It has to also be probable that their work averts those risks, which seem incredibly improbable by any reasonable estimate. If the alternative Earth was to adopt a strategy of ignoring prophetic groups of ‘idea guys’ similar to SI and ignore their pleads for donations so that they can hire competent researchers to pursue their ideas, I do not think that such decision would have increased the risk by more than a miniscule amount.
People currently understand the physical world sufficiently to see that supernatural claims are bogus, and so there is certainty about impossibility of developments predicated on supernatural. People know robust and general laws of physics that imply impossibility of perpetual motion, and so we can conclude in advance with great certainty that any perpetual motion engineering project is going to fail. Some long-standing problems in mathematics were attacked unsuccessfully for a long time, and so we know that making further progress on them is hard. In all these cases, there are specific pieces of positive knowledge that enable the inference of impossibility or futility of certain endeavors.
In contrast, a lot of questions concerning Friendly AI remain confusing and unexplored. It might turn out to be impossibly difficult to make progress on them, or else a simple matter of figuring out how to apply standard tools of mainstream mathematics. We don’t know, but neither do we have positive knowledge that implies impossibility or extreme difficulty of progress on these questions. In particular, the enormity of consequences does not imply extreme improbability of influencing those consequences. It looks plausible that the problem can be solved.
This kind of seems like political slander to me. Maybe I’m miscalibrated? But it seems like you’re thinking of “reasonable estimates” as things produced by groups or factions, treating SI as a single “estimate” in this sense, and lumping them with a vaguely negative but non-specified reference class of “prophetic groups”.
The packaged claims function to reduce SI’s organizational credibility, and yet it references no external evidence and makes no testable claims. For your “prophetic groups” reference class, does it include 1930′s nuclear activists, 1950′s environmentalists, or 1970′s nanotechnology activists? Those examples come from the socio-political reference class I generally think of SI as belonging to, and I think of them in a mostly positive way.
Personally, I prefer to think of “estimates” as specific predictions produced by specific processes at specific times, and they seem like they should be classified as “reasonable” or not on the basis of their mechanisms and grounding in observables in the past and the future.
The politics and social dynamics surrounding an issue can give you hints about what’s worth thinking about, but ultimately you have to deal with the object level issues, and the object level issues will screen off the politics and social dynamics once you process them. The most reasonable tool for extracting a “coherent opinion” from someone on the subject of AGI that is available to the public that I’m aware of is the uncertain future.
(Endgame: Singularity is a more interesting tool in some respects. It’s interesting for building intuitions about certain kinds of reality/observable correlations because it has you play as a weak but essentially benevolent AGI rather than as humanity, but (1) it is ridiculously over-specific as a prediction tool, and (2) seems to give the AGI certain unrealistic advantages and disadvantages for the sake of making it more fun as a game. I’ve had a vague thought to fork it, try to change it to be more realistic, write a bot for playing it, and use that as an engine for Monte-carlo simulator of singularity scenarios. Alas: a day job prevents me from having the time, and if that constraint were removed I bet I could find many higher value things to work on, reality being what it is, and people being motivated to action the way they are.)
Do you know of anything more epistemically helpful than the uncertain future? If so, can you tell me about it? If not, could you work through it and say how it affected your model of the world?
(Note that the Uncertain Future software is mostly supposed to be a conceptual demonstration; as mentioned in the accompanying conference paper, a better probabilistic forecasting guide would take historical observations and uncertainty about constant underlying factors into account more directly, with Bayesian model structure. The most important part of this would be stochastic differential equation model components that could account for both parameter and state uncertainty in nonlinear models of future economic development from past observations, especially of technology performance curves and learning curves. Robin Hanson’s analysis of the random properties of technological growth modes has something of a similar spirit.)
I think your estimate of their chances of success is low. But even given that estimate, I don’t think it’s Pascalian. To me, it’s Pascalian when you say “my model says the chances of this are zero, but I have to give it non-zero odds because there may be an unknown failing in my model”. I think Heaven and Hell are actually impossible, I’m just not 100% confident of that. By contrast, it would be a bit odd if your model of the world said “there is this risk to us all, but the odds of a group of people causing a change that averts that risk are actually zero”.
It is not just their chances of success. For the donations to matter, you need SI to succeed where without SI there is failure. You need to get a basket of eggs, and have all the good looking eggs be rotten inside but one fairly rotten looking egg be fresh. Even if a rotten looking egg is nonetheless more likely to be fresh inside than one would believe, it is highly unlikely situation.
I’m afraid I’m not getting your meaning. Could you fill out what corresponds to what in the analogy? What are all the other eggs? In what way do they look good compared to SI?
All the other people and organizations that are no less capable of identifying the preventable risks (if those exist) and addressing them, have to be unable to prevent destruction of mankind without SI. Just like in the Pascal’s original wager, the Thor and other deities are to be ignored by omission.
On how the SI does not look good, well, it does not look good to Holden Karnofsky, or me for that matter. Resistance to feedback loops is an extremely strong point of his.
