And the concept of 3D space seems like it’s probably going to be useful for an AI system no matter how smart it gets. Currently, they might have a concept of 3D space, but it’s not obvious that they do. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t.
Presumably at some point they start actually using the concept of 4D locally-Minkowski spacetime instead (or quantum loops or whatever)
and in general—if you have things roughly like human notions of agency or cause, but formalised differently and more correctly than we would, that makes them harder to analyse.
RS I suspect they don’t use 4D spacetime, because it’s not particularly useful for most tasks, and takes more computation.
But I agree with the broader point that abstractions can be formalized differently, and that there can be more alien abstractions. But I’d expect that this happens quite a bit later
DF I mean maybe once you’ve gotten rid of the pesky humans and need to start building dyson spheres… anyway I think curved 4d spacetime does require more computation than standard 3d modelling, but I don’t think that using minkowski spacetime does.
RS Yeah, I think I’m often thinking of the case where AI is somewhat better than humans, rather than building Dyson spheres. Who knows what’s happening at Dyson sphere level. Probably should have said that in the conversation. (I think about it this way because it seems more important to align the first few AIs, and then have them help with aligning future ones.)
DF Sure. But even when you have AI that’s worrying about signal transmission between different cities and the GPS system, SR is not that much more computationally intensive than Newtonian 3D space, and critical for accuracy.
Like I think the additional computational cost is in fact very low, but non-negative.
RS So like in practice if robots end up doing tasks like the ones we do, they develop intuitive physics models like ours, rather than Newtonian mechanics. SR might be only a bit more expensive than Newtonian, but I think most of the computational cost is in switching from heuristics / intuitive physics to a formal theory
(If they do different tasks than what we do, I expect them to develop their own internal physics which is pretty different from ours that they use for most tasks, but still not a formal theory)
DF Ooh, I wasn’t accounting for that but it seems right.
I do think that plausibly in some situations ‘intuitive physics’ takes place in minkowski spacetime.
DF
Presumably at some point they start actually using the concept of 4D locally-Minkowski spacetime instead (or quantum loops or whatever)
and in general—if you have things roughly like human notions of agency or cause, but formalised differently and more correctly than we would, that makes them harder to analyse.
RS I suspect they don’t use 4D spacetime, because it’s not particularly useful for most tasks, and takes more computation.
But I agree with the broader point that abstractions can be formalized differently, and that there can be more alien abstractions. But I’d expect that this happens quite a bit later
DF I mean maybe once you’ve gotten rid of the pesky humans and need to start building dyson spheres… anyway I think curved 4d spacetime does require more computation than standard 3d modelling, but I don’t think that using minkowski spacetime does.
RS Yeah, I think I’m often thinking of the case where AI is somewhat better than humans, rather than building Dyson spheres. Who knows what’s happening at Dyson sphere level. Probably should have said that in the conversation. (I think about it this way because it seems more important to align the first few AIs, and then have them help with aligning future ones.)
DF Sure. But even when you have AI that’s worrying about signal transmission between different cities and the GPS system, SR is not that much more computationally intensive than Newtonian 3D space, and critical for accuracy.
Like I think the additional computational cost is in fact very low, but non-negative.
RS So like in practice if robots end up doing tasks like the ones we do, they develop intuitive physics models like ours, rather than Newtonian mechanics. SR might be only a bit more expensive than Newtonian, but I think most of the computational cost is in switching from heuristics / intuitive physics to a formal theory
(If they do different tasks than what we do, I expect them to develop their own internal physics which is pretty different from ours that they use for most tasks, but still not a formal theory)
DF Ooh, I wasn’t accounting for that but it seems right.
I do think that plausibly in some situations ‘intuitive physics’ takes place in minkowski spacetime.