I think I disagree with you on the tininess of the advantage conferred by ignoring human values early on during a multi-polar take-off. I agree the long-run cost of supporting humans is tiny, but I’m trying to highlight a dynamic where fairly myopic/nihilistic power-maximizing entities end up quickly out-competing entities with other values, due to, as you say, bargaining failure on the part of the creators of the power-maximizing entities.
Right now the United States has a GDP of >$20T, US plus its NATO allies and Japan >$40T, the PRC >$14T, with a world economy of >$130T. For AI and computing industries the concentration is even greater.
These leading powers are willing to regulate companies and invade small countries based on reasons much less serious than imminent human extinction. They have also avoided destroying one another with nuclear weapons.
If one-to-one intent alignment works well enough that one’s own AI will not blatantly lie about upcoming AI extermination of humanity, then superintelligent locally-aligned AI advisors will tell the governments of these major powers (and many corporate and other actors with the capacity to activate governmental action) about the likely downside of conflict or unregulated AI havens (meaning specifically the deaths of the top leadership and everyone else in all countries).
All Boards wish other Boards would stop doing this, but neither they nor their CEOs manage to strike up a bargain with the rest of the world stop it.
Within a country, one-to-one intent alignment for government officials or actors who support the government means superintelligent advisors identify and assist in suppressing attempts by an individual AI company or its products to overthrow the government.
Internationally, with the current balance of power (and with fairly substantial deviations from it) a handful of actors have the capacity to force a slowdown or other measures to stop an outcome that will otherwise destroy them. They (and the corporations that they have legal authority over, as well as physical power to coerce) are few enough to make bargaining feasible, and powerful enough to pay a large ‘tax’ while still being ahead of smaller actors. And I think they are well enough motivated to stop their imminent annihilation, in a way that is more like avoiding mutual nuclear destruction than cosmopolitan altruistic optimal climate mitigation timing.
That situation could change if AI enables tiny firms and countries to match the superpowers in AI capabilities or WMD before leading powers can block it.
So I agree with others in this thread that good one-to-one alignment basically blocks the scenarios above.
Carl, thanks for this clear statement of your beliefs. It sounds like you’re saying (among other things) that American and Chinese cultures will not engage in a “race-to-the-bottom” in terms of how much they displace human control over the AI technologies their companies develop. Is that right? If so, could you give me a % confidence on that position somehow? And if not, could you clarify?
To reciprocate: I currently assign a ≥10% chance of a race-to-the-bottom on AI control/security/safety between two or more cultures this century, i.e., I’d bid 10% to buy in a prediction market on this claim if it were settlable. In more detail, I assign a ≥10% chance to a scenario where two or more cultures each progressively diminish the degree of control they exercise over their tech, and the safety of the economic activities of that tech to human existence, until an involuntary human extinction event. (By comparison, I assign at most around a ~3% chance of a unipolar “world takeover” event, i.e., I’d sell at 3%.)
I should add that my numbers for both of those outcomes are down significantly from ~3 years ago due to cultural progress in CS/AI (see this ACM blog post) allowing more discussion of (and hence preparation for) negative outcomes, and government pressures to regulate the tech industry.
The US and China might well wreck the world by knowingly taking gargantuan risks even if both had aligned AI advisors, although I think they likely wouldn’t.
But what I’m saying is really hard to do is to make the scenarios in the OP (with competition among individual corporate boards and the like) occur without extreme failure of 1-to-1 alignment (for both companies and governments). Competitive pressures are the main reason why AI systems with inadequate 1-to-1 alignment would be given long enough leashes to bring catastrophe. I would cosign Vanessa and Paul’s comments about these scenarios being hard to fit with the idea that technical 1-to-1 alignment work is much less impactful than cooperative RL or the like.
In more detail, I assign a ≥10% chance to a scenario where two or more cultures each progressively diminish the degree of control they exercise over their tech, and the safety of the economic activities of that tech to human existence, until an involuntary human extinction event. (By comparison, I assign at most around a ~3% chance of a unipolar “world takeover” event, i.e., I’d sell at 3%.)
