My thought process when I use “safer” and “less safe” in posts like this is: the main arguments that AGI will be unsafe depends on it having certain properties, like agency, unbounded goals, lack of interpretability, desire and ability to self-improve, and so on. So reducing the extent to which it has those properties will make it safer, because those arguments will be less applicable.
I guess you could have two objections to this:
Maybe safety is non-monotonic in those properties.
Maybe you don’t get any reduction in safety until you hit a certain threshold (corresponding to some success story).
I tend not to worry so much about these two objections because to me, the properties I outlined above are still too vague to have a good idea of the landscape of risks with respect to those properties. Once we know what agency is, we can talk about its monotonicity. For now my epistemic state is: extreme agency is an important component of the main argument for risk, so all else equal reducing it should reduce risk.
I like the idea of tying safety ideas to success stories in general, though, and will try to use it for my next post, which proposes more specific interventions during deployment. Having said that, I also believe that most safety work will be done by AGIs, and so I want to remain open-minded to success stories that are beyond my capability to predict.
For now my epistemic state is: extreme agency is an important component of thee main argument for risk, so all else equal reducing it should reduce risk.
I appreciate the explanation, but this is pretty far from my own epistemic state, which is that arguments for AI risk are highlydisjunctive, most types of AGI (not just highly agentic ones) are probably unsafe (i.e., are likely to lead us away from rather than towards a success story), at best probably only a few very specific AGI designs (which may well be agentic if combined with other properties) are both feasible and safe (i.e., can count as success stories), so it doesn’t make sense to say that an AGI is “safer” just because it’s less agentic.
Having said that, I also believe that most safety work will be done by AGIs, and so I want to remain open-minded to success stories that are beyond my capability to predict.
Getting to an AGI that can safely do human or superhuman level safety work would be a success story in itself, which I labeled “Research Assistant” in my post.
my own epistemic state, which is that arguments for AI risk are highlydisjunctive, most types of AGI (not just highly agentic ones) are probably unsafe (i.e., are likely to lead us away from rather than towards a success story), at best probably only a few very specific AGI designs (which may well be agentic if combined with other properties) are both feasible and safe (i.e., can count as success stories)
Yeah, I guess I’m not surprised that we have this disagreement. To briefly sketch out why I disagree (mostly for common knowledge; I don’t expect this to persuade you):
I think there’s something like a logistic curve for how seriously we should take arguments. Almost all arguments are bad, and have many many ways in which they might fail. This is particularly true for arguments trying to predict the future, since they have to invent novel concepts to do so. Only once you’ve seen a significant amount of work put into exploring an argument, the assumptions it relies on, and the ways it might be wrong, should you start to assign moderate probability that the argument is true, and that the concepts it uses will in hindsight make sense.
Most of the arguments mentioned in your post on disjunctive safety arguments fall far short of any reasonable credibility threshold. Most of them haven’t even had a single blog post which actually tries to scrutinise them in a critical way, or lay out their key assumptions. And to be clear, a single blog post is just about the lowest possible standard you might apply. Perhaps it’d be sufficient in a domain where claims can be very easily verified, but when we’re trying to make claims that a given effect will be pivotal for the entire future of humanity despite whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent, we need higher standards to get to the part of the logistic curve with non-negligible gradient.
This is not an argument for dismissing all of these possible mechanisms out of hand, but an argument that they shouldn’t (yet) be given high credence. I think they are often given too high credence because there’s a sort of halo effect from the arguments which have been explored in detail, making us more willing to consider arguments that in isolation would seem very out-there. When you think about the arguments made in your disjunctive post, how hard do you try to imagine each one conditional on the knowledge that the other arguments are false? Are they actually compelling in a world where Eliezer is wrong about intelligence explosions and Paul is wrong about influence-seeking agents? (Maybe you’d say that there are legitimate links between these arguments, e.g. common premises—but if so, they’re not highly disjunctive).
Getting to an AGI that can safely do human or superhuman level safety work would be a success story in itself, which I labeled “Research Assistant” in my post
Good point, I shall read that post more carefully. I still don’t think that this post is tied to the Research Assistant success story though.
but when we’re trying to make claims that a given effect will be pivotal for the entire future of humanity despite whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent, we need higher standards to get to the part of the logistic curve with non-negligible gradient.
I guess a lot of this comes down to priors and burden of proof. (I guess I have a high prior that making something smarter than human is dangerous unless we know exactly what we’re doing including the social/political aspects, and you don’t, so you think the burden of proof is on me?) But (1) I did write a bunch of blog posts which are linked to in the second post (maybe you didn’t click on that one?) and it would help if you could point out more where you’re not convinced, and (2) does the current COVID-19 disaster not make you more pessimistic about “whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent”?
