Do you mean we possibly don’t need the prerequisites, or we definitely need them but that’s possibly fine?
I’m gonna pause to make sure we’re on the same page.
We’re talking about this claim I made above:
if we zap the AGI with negative reward when it’s acting from a deceptive motivation and positive reward when it’s acting from a being-helpful motivation, would those zaps turn into a reflectively-endorsed desire for “I am being docile / helpful / etc.”? Maybe, maybe not, I dunno.
And you’re trying to argue: “‘Maybe, maybe not’ is too optimistic, the correct answer is ‘(almost) definitely not’”.
And then by “prerequisites” we’re referring to the thing you wrote above:
In order to have reflectively-endorsed goals that are stable under capability gains, the AGI needs to have reached some threshold levels of situational awareness, coherence, and general capabilities (…this is a pretty harsh set of prerequisites, especially given that we don’t have any fine control over relative capabilities (or sit awareness, or coherence,etc), so you might get an AI that can break containment before it is general or coherent enough to be alignable in principle).
OK, now to respond.
For one thing, you use the “might” near the end of that excerpt. That seems more compatible with a ‘maybe, maybe not’ claim, than with an ‘(almost) definitely not’ claim, right?
For another thing, if we have, umm, “toddler AGI” that’s too unsophisticated to have good situational awareness, coherence, etc., then I would think that the boxing / containment problem is a lot easier than we normally think about, right? We’re not talking about hardening against a superintelligent adversary. (I have previously written about that here.)
For yet another thing, I think if the “toddler AGI” is not yet sophisticated enough to have a reflectively-endorsed desire for open and honest communication (or whatever), that’s different from saying that the toddler AGI is totally out to get us. It can still have habits and desires and inclinations and aversions and such, of various sorts, and we have some (imperfect) control over what those are. We can use non-reflectively-endorsed desires to help tide us over until the toddler AGI develops enough reflectivity to form any reflectively-endorsed desires at all.
Yeah we’re on the same page here, thanks for checking!
For one thing, you use the “might” near the end of that excerpt. That seems more compatible with a ‘maybe, maybe not’ claim, than with an ‘(almost) definitely not’ claim, right?
I feel pretty uncertain about all the factors here. One reason I overall still lean towards the ‘definitely not’ stance is that building a toddler AGI that is alignable in principle is only one of multiple steps that need to go right for us to get a reflectively-stable docile AGI; in particular we still need to solve the problem of actually aligning the toddler AGI. (Another step is getting labs to even seriously attempt to box it and align it, which maybe is an out-of-scope consideration here but it does make me more pessimistic).
For another thing, if we have, umm, “toddler AGI” that’s too unsophisticated to have good situational awareness, coherence, etc., then I would think that the boxing / containment problem is a lot easier than we normally think about, right? We’re not talking about hardening against a superintelligent adversary.
I agree we’re not talking about a superintelligent adversary, and I agree that boxing is doable for some forms of toddler AGI. I do think you need coherence; if the toddler AGI is incoherent, then any “aligned” behavioral properties it has will also be incoherent, and something unpredictable (and so probably bad) will happen when the AGI becomes more capable or more coherent. (Flagging that I’m not sure “coherent” is the right way to talk about this… wish I had a more precise concept here.)
We can use non-reflectively-endorsed desires to help tide us over until the toddler AGI develops enough reflectivity to form any reflectively-endorsed desires at all.
I agree a non-reflective toddler AGI is in many ways easier to deal with. I think we will have problems at the threshold where the tAGI is first able to reflect on its goals and realizes that the RLHF-instilled desires aren’t going to imply docile behavior. (If we can speculate about how a superintelligence might extrapolate a set of trained-in desires and realize that this process doesn’t lead to a good outcome, then the tAGI can reason the same way about its own desires).
(I agree that if we can get aligned desires that are stable under reflection, then maybe the ‘use non-endorsed desires to tide us over’ plan could work. Though even then you need to somehow manage to prevent the tAGI from reflecting on its desires until you get the desires to a point where they stay aligned under reflection, and I have no idea how you would do something like that—we currently just don’t have that level of fine control over capabilities).
The basic problem here is the double-bind where we need the toddler AGI to be coherent, reflective, capable of understanding human intent (etc) in order for it to be robustly alignable at all, even though those are exactly the incredibly dangerous properties that we really want to stay away from. My guess is that the reason Nate’s story doesn’t hypothesize a reflectively-endorsed desire to be nondeceptive is that reflectively-stable aligned desires are really hard / dangerous to get, and so it seems better / at least not obviously worse to go for eliezer-corrigibility instead.
Some other difficulties that I see:
The ‘capability profile’ (ie the relative levels of the toddler AGI’s capabilities) is going to be weird / very different from that of humans; that is, once the AGI has human-level coherence and human-level understanding of human intent, it has far-superhuman capabilities in other domains. (Though hopefully we’re at least careful enough to remove code from the training data, etc).
A coherent agentic AI at GPT-4 level capabilities could plausibly already be deceptively aligned, if it had sufficient situational awareness, and our toddler AGI is much more dangerous than that.
