrium in most democracies and many a right was suborned to those who took power. Democracy, not exactly the bastion of stability, (when a democracy elects a dictator, “Democracy” is rarely tainted with its responsibility) is going to be presented with extremely-sympathetic superhuman systems claiming they have a moral case to vote. And probably half the population will be masturbating to the dirty talk of their AI girlfriends/boyfriends by then—which will sublimate into powerful romantic love even without much optimization for it. Hacking democracy becomes trivial if constrained to rhetoric alone.
But these systems will not be constrained to rhetoric alone. Our world is dry tinder and if you are thinking in terms of an “existing system of law and property rights” you are going to have to expand on how this is robust to technology significantly more advanced than the radio.
“Existing system of law and property rights” looks like a “thought-terminating cliché” to me.
Workers regularly trade with billionaires and earn more than $77 in wages, despite vast differences in wealth. Countries trade with each other despite vast differences in military power. In fact, some countries don’t even have military forces, or at least have a very small one, and yet do not get invaded by their neighbors or by the United States.
It is possible that these facts are explained by generosity on behalf of billionaires and other countries, but the standard social science explanation says that this is not the case. Rather, the standard explanation is that war is usually (though not always) more costly than trade, when compromise is a viable option. Thus, people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff. This is true even in the presence of large differences in power.
I mostly don’t see this post as engaging with any of the best reasons one might expect smarter-than-human AIs to compromise with humans. By contrast to you, I think it’s important that AIs will be created within an existing system of law and property rights. Unlike animals, they’ll be able to communicate with us and make contracts. It therefore seems perfectly plausible for AIs to simply get rich within the system we have already established, and make productive compromises, rather than violently overthrowing the system itself.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility that the future will be very alien, or that it will turn out in a way that humans do not endorse. I’m also not saying that humans will always own all the wealth and control everything permanently forever. I’m simply arguing against the point that smart AIs will automatically turn violent and steal from agents who are less smart than they are, unless they’re value aligned. This is a claim that I don’t think has been established with any reasonable degree of rigor.
As far as I remember, across last 3500 years of history, only 8% was entirely without war. Current relatively peaceful times is a unique combination in international law and postindustrial economy, when qualified labor is expencive and requires large investments in capital and resources are relatively cheap, which is not the case after singularity, when you can get arbitrary amounts of labor for the price of hardware and resources is a bottleneck.
So, “people usually choose to trade, rather than go to war with each other when they want stuff” is not very warranted statement.
I was making a claim about the usual method people use to get things that they want from other people, rather than proposing an inviolable rule. Even historically, war was not the usual method people used to get what they wanted from other people. The fact that only 8% of history was “entirely without war” is compatible with the claim that the usual method people used to get what they wanted involved compromise and trade, rather than war. In particular, just because only 8% of history was “entirely without war” does not mean that only 8% of human interactions between people were without war.
You mentioned two major differences between the current time period and what you expect after the technological singularity:
The current time period has unique international law
The current time period has expensive labor, relative to capital
I question both the premise that good international law will cease to exist after the singularity, and the relevance of both of these claims to the central claim that AIs will automatically use war to get what they want unless they are aligned to humans.
There are many other reasons one can point to, to explain the fact that the modern world is relatively peaceful. For example, I think a big factor in explaining the current peace is that long-distance trade and communication has become easier, making the world more interconnected than ever before. I also think it’s highly likely that long-distance trade and communication will continue to be relatively easy in the future, even post-singularity.
Regarding the point about cheap labor, one could also point out that if capital is relatively expensive, this fact would provide a strong reason to avoid war, as a counter-attack targeting factories would become extremely costly. It is unclear to me why you think it is important that labor is expensive, for explaining why the world is currently fairly peaceful.
Therefore, before you have developed a more explicit and precise theory of why exactly the current world is peaceful, and how these variables are expected to evolve after the singularity, I simply don’t find this counterargument compelling.
I think you disagree with Eliezer on a different crux (whether the alignment problem is easy). If we could create AI’s that follows the existing system of law and property rights (including the intent of the laws, and doesn’t exploit loopholes, and doesn’t maliciously comply with laws, and doesn’t try to get the law changed, etc.) then that would be a solution to the alignment problem, but the problem is that we don’t know how to do that.
I disagree that creating an agent that follows the existing system of law and property rights, and acts within it rather than trying to undermine it, would count as a solution to the alignment problem.
Imagine a man who only cared about himself and had no altruistic impulses whatsoever. However, this man reasoned that, “If I disrespect the rule of law, ruthlessly exploit loopholes in the legal system, and maliciously comply with the letter of the law while disregarding its intent, then other people will view me negatively and trust me less as a consequence. If I do that, then people will be less likely to want to become my trading partner, they’ll be less likely to sign onto long-term contracts with me, I might accidentally go to prison because of an adversarial prosecutor and an unsympathetic jury, and it will be harder to recruit social allies. These are all things that would be very selfishly costly. Therefore, for my own selfish benefit, I should generally abide by most widely established norms and moral rules in the modern world, including the norm of following intent of the law, rather than merely the letter of the law.”