If this means that a ‘robot rebellion’ would include software produced by more than one company or country, I think that that is a substantial possibility, as well as the alternative, since competitive dynamics in a world with a few giant countries and a few giant AI companies (and only a couple leading chip firms) can mean that the way safety tradeoffs work is by one party introducing rogue AI systems that outcompete by not paying an alignment tax (and intrinsically embodying in themselves astronomically valuable and expensive IP), or cascading alignment failure in software traceable to a leading company/consortium or country/alliance.
But either way reasonably effective 1-to-1 alignment methods (of the ‘trying to help you and not lie to you and murder you with human-level abilities’ variety) seem to eliminate a supermajority of the risk.
[I am separately skeptical that technical work on multi-agent RL is particularly helpful, since it can be done by 1-to-1 aligned systems when they are smart, and the more important coordination problems seem to be earlier between humans in the development phase.]
The US and China might well wreck the world by knowingly taking gargantuan risks even if both had aligned AI advisors, although I think they likely wouldn’t.
But what I’m saying is really hard to do is to make the scenarios in the OP (with competition among individual corporate boards and the like) occur without extreme failure of 1-to-1 alignment
I’m not sure I understand yet. For example, here’s a version of Flash War that happens seemingly without either the principals knowingly taking gargantuan risks or extreme intent-alignment failure.
The principals largely delegate to AI systems on military decision-making, mistakenly believing that the systems are extremely competent in this domain.
The mostly-intent-aligned AI systems, who are actually not extremely competent in this domain, make hair-trigger commitments of the kind described in the OP. The systems make their principals aware of these commitments and (being mostly-intent-aligned) convince their principals “in good faith” that this is the best strategy to pursue. In particular they are convinced that this will not lead to existential catastrophe.
The commitments are triggered as described in the OP, leading to conflict. The conflict proceeds too quickly for the principals to effectively intervene / the principals think their best bet at this point is to continue to delegate to the AIs.
At every step both principals and AIs think they’re doing what’s best by the respective principals’ lights. Nevertheless, due to a combination of incompetence at bargaining and structural factors (e.g., persistent uncertainty about the other side’s resolve), the AIs continue to fight to the point of extinction or unrecoverable collapse.
Would be curious to know which parts of this story you find most implausible.
Mainly such complete (and irreversible!) delegation to such incompetent systems being necessary or executed. If AI is so powerful that the nuclear weapons are launched on hair-trigger without direction from human leadership I expect it to not be awful at forecasting that risk.
You could tell a story where bargaining problems lead to mutual destruction, but the outcome shouldn’t be very surprising on average, i.e. the AI should be telling you about it happening with calibrated forecasts.
Ok, thanks for that. I’d guess then that I’m more uncertain than you about whether human leadership would delegate to systems who would fail to accurately forecast catastrophe.
It’s possible that human leadership just reasons poorly about whether their systems are competent in this domain. For instance, they may observe that their systems perform well in lots of other domains, and incorrectly reason that “well, these systems are better than us in many domains, so they must be better in this one, too”. Eagerness to deploy before a more thorough investigation of the systems’ domain-specific abilities may be exacerbated by competitive pressures. And of course there is historical precedent for delegation to overconfident military bureaucracies.
On the other hand, to the extent that human leadership is able to correctly assess their systems’ competence in this domain, it may be only because there has been a sufficiently successful AI cooperation research program. For instance, maybe this research program has furnished appropriate simulation environments to probe the relevant aspects of the systems’ behavior, transparency tools for investigating cognition about other AI systems, norms for the resolution of conflicting interests and methods for robustly instilling those norms, etc, along with enough researcher-hours applying these tools to have an accurate sense of how well the systems will navigate conflict.
As for irreversible delegation — there is the question of whether delegation is in principle reversible, and the question of whether human leaders would want to override their AI delegates once war is underway. Even if delegation is reversible, human leaders may think that their delegates are better suited to wage war on their behalf once it has started. Perhaps because things are simply happening so fast for them to have confidence that they could intervene without placing themselves at a decisive disadvantage.
And I think they are well enough motivated to stop their imminent annihilation, in a way that is more like avoiding mutual nuclear destruction than cosmopolitan altruistic optimal climate mitigation timing.