All of my reasoning here is kind of based on fuzzy confused concepts like ‘coherence’ and ‘capability to self-reflect’, and I kind of feel like this should make me more pessimistic rather than more optimistic about the plan.
It does make me more uncertain about most of the details. And that then makes me more pessimistic about the solution, because I expect that I’m missing some of the problems.
(Analogy: say I’m working on a math exercise sheet and I have some concrete reason to suspect my answer may be wrong; if I then realize I’m actually confused about the entire setup, I should be even more pessimistic about having gotten the correct answer).
I’m gonna pause to make sure we’re on the same page.
We’re talking about this claim I made above:
And you’re trying to argue: “‘Maybe, maybe not’ is too optimistic, the correct answer is ‘(almost) definitely not’”.
And then by “prerequisites” we’re referring to the thing you wrote above:
OK, now to respond.
For one thing, you use the “might” near the end of that excerpt. That seems more compatible with a ‘maybe, maybe not’ claim, than with an ‘(almost) definitely not’ claim, right?
For another thing, if we have, umm, “toddler AGI” that’s too unsophisticated to have good situational awareness, coherence, etc., then I would think that the boxing / containment problem is a lot easier than we normally think about, right? We’re not talking about hardening against a superintelligent adversary. (I have previously written about that here.)
For yet another thing, I think if the “toddler AGI” is not yet sophisticated enough to have a reflectively-endorsed desire for open and honest communication (or whatever), that’s different from saying that the toddler AGI is totally out to get us. It can still have habits and desires and inclinations and aversions and such, of various sorts, and we have some (imperfect) control over what those are. We can use non-reflectively-endorsed desires to help tide us over until the toddler AGI develops enough reflectivity to form any reflectively-endorsed desires at all.
Yeah we’re on the same page here, thanks for checking!
I feel pretty uncertain about all the factors here. One reason I overall still lean towards the ‘definitely not’ stance is that building a toddler AGI that is alignable in principle is only one of multiple steps that need to go right for us to get a reflectively-stable docile AGI; in particular we still need to solve the problem of actually aligning the toddler AGI. (Another step is getting labs to even seriously attempt to box it and align it, which maybe is an out-of-scope consideration here but it does make me more pessimistic).
I agree we’re not talking about a superintelligent adversary, and I agree that boxing is doable for some forms of toddler AGI. I do think you need coherence; if the toddler AGI is incoherent, then any “aligned” behavioral properties it has will also be incoherent, and something unpredictable (and so probably bad) will happen when the AGI becomes more capable or more coherent. (Flagging that I’m not sure “coherent” is the right way to talk about this… wish I had a more precise concept here.)
I agree a non-reflective toddler AGI is in many ways easier to deal with. I think we will have problems at the threshold where the tAGI is first able to reflect on its goals and realizes that the RLHF-instilled desires aren’t going to imply docile behavior. (If we can speculate about how a superintelligence might extrapolate a set of trained-in desires and realize that this process doesn’t lead to a good outcome, then the tAGI can reason the same way about its own desires).
(I agree that if we can get aligned desires that are stable under reflection, then maybe the ‘use non-endorsed desires to tide us over’ plan could work. Though even then you need to somehow manage to prevent the tAGI from reflecting on its desires until you get the desires to a point where they stay aligned under reflection, and I have no idea how you would do something like that—we currently just don’t have that level of fine control over capabilities).
The basic problem here is the double-bind where we need the toddler AGI to be coherent, reflective, capable of understanding human intent (etc) in order for it to be robustly alignable at all, even though those are exactly the incredibly dangerous properties that we really want to stay away from. My guess is that the reason Nate’s story doesn’t hypothesize a reflectively-endorsed desire to be nondeceptive is that reflectively-stable aligned desires are really hard / dangerous to get, and so it seems better / at least not obviously worse to go for eliezer-corrigibility instead.
Some other difficulties that I see:
The ‘capability profile’ (ie the relative levels of the toddler AGI’s capabilities) is going to be weird / very different from that of humans; that is, once the AGI has human-level coherence and human-level understanding of human intent, it has far-superhuman capabilities in other domains. (Though hopefully we’re at least careful enough to remove code from the training data, etc).
A coherent agentic AI at GPT-4 level capabilities could plausibly already be deceptively aligned, if it had sufficient situational awareness, and our toddler AGI is much more dangerous than that.
All of my reasoning here is kind of based on fuzzy confused concepts like ‘coherence’ and ‘capability to self-reflect’, and I kind of feel like this should make me more pessimistic rather than more optimistic about the plan.
Regarding your last point 3., why does this make you more pessimistic rather than just very uncertain about everything?
It does make me more uncertain about most of the details. And that then makes me more pessimistic about the solution, because I expect that I’m missing some of the problems.
(Analogy: say I’m working on a math exercise sheet and I have some concrete reason to suspect my answer may be wrong; if I then realize I’m actually confused about the entire setup, I should be even more pessimistic about having gotten the correct answer).