Great post! I’m glad someone has outlined in clear terms what these failures look like, rather than the nebulous ‘multiagent misalignment’, as it lets us start on a path to clarifying what (if any) new mitigations or technical research are needed.
Agent-agnostic perspective is a very good innovation for thinking about these problems—is line between agentive and non-agentive behaviour is often not clear, and it’s not like there is a principled metaphysical distinction between the two (e.g. Dennett and the Intentional Stance). Currently, big corporations can be weakly modelled this way and individual humans are fully agentive, but Transformative AI will bring up a whole spectrum of more and less agentive things that will fill up the rest of this spectrum.
There is a sense in which, if the outcome is something catastrophic, there must have been misalignment, and if there was misalignment then in some sense at least some individual agents were misaligned. Specifically, the systems in your Production Web weren’t intent-aligned because they weren’t doing what we wanted them to do, and were at least partly deceiving us. Assuming this is the case, ‘multipolar failure’ requires some subset of intent misalignment. But it’s a special subset because it involves different kinds of failures to the ones we normally talk about.
It seems like you’re identifying some dimensions of intent alignment as those most likely to be neglected because they’re the hardest to catch, or because there will be economic incentives to ensure AI isn’t aligned in that way, rather than saying that there some sense in which the transformative AI in the production web scenario is ‘fully aligned’ but still produces an existential catastrophe.
I think that the difference between your Production Web and Paul Christiano’s subtle creeping Outer Alignment failure scenario is just semantic—you say that the AIs involved are aligned in some relevant sense while Christiano says they are misaligned.
The further question then becomes, how clear is the distinction between multiagent alignment and ‘all of alignment except multiagent alignment’. This is the part where your claim of ‘Problems before solutions’ actually does become an issue—given that the systems going wrong in Production Web aren’t Intent-aligned (I think you’d agree with this), at a high level the overall problem is the same in single and multiagent scenarios.
So for it to be clear that there is a separate multiagent problem to be solved, we have to have some reason to expect that the solutions currently intended to solve single agent intent alignment aren’t adequate, and that extra research aimed at examining the behaviour of AI e.g. in game theoretic situations, or computational social choice research, is required to avert these particular examples of misalignment.
A related point—as with single agent misalignment, the Fast scenarios seem more certain to occur, given their preconditions, than the slow scenarios.
A certain amount of stupidity and lack of coordination persisting for a while is required in all the slow scenarios, like the systems involved in Production Web being allowed to proliferate and be used more and more even if an opportunity to coordinate and shut the systems down exists and there are reasons to do so. There isn’t an exact historical analogy for that type of stupidity so far, though a few things come close (e.g. covid response, leadup to WW2, cuban missile crisis).
As with single agent fast takeoff scenarios, in the fast stories there is a key ‘treacherous turn’ moment where the systems suddenly go wrong, which requires much less lack of coordination to be plausible than the slow Production Web scenarios.
Therefore, multipolar failure is less dangerous if takeoff is slower, but the difference in risk between slow vs fast takeoff for multipolar failure is unfortunately a lot smaller than the slow vs fast risk difference for single agent failure (where the danger is minimal if takeoff is slow enough). So multiagent failures seem like they would be the dominant risk factor if takeoff is sufficiently slow.
Great post! I’m glad someone has outlined in clear terms what these failures look like, rather than the nebulous ‘multiagent misalignment’, as it lets us start on a path to clarifying what (if any) new mitigations or technical research are needed.
Agent-agnostic perspective is a very good innovation for thinking about these problems—is line between agentive and non-agentive behaviour is often not clear, and it’s not like there is a principled metaphysical distinction between the two (e.g. Dennett and the Intentional Stance). Currently, big corporations can be weakly modelled this way and individual humans are fully agentive, but Transformative AI will bring up a whole spectrum of more and less agentive things that will fill up the rest of this spectrum.
There is a sense in which, if the outcome is something catastrophic, there must have been misalignment, and if there was misalignment then in some sense at least some individual agents were misaligned. Specifically, the systems in your Production Web weren’t intent-aligned because they weren’t doing what we wanted them to do, and were at least partly deceiving us. Assuming this is the case, ‘multipolar failure’ requires some subset of intent misalignment. But it’s a special subset because it involves different kinds of failures to the ones we normally talk about.
It seems like you’re identifying some dimensions of intent alignment as those most likely to be neglected because they’re the hardest to catch, or because there will be economic incentives to ensure AI isn’t aligned in that way, rather than saying that there some sense in which the transformative AI in the production web scenario is ‘fully aligned’ but still produces an existential catastrophe.
I think that the difference between your Production Web and Paul Christiano’s subtle creeping Outer Alignment failure scenario is just semantic—you say that the AIs involved are aligned in some relevant sense while Christiano says they are misaligned.
The further question then becomes, how clear is the distinction between multiagent alignment and ‘all of alignment except multiagent alignment’. This is the part where your claim of ‘Problems before solutions’ actually does become an issue—given that the systems going wrong in Production Web aren’t Intent-aligned (I think you’d agree with this), at a high level the overall problem is the same in single and multiagent scenarios.
So for it to be clear that there is a separate multiagent problem to be solved, we have to have some reason to expect that the solutions currently intended to solve single agent intent alignment aren’t adequate, and that extra research aimed at examining the behaviour of AI e.g. in game theoretic situations, or computational social choice research, is required to avert these particular examples of misalignment.
A related point—as with single agent misalignment, the Fast scenarios seem more certain to occur, given their preconditions, than the slow scenarios.
A certain amount of stupidity and lack of coordination persisting for a while is required in all the slow scenarios, like the systems involved in Production Web being allowed to proliferate and be used more and more even if an opportunity to coordinate and shut the systems down exists and there are reasons to do so. There isn’t an exact historical analogy for that type of stupidity so far, though a few things come close (e.g. covid response, leadup to WW2, cuban missile crisis).
As with single agent fast takeoff scenarios, in the fast stories there is a key ‘treacherous turn’ moment where the systems suddenly go wrong, which requires much less lack of coordination to be plausible than the slow Production Web scenarios.
Therefore, multipolar failure is less dangerous if takeoff is slower, but the difference in risk between slow vs fast takeoff for multipolar failure is unfortunately a lot smaller than the slow vs fast risk difference for single agent failure (where the danger is minimal if takeoff is slow enough). So multiagent failures seem like they would be the dominant risk factor if takeoff is sufficiently slow.