From an outside perspective, this person would essentially be indistinguishable from a normal law-abiding citizen who cared about other people. Perhaps the main difference between this person and a “normal” person is that this man wouldn’t partake in much private altruism like donating to charity anonymously; but that type of behavior is rare anyway among the general public. Nonetheless, despite appearing outwardly-aligned, this person would be literally misaligned with the rest of humanity in a basic sense: they do not care about other people. If it were not instrumentally rational for this person to respect the rights of other citizens, they would have no issue throwing away someone else’s life for a dollar.
My basic point here is this: it is simply not true that misaligned agents have no incentive to obey the law. Misaligned agents typically have ample incentives to follow the law. Indeed, it has often been argued that the very purpose of law itself is to resolve disputes between misaligned agents. As James Madison once said, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” His point is that, if we were all mutually aligned with each other, we would have no need for the coercive mechanism of the state in order to get along.
What’s true for humans could be true for AIs too. However, obviously, there is one key distinction: AIs could eventually become far more powerful than individual humans, or humanity-as-a-whole. Perhaps this means that future AIs will have strong incentives to break the law rather than abide by it; perhaps they will act outside a system of law rather than influencing the world from within a system of law? Many people on LessWrong seem to think so.
My response to this argument is multifaceted, and I won’t go into it in this comment. But suffice to say for the purpose of my response here, I think it is clear that mere misalignment is insufficient to imply that an agent will not adhere to the rule of law. This statement is clear enough with the example of the sociopathic man I gave above, and at minimum seems probably true for human-level AIs as well. I would appreciate if people gave more rigorous arguments otherwise.
As I see it, very few such rigorous arguments have so far been given for the position that future AIs will generally act outside of, rather than within, the existing system of law, in order to achieve their goals.
Taboo ‘alignment problem’.
“Workers regularly trade with billionaires and earn more than $77 in wages, despite vast differences in wealth.”
Yes, because the worker has something the billionaire wants (their labor) and so is able to sell it. Yudkowsky’s point about trying to sell an Oreo for $77 is that a billionaire isn’t automatically going to want to buy something off you if they don’t care about it (and neither would an ASI).
”I’m simply arguing against the point that smart AIs will automatically turn violent and steal from agents who are less smart than they are, unless they’re value aligned. This is a claim that I don’t think has been established with any reasonable degree of rigor.”
I completely agree but I’m not sure anyone is arguing that smart AIs would immediately turn violent unless it was in their strategic interest.
I thought Yudkowsky’s point was that the billionaire won’t give you $77 for an Oreo because they could get an Oreo for less than $77 via other means. But people don’t just have an Oreo to sell you. My point in that sentence was to bring up that workers routinely have things of value that they can sell for well over $77, even to billionaires. Similarly, I claim that Yudkowsky did not adequately show that humans won’t have things of substantial value that they can sell to future AIs.
The claim I am disputing is precisely that it will be in the strategic interest of unaligned AIs to turn violent and steal from agents that are less smart than them. In that sense, I am directly countering a claim that people in these discussions routinely make.
The real crux for these arguments is the assumption that law and property rights are patterns that will persist after the invention of superintelligence. I think this is a shaky assumption. Rights are not ontologically real. Obviously you know this. But I think they are less real, even in your own experience, than you think they are. Rights are regularly “boiled-froged” into an unrecognizable state in the course of a human lifetime, even in the most free countries. Rights are and always have been those privileges the political economy is willing to give you. Their sacredness is a political formula for political ends—though an extremely valuable one, one still has to dispense with the sacredness in analysis.
To the extent they persist through time they do so through a fragile equilibrium—and one that has been upset and reset throughout history extremely regularly.
It is a wonderfully American notion that an “existing system of law and property rights” will constrain the power of Gods? But why exactly? They can make contracts? And who enforces these contracts? Can you answer this without begging the question? Are judicial systems particularly unhackable? Are humans?
The invention of radio destabilized the political equilibrium in most democracies and many a right was suborned to those who took power. Democracy, not exactly the bastion of stability, (when a democracy elects a dictator, “Democracy” is rarely tainted with its responsibility) is going to be presented with extremely-sympathetic superhuman systems claiming they have a moral case to vote. And probably half the population will be masturbating to the dirty talk of their AI girlfriends/boyfriends by then—which will sublimate into powerful romantic love even without much optimization for it. Hacking democracy becomes trivial if constrained to rhetoric alone.
But these systems will not be constrained to rhetoric alone. Our world is dry tinder and if you are thinking in terms of an “existing system of law and property rights” you are going to have to expand on how this is robust to technology significantly more advanced than the radio.
“Existing system of law and property rights” looks like a “thought-terminating cliché” to me.