I do not think we really disagree on this point. I also believe that looking at the state of the computer is not as important as having an understanding of how the program is going to operate and how to shape its incentives.
Maybe this could be better emphasized, but the way I think about this article is showing that even the strongest case for looking at the intersection of quantum computing and AI alignment does not look very promising.
re: How quantum computing will affect ML
I basically agree that the most plausible way QC can affect AI aligment is by providing computational speedups—but I think this mostly changes the timelines rather than violating any specific assumptions in usual AI alignment research.
Relatedly, I am bearish that we will see better than quadratic speedups (ie Grover) - to get better-than-quadratic speedups you need to surpass many challenges that right now it is not clear can be surpassed outside of very contrived problem setup [REF].
In fact I think that the speedups will not even be quadratic because you “lose” the quadratic speedup when parallelizing quantum computing (in the sense that the speedup does not scale quadratically with the number of cores).
re: impotance of oversight
I do not think we really disagree on this point. I also believe that looking at the state of the computer is not as important as having an understanding of how the program is going to operate and how to shape its incentives.
Maybe this could be better emphasized, but the way I think about this article is showing that even the strongest case for looking at the intersection of quantum computing and AI alignment does not look very promising.
re: How quantum computing will affect ML
I basically agree that the most plausible way QC can affect AI aligment is by providing computational speedups—but I think this mostly changes the timelines rather than violating any specific assumptions in usual AI alignment research.
Relatedly, I am bearish that we will see better than quadratic speedups (ie Grover) - to get better-than-quadratic speedups you need to surpass many challenges that right now it is not clear can be surpassed outside of very contrived problem setup [REF].
In fact I think that the speedups will not even be quadratic because you “lose” the quadratic speedup when parallelizing quantum computing (in the sense that the speedup does not scale quadratically with the number of cores).