When you think about the arguments made in your disjunctive post, how hard do you try to imagine each one conditional on the knowledge that the other arguments are false? Are they actually compelling in a world where Eliezer is wrong about intelligence explosions and Paul is wrong about influence-seeking agents?
I think I did? Eliezer being wrong about intelligence explosions just means we live in a world without intelligence explosions, and Paul being wrong about influence-seeking agents just means he (or someone) succeeds in building intent-aligned AGI, right? Many of my “disjunctive” arguments were written specifically with that scenario in mind.
Many of my “disjunctive” arguments were written specifically with that scenario in mind.
Cool, makes sense. I retract my pointed questions.
I guess I have a high prior that making something smarter than human is dangerous unless we know exactly what we’re doing including the social/political aspects, and you don’t, so you think the burden of proof is on me?
This seems about right. In general when someone proposes a mechanism by which the world might end, I think the burden of proof is on them. You’re not just claiming “dangerous”, you’re claiming something like “more dangerous than anything else has ever been, even if it’s intent-aligned”. This is an incredibly bold claim and requires correspondingly thorough support.
does the current COVID-19 disaster not make you more pessimistic about “whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent”?
Actually, COVID makes me a little more optimistic. First because quite a few countries are handling it well. Secondly because I wasn’t even sure that lockdowns were a tool in the arsenal of democracies, and it seemed pretty wild to shut the economy down for so long. But they did. Also essential services have proven much more robust than I’d expected (I thought there would be food shortages, etc).
This seems about right. In general when someone proposes a mechanism by which the world might end, I think the burden of proof is on them. You’re not just claiming “dangerous”, you’re claiming something like “more dangerous than anything else has ever been, even if it’s intent-aligned”. This is an incredibly bold claim and requires correspondingly thorough support.
“More dangerous than anything else has ever been” does not seem incredibly bold to me, given that superhuman AI will be more powerful than anything else the world has seen. Historically the risk of civilization doing damage to itself seems to grow with the power that it has access to (e.g., the two world wars, substantial risks of nuclear war and man-made pandemic that continue to accumulate each year, climate change) so I think I’m just extrapolating a clear trend. (Past risks like these could not have been eliminated by solving a single straightforward, self-contained, technical problem analogous to “intent alignment” so why expect that now?)
To risk being uncharitable, your position seems analogous to someone saying, before the start of the nuclear era, “I think we should have a low prior that developing any particular kind of nuclear weapon will greatly increase the risk of global devastation in the future, because (1) that would be unprecedentedly dangerous and (2) nobody wants global devastation so everyone will work to prevent it. The only argument that has been developed well enough to overcome this low prior is that some types of nuclear weapons could potentially ignite the atmosphere, so to be safe we’ll just make sure to only build bombs that definitely can’t do that.” (What would be a charitable historical analogy to your position if this one is not?)
“The world might end” is not the only or even the main thing I’m worried about, especially because there are more people who can be expected to worry about “the world might end” and try to do something about it. My focus is more on the possibility that humanity survives but the values of people like me (or human values, or objective morality, depending on what the correct metaethics turn out to be) end up controlling only a small fraction of universe so we end up with astronomical waste or Beyond Astronomical Waste as a result. (Or our values become corrupted and the universe ends up being optimized for completely alien or wrong values.) There is plenty of precedence for the world becoming quite suboptimal according to some group’s values, and there is no apparent reason to think the universe has to evolve according to objective morality (if such a thing exists), so my claim also doesn’t seem very extraordinary from this perspective.
First because quite a few countries are handling it well. Secondly because I wasn’t even sure that lockdowns were a tool in the arsenal of democracies, and it seemed pretty wild to shut the economy down for so long.
If you think societal response to a risk like pandemic (and presumably AI) is substantially suboptimal by default (and it clearly is given that large swaths of humanity are incurring a lot of needless deaths), doesn’t that imply significant residual risks, and plenty of room for people like us to try to improve the response? To a first approximation, the default suboptimal social response reduces all risks by some constant amount, so if some particular x-risk is important to work on without considering default social response, it’s probably still important to work on after considering “whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent”. Do you disagree this argument? Did you have some other reason for saying that, that I’m not getting?
To try to encourage you to engage with my arguments more (as far as pointing out where you’re not convinced), I think I’m pretty good at being skeptical of my own ideas and have a good track record in terms of not spewing off a lot of random ideas that turn out to be far off the mark. But I am too lazy / have too many interests / am too easily distracted to write long papers/posts where I lay out every step of my reasoning and address every possible counterargument in detail.