In my recent writeup of an investigation into AI Takeover scenarios I made an identical comparison—i.e. that the optimistic analogy looks like avoiding nuclear MAD for a while and the pessimistic analogy looks like optimal climate mitigation:
It is unrealistic to expect TAI to be deployed if first there are many worsening warning shots involving dangerous AI systems. This would be comparable to an unrealistic alternate history where nuclear weapons were immediately used by the US and Soviet Union as soon as they were developed and in every war where they might have offered a temporary advantage, resulting in nuclear annihilation in the 1950s.
Note that this is not the same as an alternate history where nuclear near-misses escalated (e.g. Petrov, Vasili Arkhipov), but instead an outcome where nuclear weapons were used as ordinary weapons of war with no regard for the larger dangers that presented—there would be no concept of ‘near misses’ because MAD wouldn’t have developed as a doctrine. In a previous post I argued, following Anders Sandberg, that paradoxically the large number of nuclear ‘near misses’ implies that there is a forceful pressure away from the worst outcomes.
Right now the United States has a GDP of >$20T, US plus its NATO allies and Japan >$40T, the PRC >$14T, with a world economy of >$130T. For AI and computing industries the concentration is even greater.
These leading powers are willing to regulate companies and invade small countries based on reasons much less serious than imminent human extinction. They have also avoided destroying one another with nuclear weapons.
If one-to-one intent alignment works well enough that one’s own AI will not blatantly lie about upcoming AI extermination of humanity, then superintelligent locally-aligned AI advisors will tell the governments of these major powers (and many corporate and other actors with the capacity to activate governmental action) about the likely downside of conflict or unregulated AI havens (meaning specifically the deaths of the top leadership and everyone else in all countries).
Within a country, one-to-one intent alignment for government officials or actors who support the government means superintelligent advisors identify and assist in suppressing attempts by an individual AI company or its products to overthrow the government.
Internationally, with the current balance of power (and with fairly substantial deviations from it) a handful of actors have the capacity to force a slowdown or other measures to stop an outcome that will otherwise destroy them. They (and the corporations that they have legal authority over, as well as physical power to coerce) are few enough to make bargaining feasible, and powerful enough to pay a large ‘tax’ while still being ahead of smaller actors. And I think they are well enough motivated to stop their imminent annihilation, in a way that is more like avoiding mutual nuclear destruction than cosmopolitan altruistic optimal climate mitigation timing.
That situation could change if AI enables tiny firms and countries to match the superpowers in AI capabilities or WMD before leading powers can block it.
So I agree with others in this thread that good one-to-one alignment basically blocks the scenarios above.
Carl, thanks for this clear statement of your beliefs. It sounds like you’re saying (among other things) that American and Chinese cultures will not engage in a “race-to-the-bottom” in terms of how much they displace human control over the AI technologies their companies develop. Is that right? If so, could you give me a % confidence on that position somehow? And if not, could you clarify?
To reciprocate: I currently assign a ≥10% chance of a race-to-the-bottom on AI control/security/safety between two or more cultures this century, i.e., I’d bid 10% to buy in a prediction market on this claim if it were settlable. In more detail, I assign a ≥10% chance to a scenario where two or more cultures each progressively diminish the degree of control they exercise over their tech, and the safety of the economic activities of that tech to human existence, until an involuntary human extinction event. (By comparison, I assign at most around a ~3% chance of a unipolar “world takeover” event, i.e., I’d sell at 3%.)
I should add that my numbers for both of those outcomes are down significantly from ~3 years ago due to cultural progress in CS/AI (see this ACM blog post) allowing more discussion of (and hence preparation for) negative outcomes, and government pressures to regulate the tech industry.
The US and China might well wreck the world by knowingly taking gargantuan risks even if both had aligned AI advisors, although I think they likely wouldn’t.
But what I’m saying is really hard to do is to make the scenarios in the OP (with competition among individual corporate boards and the like) occur without extreme failure of 1-to-1 alignment (for both companies and governments). Competitive pressures are the main reason why AI systems with inadequate 1-to-1 alignment would be given long enough leashes to bring catastrophe. I would cosign Vanessa and Paul’s comments about these scenarios being hard to fit with the idea that technical 1-to-1 alignment work is much less impactful than cooperative RL or the like.