On the rationality movement, here’s a quote from Holden.
Apparent poorly grounded belief in SI’s superior general rationality. Many of the things that SI and its supporters and advocates say imply a belief that they have special insights into the nature of general rationality, and/or have superior general rationality, relative to the rest of the population. (Examples here, here and here). My understanding is that SI is in the process of spinning off a group dedicated to training people on how to have higher general rationality.
Yet I’m not aware of any of what I consider compelling evidence that SI staff/supporters/advocates have any special insight into the nature of general rationality or that they have especially high general rationality.
Could you give me some examples of other people and organizations trying to prevent the risk of an Unfriendy AI? Because for me, it’s not like I believe that SI has a great chance to develop the theory and prevent the danger, but rather like they are the only people who even care about this specific risk (which I believe to be real).
As soon as the message becomes widely known, and smart people and organizations will start rationally discussing the dangers of Unfriendly AI, and how to make a Friendly AI (avoiding some obvious errors, such as “a smart AI simply must develop a human-compatible morality, because it would be too horrible to think otherwise”), then there is a pretty good chance that some of those organization will be more capable than SI to reach that goal: more smart people, better funding, etc. But at this moment, SI seems to be the only one paying attention to this topic.
It’s a crooked game, but it’s the only game in town?
None of that is evidence that SI would be more effective if it had more money. Assign odds to hostile AI becoming extant given low funding for SI, and compare the odds of hostile AI becoming extant given high funding for SI. The difference between those two is proportional to the value of SI (with regards to preventing hostile AI).
SI being the only one ought to lower your probability that this whole enterprise is worthwhile in any way.
With regards to the ‘message’, i think you grossly over estimate value of a rather easy insight that anyone who has watched Terminator could have. With regards to “rationally discussing”, what I have seen so far here is pure rationalization and very little, if any, rationality. What the SI has on the track record is, once again, a lot of rationalizations and not enough rationality to even have had an accountant through it’s first 10 years and first over 2 millions dollars in other people’s money.
Note that that second paragraph is one of Holden Karnofsky’s objections to SIAI: a high opinion of its own rationality that is not so far substantiable from the outside view.
Yes. I am sure Holden is being very polite, which is generally good but I’ve been getting impression that the point he was making did not in full carry across the same barrier that has resulted in the above-mentioned high opinion of own rationality despite complete lack of results for which rationality would be better explanation than irrationality (and presence of results which set rather low ceiling for the rationality). The ‘resistance to feedback’ is even stronger point, suggestive that the belief in own rationality is, at least to some extent, combined with expectation that it won’t pass the test and subsequent avoidance (rather than seeking) of tests; as when psychics do believe in their powers but do avoid any reliable test.
It has to also be probable that their work averts those risks, which seem incredibly improbable by any reasonable estimate. If the alternative Earth was to adopt a strategy of ignoring prophetic groups of ‘idea guys’ similar to SI and ignore their pleads for donations so that they can hire competent researchers to pursue their ideas, I do not think that such decision would have increased the risk by more than a miniscule amount.
People currently understand the physical world sufficiently to see that supernatural claims are bogus, and so there is certainty about impossibility of developments predicated on supernatural. People know robust and general laws of physics that imply impossibility of perpetual motion, and so we can conclude in advance with great certainty that any perpetual motion engineering project is going to fail. Some long-standing problems in mathematics were attacked unsuccessfully for a long time, and so we know that making further progress on them is hard. In all these cases, there are specific pieces of positive knowledge that enable the inference of impossibility or futility of certain endeavors.
In contrast, a lot of questions concerning Friendly AI remain confusing and unexplored. It might turn out to be impossibly difficult to make progress on them, or else a simple matter of figuring out how to apply standard tools of mainstream mathematics. We don’t know, but neither do we have positive knowledge that implies impossibility or extreme difficulty of progress on these questions. In particular, the enormity of consequences does not imply extreme improbability of influencing those consequences. It looks plausible that the problem can be solved.
This kind of seems like political slander to me. Maybe I’m miscalibrated? But it seems like you’re thinking of “reasonable estimates” as things produced by groups or factions, treating SI as a single “estimate” in this sense, and lumping them with a vaguely negative but non-specified reference class of “prophetic groups”.
The packaged claims function to reduce SI’s organizational credibility, and yet it references no external evidence and makes no testable claims. For your “prophetic groups” reference class, does it include 1930′s nuclear activists, 1950′s environmentalists, or 1970′s nanotechnology activists? Those examples come from the socio-political reference class I generally think of SI as belonging to, and I think of them in a mostly positive way.
Personally, I prefer to think of “estimates” as specific predictions produced by specific processes at specific times, and they seem like they should be classified as “reasonable” or not on the basis of their mechanisms and grounding in observables in the past and the future.
The politics and social dynamics surrounding an issue can give you hints about what’s worth thinking about, but ultimately you have to deal with the object level issues, and the object level issues will screen off the politics and social dynamics once you process them. The most reasonable tool for extracting a “coherent opinion” from someone on the subject of AGI that is available to the public that I’m aware of is the uncertain future.
(Endgame: Singularity is a more interesting tool in some respects. It’s interesting for building intuitions about certain kinds of reality/observable correlations because it has you play as a weak but essentially benevolent AGI rather than as humanity, but (1) it is ridiculously over-specific as a prediction tool, and (2) seems to give the AGI certain unrealistic advantages and disadvantages for the sake of making it more fun as a game. I’ve had a vague thought to fork it, try to change it to be more realistic, write a bot for playing it, and use that as an engine for Monte-carlo simulator of singularity scenarios. Alas: a day job prevents me from having the time, and if that constraint were removed I bet I could find many higher value things to work on, reality being what it is, and people being motivated to action the way they are.)
Do you know of anything more epistemically helpful than the uncertain future? If so, can you tell me about it? If not, could you work through it and say how it affected your model of the world?
(Note that the Uncertain Future software is mostly supposed to be a conceptual demonstration; as mentioned in the accompanying conference paper, a better probabilistic forecasting guide would take historical observations and uncertainty about constant underlying factors into account more directly, with Bayesian model structure. The most important part of this would be stochastic differential equation model components that could account for both parameter and state uncertainty in nonlinear models of future economic development from past observations, especially of technology performance curves and learning curves. Robin Hanson’s analysis of the random properties of technological growth modes has something of a similar spirit.)
I think your estimate of their chances of success is low. But even given that estimate, I don’t think it’s Pascalian. To me, it’s Pascalian when you say “my model says the chances of this are zero, but I have to give it non-zero odds because there may be an unknown failing in my model”. I think Heaven and Hell are actually impossible, I’m just not 100% confident of that. By contrast, it would be a bit odd if your model of the world said “there is this risk to us all, but the odds of a group of people causing a change that averts that risk are actually zero”.
It is not just their chances of success. For the donations to matter, you need SI to succeed where without SI there is failure. You need to get a basket of eggs, and have all the good looking eggs be rotten inside but one fairly rotten looking egg be fresh. Even if a rotten looking egg is nonetheless more likely to be fresh inside than one would believe, it is highly unlikely situation.
I’m afraid I’m not getting your meaning. Could you fill out what corresponds to what in the analogy? What are all the other eggs? In what way do they look good compared to SI?
All the other people and organizations that are no less capable of identifying the preventable risks (if those exist) and addressing them, have to be unable to prevent destruction of mankind without SI. Just like in the Pascal’s original wager, the Thor and other deities are to be ignored by omission.
On how the SI does not look good, well, it does not look good to Holden Karnofsky, or me for that matter. Resistance to feedback loops is an extremely strong point of his.
On the rationality movement, here’s a quote from Holden.
Could you give me some examples of other people and organizations trying to prevent the risk of an Unfriendy AI? Because for me, it’s not like I believe that SI has a great chance to develop the theory and prevent the danger, but rather like they are the only people who even care about this specific risk (which I believe to be real).
As soon as the message becomes widely known, and smart people and organizations will start rationally discussing the dangers of Unfriendly AI, and how to make a Friendly AI (avoiding some obvious errors, such as “a smart AI simply must develop a human-compatible morality, because it would be too horrible to think otherwise”), then there is a pretty good chance that some of those organization will be more capable than SI to reach that goal: more smart people, better funding, etc. But at this moment, SI seems to be the only one paying attention to this topic.
It’s a crooked game, but it’s the only game in town?
None of that is evidence that SI would be more effective if it had more money. Assign odds to hostile AI becoming extant given low funding for SI, and compare the odds of hostile AI becoming extant given high funding for SI. The difference between those two is proportional to the value of SI (with regards to preventing hostile AI).
SI being the only one ought to lower your probability that this whole enterprise is worthwhile in any way.
With regards to the ‘message’, i think you grossly over estimate value of a rather easy insight that anyone who has watched Terminator could have. With regards to “rationally discussing”, what I have seen so far here is pure rationalization and very little, if any, rationality. What the SI has on the track record is, once again, a lot of rationalizations and not enough rationality to even have had an accountant through it’s first 10 years and first over 2 millions dollars in other people’s money.
Note that that second paragraph is one of Holden Karnofsky’s objections to SIAI: a high opinion of its own rationality that is not so far substantiable from the outside view.
Yes. I am sure Holden is being very polite, which is generally good but I’ve been getting impression that the point he was making did not in full carry across the same barrier that has resulted in the above-mentioned high opinion of own rationality despite complete lack of results for which rationality would be better explanation than irrationality (and presence of results which set rather low ceiling for the rationality). The ‘resistance to feedback’ is even stronger point, suggestive that the belief in own rationality is, at least to some extent, combined with expectation that it won’t pass the test and subsequent avoidance (rather than seeking) of tests; as when psychics do believe in their powers but do avoid any reliable test.