So what I’d like to do is to just amend my posts to address the main objections that many people actually have, enough for more readers like you to “assign moderate probability that the argument is true”. In order to do that, I need to have a better idea what objections people actually have or what counterarguments they currently find convincing. Does this make sense to you?
I’m pretty skeptical of this as a way of making progress. It’s not that I already have strong disagreements with your arguments. But rather, if you haven’t yet explained them thoroughly, I expect them to be underspecified, and use some words and concepts that are wrong in hard-to-see ways. One way this might happen is if those arguments use concepts (like “metaphilosophy”) that kinda intuitively seem like they’re pointing at something, but come with a bunch of connotations and underlying assumptions that make actually understanding them very tricky.
So my expectation for what happens here is: I look at one of your arguments, formulate some objection X, and then you say either: “No, that wasn’t what I was claiming”, or “Actually, ~X is one of the implicit premises”, or “Your objection doesn’t make any sense in the framework I’m outlining” and then we repeat this a dozen or more times. I recently went through this process with Rohin, and it took a huge amount of time and effort (both here and in private conversation) to get anywhere near agreement, despite our views on AI being much more similar than yours and mine.
And even then, you’ll only have fixed the problems I’m able to spot, and not all the others. In other words, I think of patching your way to good arguments as kinda like patching your way to safe AGI. (To be clear, none of this is meant as specific criticism of your arguments, but rather as general comments about any large-scale arguments using novel concepts that haven’t been made very thoroughly and carefully).
Having said this, I’m open to trying it for one of your arguments. So perhaps you can point me to one that you particularly want engagement on?
(serious question, I’m not sure what the right process here is)
What do you think should happen instead of “read through and object to Wei_Dai’s existing blogposts?”. Is there a different process that would work better? Or you think this generally isn’t worth the time? Or you think Wei Dai should write a blogpost that more clearly passes your “sniff test” of “probably compelling enough to be worth more of my attention?”
Mostly “Wei Dai should write a blogpost that more clearly passes your “sniff test” of “probably compelling enough to be worth more of my attention”″. And ideally a whole sequence or a paper.
It’s possible that Wei has already done this, and that I just haven’t noticed. But I had a quick look at a few of the blog posts linked in the “Disjunctive scenarios” post, and they seem to overall be pretty short and non-concrete, even for blog posts. Also, there are literally thirty items on the list, which makes it hard to know where to start (and also suggests low average quality of items). Hence why I’m asking Wei for one which is unusually worth engaging with; if I’m positively surprised, I’ll probably ask for another.
Having said this, I’m open to trying it for one of your arguments. So perhaps you can point me to one that you particularly want engagement on?
Perhaps you could read all three of these posts (they’re pretty short :) and then either write a quick response to each one and then I’ll decide which one to dive into, or pick one yourself (that you find particularly interesting, or you have something to say about).
Also, let me know if you prefer to do this here, via email, or text/audio/video chat. (Also, apologies ahead of time for any issues/delays as my kid is home all the time now, and looking after my investments is a much bigger distraction / time-sink than usual, after I updated away from “just put everything into an index fund”.)
My thoughts on each of these. The common thread is that it seems to me you’re using abstractions at way too high a level to be confident that they will actually apply, or that they even make sense in those contexts.
AGIs and economies of scale
Do we expect AGIs to be so competitive that reducing coordination costs is a big deal? I expect that the dominant factor will be AGI intelligence, which will vary enough that changes in coordination costs aren’t a big deal. Variations in human intelligence have a huge effect, and presumably variations in AGI intelligence will be much bigger.
There’s an obvious objection to giving one AGI all of your resources, which is “how do you know it’s aligned”? And this seems like an issue where there’d be unified dissent from people worried about both short-term and long-term safety.
Oh, another concern: if they’re all intent aligned to the same person, then this amounts to declaring that person dictator. Which is often quite a difficult thing to convince people to do.
Consider also that we’ll be in an age of unprecedented plenty, once we have aligned AGIs that can do things for us. So I don’t see why economic competition will be very strong. Perhaps military competition will be strong, but will countries really be converting so much of their economy to military spending that they need this edge to keep up?
So this seems possible, but very far from a coherent picture in my mind.
Some thoughts on metaphilosophy
These are a bunch of fun analogies here. But it is very unclear to me what you mean by “philosophy” here, since most, or perhaps all, of your descriptions would be equally applicable to “thinking” or “reasoning”. The model you give of philosophy is also a model of choosing the next move in the game of chess, and countless other things.
Similarly, what is metaphilosophy, and what would it mean to solve it? Reach a dead end? Be able to answer any question? Why should we think that the concept of a “solution” to metaphilosophy makes any sense?
Overall, this posts feels like it’s pointing at something interesting but I don’t know if it actually communicated any content to me. Like, is the point of the sections headed “Philosophy as interminable debate” and “Philosophy as Jürgen Schmidhuber’s General TM” just to say that we can never be certain of any proposition? As written, the post is consistent both with you having some deep understanding of metaphilosophy that I just am not comprehending, and also with you using this word in a nonsensical way.
Two Neglected Problems in Human-AI Safety
“There seems to be no reason not to expect that human value functions have similar problems, which even “aligned” AIs could trigger unless they are somehow designed not to.” There are plenty of reasons to think that we don’t have similar problems—for instance, we’re much smarter than the ML systems on which we’ve seen adversarial examples. Also, there are lots of us, and we keep each other in check.
“For example, such AIs could give humans so much power so quickly or put them in such novel situations that their moral development can’t keep up, and their value systems no longer apply or give essentially random answers.” What does this actually look like? Suppose I’m made the absolute ruler of a whole virtual universe—that’s a lot of power. How might my value system “not keep up”?
The second half of this post makes a lot of sense to me, in large part because you can replace “corrupt human values” with “manipulate people”, and then it’s very analogous to problems we face today. Even so, a *lot* of additional work would need to be done to make a plausible case that this is an existential risk.
“An objective that is easy to test/measure (just check if the target has accepted the values you’re trying to instill, or has started doing things that are more beneficial to you)”. Since when was it easy to “just check” someone’s values? Like, are you thinking of an AI reading them off our neurons?
Here’s a slightly stretched analogy to try and explain my overall perspective. If you talked to someone born a thousand years ago about the future, they might make claims like “the most important thing is making process on metatheology” or “corruption of our honour is an existential risk”, or “once instantaneous communication exists then economies of scale will be so great that countries will be forced to nationalise all their resources”. How do we distinguish our own position from theirs? The only way is to describe our own concepts at a level of clarity and detail that they just couldn’t have managed. So what I want is a description of what “metaphilosophy” is such that it would have been impossible to give an equally clear description of “metatheology” without realising that this concept is not useful or coherent. Maybe that’s too high a target, but I think it’s one we should keep in mind as what is *actually necessary* to reason at such an abstract level without getting into confusion.
“There seems to be no reason not to expect that human value functions have similar problems, which even “aligned” AIs could trigger unless they are somehow designed not to.” There are plenty of reasons to think that we don’t have similar problems—for instance, we’re much smarter than the ML systems on which we’ve seen adversarial examples. Also, there are lots of us, and we keep each other in check.
“For example, such AIs could give humans so much power so quickly or put them in such novel situations that their moral development can’t keep up, and their value systems no longer apply or give essentially random answers.” What does this actually look like? Suppose I’m made the absolute ruler of a whole virtual universe—that’s a lot of power. How might my value system “not keep up”?
I confess to being uncertain of what you find confusing/unclear here. Think of any subject you currently have conflicting moral intuitions about (do you have none?), and now imagine being given unlimited power without being given the corresponding time to sort out which intuitions you endorse. It seems quite plausible to me that you might choose to do the wrong thing in such a situation, which could be catastrophic if said decision is irreversible.
But I can’t do the wrong thing, by my standards of value, if my “value system no longer applies”. So that’s part of what I’m trying to tease out.
Another part is: I’m not sure if Wei thinks this is just a governance problem (i.e. we’re going to put people in charge who do the wrong thing, despite some people advocating caution) or a more fundamental problem that nobody would do the right thing.
If the former, then I’d characterise this more as “more power magnifies leadership problems”. But maybe it won’t, because there’s also a much larger space of morally acceptable things you can do. It just doesn’t seem that easy to me to accidentally do a moral catastrophe if you’ve got a huge amount of power, and less so an irreversible one. But maybe this is just because I don’t know of whatever possible examples Wei thinks about.
As opposed to coming up with powerful and predictive concepts, and refining them over time. Of course argument and counterargument are crucial to that, so there’s no sharp line between this and “patching”, but for me the difference is: are you starting with the assumption that the idea is fundamentally sound, and you just need to fix it up a bit to address objections? If you are in that position despite not having fleshed out the idea very much, that’s what I’d characterise as “patching your way to good arguments”.
It looks like someone strong downvoted a couple of my comments in this thread (the parent and this one). (The parent comment was at 5 points with 3 votes, now it’s 0 points with 4 votes.) This is surprising to me as I can’t think of what I have written that could cause someone to want to do that. Does the person who downvoted want to explain, or anyone else want to take a guess?
(I also can’t think of a clear reason why anyone would strong-downvote your comments. I liked reading this comment thread, even though I had some sticky-feeling sense that it would be hard to resolve to convo with Richard for some reason I can’t easily articulate.)
What do you mean by “hard to resolve to convo with Richard”? I can’t parse that grammar.
I didn’t downvote those comments, but if you interpret me as saying “More rigour for important arguments please”, and Wei as saying “I’m too lazy to provide this rigour”, then I can see why someone might have downvoted them.
Like, on one level I’m fine with Wei having different epistemic standards to me, and I appreciate his engagement. And I definitely don’t intend my arguments as attacks on Wei specifically, since he puts much more effort into making intellectual progress than almost anyone on this site.
But on another level, the whole point of this site is to have higher epistemic standards, and (I would argue) the main thing preventing that is just people being so happy to accept blog-post-sized insights without further scrutiny.
My thought process when I use “safer” and “less safe” in posts like this is: the main arguments that AGI will be unsafe depends on it having certain properties, like agency, unbounded goals, lack of interpretability, desire and ability to self-improve, and so on. So reducing the extent to which it has those properties will make it safer, because those arguments will be less applicable.
I guess you could have two objections to this:
Maybe safety is non-monotonic in those properties.
Maybe you don’t get any reduction in safety until you hit a certain threshold (corresponding to some success story).
I tend not to worry so much about these two objections because to me, the properties I outlined above are still too vague to have a good idea of the landscape of risks with respect to those properties. Once we know what agency is, we can talk about its monotonicity. For now my epistemic state is: extreme agency is an important component of the main argument for risk, so all else equal reducing it should reduce risk.
I like the idea of tying safety ideas to success stories in general, though, and will try to use it for my next post, which proposes more specific interventions during deployment. Having said that, I also believe that most safety work will be done by AGIs, and so I want to remain open-minded to success stories that are beyond my capability to predict.
I appreciate the explanation, but this is pretty far from my own epistemic state, which is that arguments for AI risk are highly disjunctive, most types of AGI (not just highly agentic ones) are probably unsafe (i.e., are likely to lead us away from rather than towards a success story), at best probably only a few very specific AGI designs (which may well be agentic if combined with other properties) are both feasible and safe (i.e., can count as success stories), so it doesn’t make sense to say that an AGI is “safer” just because it’s less agentic.
Getting to an AGI that can safely do human or superhuman level safety work would be a success story in itself, which I labeled “Research Assistant” in my post.
Yeah, I guess I’m not surprised that we have this disagreement. To briefly sketch out why I disagree (mostly for common knowledge; I don’t expect this to persuade you):
I think there’s something like a logistic curve for how seriously we should take arguments. Almost all arguments are bad, and have many many ways in which they might fail. This is particularly true for arguments trying to predict the future, since they have to invent novel concepts to do so. Only once you’ve seen a significant amount of work put into exploring an argument, the assumptions it relies on, and the ways it might be wrong, should you start to assign moderate probability that the argument is true, and that the concepts it uses will in hindsight make sense.
Most of the arguments mentioned in your post on disjunctive safety arguments fall far short of any reasonable credibility threshold. Most of them haven’t even had a single blog post which actually tries to scrutinise them in a critical way, or lay out their key assumptions. And to be clear, a single blog post is just about the lowest possible standard you might apply. Perhaps it’d be sufficient in a domain where claims can be very easily verified, but when we’re trying to make claims that a given effect will be pivotal for the entire future of humanity despite whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent, we need higher standards to get to the part of the logistic curve with non-negligible gradient.
This is not an argument for dismissing all of these possible mechanisms out of hand, but an argument that they shouldn’t (yet) be given high credence. I think they are often given too high credence because there’s a sort of halo effect from the arguments which have been explored in detail, making us more willing to consider arguments that in isolation would seem very out-there. When you think about the arguments made in your disjunctive post, how hard do you try to imagine each one conditional on the knowledge that the other arguments are false? Are they actually compelling in a world where Eliezer is wrong about intelligence explosions and Paul is wrong about influence-seeking agents? (Maybe you’d say that there are legitimate links between these arguments, e.g. common premises—but if so, they’re not highly disjunctive).
Good point, I shall read that post more carefully. I still don’t think that this post is tied to the Research Assistant success story though.
I guess a lot of this comes down to priors and burden of proof. (I guess I have a high prior that making something smarter than human is dangerous unless we know exactly what we’re doing including the social/political aspects, and you don’t, so you think the burden of proof is on me?) But (1) I did write a bunch of blog posts which are linked to in the second post (maybe you didn’t click on that one?) and it would help if you could point out more where you’re not convinced, and (2) does the current COVID-19 disaster not make you more pessimistic about “whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent”?
I think I did? Eliezer being wrong about intelligence explosions just means we live in a world without intelligence explosions, and Paul being wrong about influence-seeking agents just means he (or someone) succeeds in building intent-aligned AGI, right? Many of my “disjunctive” arguments were written specifically with that scenario in mind.
Cool, makes sense. I retract my pointed questions.
This seems about right. In general when someone proposes a mechanism by which the world might end, I think the burden of proof is on them. You’re not just claiming “dangerous”, you’re claiming something like “more dangerous than anything else has ever been, even if it’s intent-aligned”. This is an incredibly bold claim and requires correspondingly thorough support.
Actually, COVID makes me a little more optimistic. First because quite a few countries are handling it well. Secondly because I wasn’t even sure that lockdowns were a tool in the arsenal of democracies, and it seemed pretty wild to shut the economy down for so long. But they did. Also essential services have proven much more robust than I’d expected (I thought there would be food shortages, etc).
“More dangerous than anything else has ever been” does not seem incredibly bold to me, given that superhuman AI will be more powerful than anything else the world has seen. Historically the risk of civilization doing damage to itself seems to grow with the power that it has access to (e.g., the two world wars, substantial risks of nuclear war and man-made pandemic that continue to accumulate each year, climate change) so I think I’m just extrapolating a clear trend. (Past risks like these could not have been eliminated by solving a single straightforward, self-contained, technical problem analogous to “intent alignment” so why expect that now?)
To risk being uncharitable, your position seems analogous to someone saying, before the start of the nuclear era, “I think we should have a low prior that developing any particular kind of nuclear weapon will greatly increase the risk of global devastation in the future, because (1) that would be unprecedentedly dangerous and (2) nobody wants global devastation so everyone will work to prevent it. The only argument that has been developed well enough to overcome this low prior is that some types of nuclear weapons could potentially ignite the atmosphere, so to be safe we’ll just make sure to only build bombs that definitely can’t do that.” (What would be a charitable historical analogy to your position if this one is not?)
“The world might end” is not the only or even the main thing I’m worried about, especially because there are more people who can be expected to worry about “the world might end” and try to do something about it. My focus is more on the possibility that humanity survives but the values of people like me (or human values, or objective morality, depending on what the correct metaethics turn out to be) end up controlling only a small fraction of universe so we end up with astronomical waste or Beyond Astronomical Waste as a result. (Or our values become corrupted and the universe ends up being optimized for completely alien or wrong values.) There is plenty of precedence for the world becoming quite suboptimal according to some group’s values, and there is no apparent reason to think the universe has to evolve according to objective morality (if such a thing exists), so my claim also doesn’t seem very extraordinary from this perspective.
If you think societal response to a risk like pandemic (and presumably AI) is substantially suboptimal by default (and it clearly is given that large swaths of humanity are incurring a lot of needless deaths), doesn’t that imply significant residual risks, and plenty of room for people like us to try to improve the response? To a first approximation, the default suboptimal social response reduces all risks by some constant amount, so if some particular x-risk is important to work on without considering default social response, it’s probably still important to work on after considering “whatever efforts people will make when the problem starts becoming more apparent”. Do you disagree this argument? Did you have some other reason for saying that, that I’m not getting?
To try to encourage you to engage with my arguments more (as far as pointing out where you’re not convinced), I think I’m pretty good at being skeptical of my own ideas and have a good track record in terms of not spewing off a lot of random ideas that turn out to be far off the mark. But I am too lazy / have too many interests / am too easily distracted to write long papers/posts where I lay out every step of my reasoning and address every possible counterargument in detail.
So what I’d like to do is to just amend my posts to address the main objections that many people actually have, enough for more readers like you to “assign moderate probability that the argument is true”. In order to do that, I need to have a better idea what objections people actually have or what counterarguments they currently find convincing. Does this make sense to you?
I’m pretty skeptical of this as a way of making progress. It’s not that I already have strong disagreements with your arguments. But rather, if you haven’t yet explained them thoroughly, I expect them to be underspecified, and use some words and concepts that are wrong in hard-to-see ways. One way this might happen is if those arguments use concepts (like “metaphilosophy”) that kinda intuitively seem like they’re pointing at something, but come with a bunch of connotations and underlying assumptions that make actually understanding them very tricky.
So my expectation for what happens here is: I look at one of your arguments, formulate some objection X, and then you say either: “No, that wasn’t what I was claiming”, or “Actually, ~X is one of the implicit premises”, or “Your objection doesn’t make any sense in the framework I’m outlining” and then we repeat this a dozen or more times. I recently went through this process with Rohin, and it took a huge amount of time and effort (both here and in private conversation) to get anywhere near agreement, despite our views on AI being much more similar than yours and mine.
And even then, you’ll only have fixed the problems I’m able to spot, and not all the others. In other words, I think of patching your way to good arguments as kinda like patching your way to safe AGI. (To be clear, none of this is meant as specific criticism of your arguments, but rather as general comments about any large-scale arguments using novel concepts that haven’t been made very thoroughly and carefully).
Having said this, I’m open to trying it for one of your arguments. So perhaps you can point me to one that you particularly want engagement on?
(serious question, I’m not sure what the right process here is)
What do you think should happen instead of “read through and object to Wei_Dai’s existing blogposts?”. Is there a different process that would work better? Or you think this generally isn’t worth the time? Or you think Wei Dai should write a blogpost that more clearly passes your “sniff test” of “probably compelling enough to be worth more of my attention?”
Mostly “Wei Dai should write a blogpost that more clearly passes your “sniff test” of “probably compelling enough to be worth more of my attention”″. And ideally a whole sequence or a paper.
It’s possible that Wei has already done this, and that I just haven’t noticed. But I had a quick look at a few of the blog posts linked in the “Disjunctive scenarios” post, and they seem to overall be pretty short and non-concrete, even for blog posts. Also, there are literally thirty items on the list, which makes it hard to know where to start (and also suggests low average quality of items). Hence why I’m asking Wei for one which is unusually worth engaging with; if I’m positively surprised, I’ll probably ask for another.
Perhaps you could read all three of these posts (they’re pretty short :) and then either write a quick response to each one and then I’ll decide which one to dive into, or pick one yourself (that you find particularly interesting, or you have something to say about).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sn5NiiD5WBi4dLzaB/agi-will-drastically-increase-economies-of-scale
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EByDsY9S3EDhhfFzC/some-thoughts-on-metaphilosophy
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HTgakSs6JpnogD6c2/two-neglected-problems-in-human-ai-safety
Also, let me know if you prefer to do this here, via email, or text/audio/video chat. (Also, apologies ahead of time for any issues/delays as my kid is home all the time now, and looking after my investments is a much bigger distraction / time-sink than usual, after I updated away from “just put everything into an index fund”.)
My thoughts on each of these. The common thread is that it seems to me you’re using abstractions at way too high a level to be confident that they will actually apply, or that they even make sense in those contexts.
AGIs and economies of scale
Do we expect AGIs to be so competitive that reducing coordination costs is a big deal? I expect that the dominant factor will be AGI intelligence, which will vary enough that changes in coordination costs aren’t a big deal. Variations in human intelligence have a huge effect, and presumably variations in AGI intelligence will be much bigger.
There’s an obvious objection to giving one AGI all of your resources, which is “how do you know it’s aligned”? And this seems like an issue where there’d be unified dissent from people worried about both short-term and long-term safety.
Oh, another concern: if they’re all intent aligned to the same person, then this amounts to declaring that person dictator. Which is often quite a difficult thing to convince people to do.
Consider also that we’ll be in an age of unprecedented plenty, once we have aligned AGIs that can do things for us. So I don’t see why economic competition will be very strong. Perhaps military competition will be strong, but will countries really be converting so much of their economy to military spending that they need this edge to keep up?
So this seems possible, but very far from a coherent picture in my mind.
Some thoughts on metaphilosophy
These are a bunch of fun analogies here. But it is very unclear to me what you mean by “philosophy” here, since most, or perhaps all, of your descriptions would be equally applicable to “thinking” or “reasoning”. The model you give of philosophy is also a model of choosing the next move in the game of chess, and countless other things.
Similarly, what is metaphilosophy, and what would it mean to solve it? Reach a dead end? Be able to answer any question? Why should we think that the concept of a “solution” to metaphilosophy makes any sense?
Overall, this posts feels like it’s pointing at something interesting but I don’t know if it actually communicated any content to me. Like, is the point of the sections headed “Philosophy as interminable debate” and “Philosophy as Jürgen Schmidhuber’s General TM” just to say that we can never be certain of any proposition? As written, the post is consistent both with you having some deep understanding of metaphilosophy that I just am not comprehending, and also with you using this word in a nonsensical way.
Two Neglected Problems in Human-AI Safety
“There seems to be no reason not to expect that human value functions have similar problems, which even “aligned” AIs could trigger unless they are somehow designed not to.” There are plenty of reasons to think that we don’t have similar problems—for instance, we’re much smarter than the ML systems on which we’ve seen adversarial examples. Also, there are lots of us, and we keep each other in check.
“For example, such AIs could give humans so much power so quickly or put them in such novel situations that their moral development can’t keep up, and their value systems no longer apply or give essentially random answers.” What does this actually look like? Suppose I’m made the absolute ruler of a whole virtual universe—that’s a lot of power. How might my value system “not keep up”?
The second half of this post makes a lot of sense to me, in large part because you can replace “corrupt human values” with “manipulate people”, and then it’s very analogous to problems we face today. Even so, a *lot* of additional work would need to be done to make a plausible case that this is an existential risk.
“An objective that is easy to test/measure (just check if the target has accepted the values you’re trying to instill, or has started doing things that are more beneficial to you)”. Since when was it easy to “just check” someone’s values? Like, are you thinking of an AI reading them off our neurons?
Here’s a slightly stretched analogy to try and explain my overall perspective. If you talked to someone born a thousand years ago about the future, they might make claims like “the most important thing is making process on metatheology” or “corruption of our honour is an existential risk”, or “once instantaneous communication exists then economies of scale will be so great that countries will be forced to nationalise all their resources”. How do we distinguish our own position from theirs? The only way is to describe our own concepts at a level of clarity and detail that they just couldn’t have managed. So what I want is a description of what “metaphilosophy” is such that it would have been impossible to give an equally clear description of “metatheology” without realising that this concept is not useful or coherent. Maybe that’s too high a target, but I think it’s one we should keep in mind as what is *actually necessary* to reason at such an abstract level without getting into confusion.
I confess to being uncertain of what you find confusing/unclear here. Think of any subject you currently have conflicting moral intuitions about (do you have none?), and now imagine being given unlimited power without being given the corresponding time to sort out which intuitions you endorse. It seems quite plausible to me that you might choose to do the wrong thing in such a situation, which could be catastrophic if said decision is irreversible.
But I can’t do the wrong thing, by my standards of value, if my “value system no longer applies”. So that’s part of what I’m trying to tease out.
Another part is: I’m not sure if Wei thinks this is just a governance problem (i.e. we’re going to put people in charge who do the wrong thing, despite some people advocating caution) or a more fundamental problem that nobody would do the right thing.
If the former, then I’d characterise this more as “more power magnifies leadership problems”. But maybe it won’t, because there’s also a much larger space of morally acceptable things you can do. It just doesn’t seem that easy to me to accidentally do a moral catastrophe if you’ve got a huge amount of power, and less so an irreversible one. But maybe this is just because I don’t know of whatever possible examples Wei thinks about.
As opposed to what?
As opposed to coming up with powerful and predictive concepts, and refining them over time. Of course argument and counterargument are crucial to that, so there’s no sharp line between this and “patching”, but for me the difference is: are you starting with the assumption that the idea is fundamentally sound, and you just need to fix it up a bit to address objections? If you are in that position despite not having fleshed out the idea very much, that’s what I’d characterise as “patching your way to good arguments”.
It looks like someone strong downvoted a couple of my comments in this thread (the parent and this one). (The parent comment was at 5 points with 3 votes, now it’s 0 points with 4 votes.) This is surprising to me as I can’t think of what I have written that could cause someone to want to do that. Does the person who downvoted want to explain, or anyone else want to take a guess?
(I also can’t think of a clear reason why anyone would strong-downvote your comments. I liked reading this comment thread, even though I had some sticky-feeling sense that it would be hard to resolve to convo with Richard for some reason I can’t easily articulate.)
What do you mean by “hard to resolve to convo with Richard”? I can’t parse that grammar.
I didn’t downvote those comments, but if you interpret me as saying “More rigour for important arguments please”, and Wei as saying “I’m too lazy to provide this rigour”, then I can see why someone might have downvoted them.
Like, on one level I’m fine with Wei having different epistemic standards to me, and I appreciate his engagement. And I definitely don’t intend my arguments as attacks on Wei specifically, since he puts much more effort into making intellectual progress than almost anyone on this site.
But on another level, the whole point of this site is to have higher epistemic standards, and (I would argue) the main thing preventing that is just people being so happy to accept blog-post-sized insights without further scrutiny.