If this means that a ‘robot rebellion’ would include software produced by more than one company or country, I think that that is a substantial possibility, as well as the alternative, since competitive dynamics in a world with a few giant countries and a few giant AI companies (and only a couple leading chip firms) can mean that the way safety tradeoffs work is by one party introducing rogue AI systems that outcompete by not paying an alignment tax (and intrinsically embodying in themselves astronomically valuable and expensive IP), or cascading alignment failure in software traceable to a leading company/consortium or country/alliance.
But either way reasonably effective 1-to-1 alignment methods (of the ‘trying to help you and not lie to you and murder you with human-level abilities’ variety) seem to eliminate a supermajority of the risk.
[I am separately skeptical that technical work on multi-agent RL is particularly helpful, since it can be done by 1-to-1 aligned systems when they are smart, and the more important coordination problems seem to be earlier between humans in the development phase.]
I’m not sure I understand yet. For example, here’s a version of Flash War that happens seemingly without either the principals knowingly taking gargantuan risks or extreme intent-alignment failure.
The principals largely delegate to AI systems on military decision-making, mistakenly believing that the systems are extremely competent in this domain.
The mostly-intent-aligned AI systems, who are actually not extremely competent in this domain, make hair-trigger commitments of the kind described in the OP. The systems make their principals aware of these commitments and (being mostly-intent-aligned) convince their principals “in good faith” that this is the best strategy to pursue. In particular they are convinced that this will not lead to existential catastrophe.
The commitments are triggered as described in the OP, leading to conflict. The conflict proceeds too quickly for the principals to effectively intervene / the principals think their best bet at this point is to continue to delegate to the AIs.
At every step both principals and AIs think they’re doing what’s best by the respective principals’ lights. Nevertheless, due to a combination of incompetence at bargaining and structural factors (e.g., persistent uncertainty about the other side’s resolve), the AIs continue to fight to the point of extinction or unrecoverable collapse.
Would be curious to know which parts of this story you find most implausible.
Mainly such complete (and irreversible!) delegation to such incompetent systems being necessary or executed. If AI is so powerful that the nuclear weapons are launched on hair-trigger without direction from human leadership I expect it to not be awful at forecasting that risk.
You could tell a story where bargaining problems lead to mutual destruction, but the outcome shouldn’t be very surprising on average, i.e. the AI should be telling you about it happening with calibrated forecasts.
Ok, thanks for that. I’d guess then that I’m more uncertain than you about whether human leadership would delegate to systems who would fail to accurately forecast catastrophe.
It’s possible that human leadership just reasons poorly about whether their systems are competent in this domain. For instance, they may observe that their systems perform well in lots of other domains, and incorrectly reason that “well, these systems are better than us in many domains, so they must be better in this one, too”. Eagerness to deploy before a more thorough investigation of the systems’ domain-specific abilities may be exacerbated by competitive pressures. And of course there is historical precedent for delegation to overconfident military bureaucracies.
On the other hand, to the extent that human leadership is able to correctly assess their systems’ competence in this domain, it may be only because there has been a sufficiently successful AI cooperation research program. For instance, maybe this research program has furnished appropriate simulation environments to probe the relevant aspects of the systems’ behavior, transparency tools for investigating cognition about other AI systems, norms for the resolution of conflicting interests and methods for robustly instilling those norms, etc, along with enough researcher-hours applying these tools to have an accurate sense of how well the systems will navigate conflict.
As for irreversible delegation — there is the question of whether delegation is in principle reversible, and the question of whether human leaders would want to override their AI delegates once war is underway. Even if delegation is reversible, human leaders may think that their delegates are better suited to wage war on their behalf once it has started. Perhaps because things are simply happening so fast for them to have confidence that they could intervene without placing themselves at a decisive disadvantage.
In my recent writeup of an investigation into AI Takeover scenarios I made an identical comparison—i.e. that the optimistic analogy looks like avoiding nuclear MAD for a while and the pessimistic analogy looks like optimal climate mitigation: