As far as I know, my post started the recent trend you complain about.
Several commenters on this thread (e.g. @Lucius Bushnaqhere and @MondSemmelhere) mention LessWrong’s growth and the resulting influx of uninformed new users as the likely cause. Any such new users may benefit from reading my recently-curated review of Planecrash, the bulk of which is about summarising Yudkowsky’s worldview.
i continue to feel so confused at what continuity led to some users of this forum asking questions like, “what effect will superintelligence have on the economy?” or otherwise expecting an economic ecosystem of superintelligences
If there’s decision-making about scarce resources, you will have an economy. Even superintelligence does not necessarily imply infinite abundance of everything, starting with the reason that our universe only has so many atoms. Multipolar outcomes seem plausible under continuous takeoff, which the consensus view in AI safety (as I understand it) sees as more likely than fast takeoff. I admit that there are strong reasons for thinking that the aggregate of a bunch of sufficiently smart things is agentic, but this isn’t directly relevant for the concerns about humans within the system in my post.
a value-aligned superintelligence directly creates utopia
[...] Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say it was irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work. He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out.
Peter Thiel might call this “indefinite optimism”: delay all planning or visualisation because there’s some later point where it’s trusted things will all sort themselves out. Now, if you think that takeoff will definitely be extremely hard and the resulting superintelligence will effortlessly take over the world, then obviously it makes sense to focus on what that superintelligence will want to do. But what if takeoff lasts months or years or decades? (Note that there can be lots of change even within months if the stakes look extreme to powerful actors!) Aren’t you curious about what an aligned superintelligence will end up deciding about society and humans? Are you so sure about the transition period being so short and the superintelligence being so unitary and multipolar outcomes being so unlikely that we’ll never have to worry about problems downstream of the incentive issues and competitive pressures that I discuss (which Beren recently had an excellent post on)? Are you so sure that there is not a single interesting, a priori deducible fact about the superintelligent economy beyond “a singleton is in charge and everything is utopia”?
The default outcome is an unaligned superintelligence singleton destroying the world and not caring about human concepts like property rights. Whereas an aligned superintelligence can create a far more utopian future than a human could come up with, and cares about capitalism and property rights only to the extent that that’s what it was designed to care about.
So I indeed don’t get your perspective. Why are humans still appearing as agents or decision-makers in your post-superintelligence scenario at all? If the superintelligence for some unlikely reason wants a human to stick around and to do something, then it doesn’t need to pay them. And if a superintelligence wants a resource, it can just take it, no need to pay for anything.
@L Rudolf L can talk on his own, but for me, a crux probably is I don’t expect either unaligned superintelligence singleton or a value aligned superintelligence creating utopia as the space of likely outcomes within the next few decades.
For the unaligned superintelligence point, my basic reasons is I now believe the alignment problem got significantly easier compared to 15 years ago, I’ve become more bullish on AI control working out since o3, and I’ve come to think instrumental convergence is probably correct for some AIs we build in practice, but that instrumental drives are more constrainable on the likely paths to AGI and ASI.
For the alignment point, a big reason for this is I now think a lot of what makes an AI aligned is primarily data, compared to inductive biases, and one of my biggest divergences with the LW community comes down to me thinking that inductive bias is way less necessary for alignment than people usually think, especially compared to 15 years ago.
For AI control, one update I’ve made for o3 is that I believe OpenAI managed to get the RL loop working in domains where outcomes are easily verifiable, but not in domains where verifying is hard, and programming/mathematics are such domains where verifying is easy, but the tie-in is that capabilities will be more spikey/narrow than you may think, and this matters since I believe narrow/tool AI has a relevant role to play in an intelligence explosion, so you can actually affect the outcome by building narrow capabilities AI for a few years, and the fact that AI capabilities are spikey in domains where we can easily verify outcomes is good for eliciting AI capabilities, which is a part of AI control.
For the singleton point, it’s probably because I believe takeoff is both slow and somewhat distributed enough such that multiple superintelligent AIs can arise.
For the value-aligned superintelligence creating a utopia for everyone, my basic reason for why I don’t really believe in this is because I believe value conflicts are effectively irresolvable due to moral subjectivism, which forces the utopia to be a utopia for some people, and I expect the set of people that are in an individual utopia to be small in practice (because value conflicts become more relevant for AIs that can create nation-states all by themselves.)
For why humans are decision makers, this is probably because AI is either controlled or certain companies have chosen to make AIs follow instruction-following drives, and that actually succeeding.
And why must alignment be binary? (aligned, or misaligned, where misaligned necessarily means it destroys the world and does not care about property rights)
Why can you not have an a superintelligence that is only misaligned when it comes to issues of wealth distribution?
I guess we could in theory fail and only achieve partial alignment, but that seems like a weird scenario to imagine. Like shooting for a 1 in big_number target (= an aligned mind design in the space of all potential mind designs) and then only grazing it. How would that happen in practice?
And what does it even mean for a superintelligence to be “only misaligned when it comes to issues of wealth distribution”? Can’t you then just ask your pretty-much-perfectly-aligned entity to align itself on that remaining question?
I guess we could in theory fail and only achieve partial alignment, but that seems like a weird scenario to imagine. Like shooting for a 1 in big_number target (= an aligned mind design in the space of all potential mind designs) and then only grazing it. How would that happen in practice?
Are you saying that the 1 aligned mind design in the space of all potential mind designs is an easier target than the subspace composed of mind designs that does not destroy the world? If so, why? is it a bigger target? is it more stable?
Can’t you then just ask your pretty-much-perfectly-aligned entity to align itself on that remaining question?
No, because the you who can ask (the persons in power) is themselves misaligned with the 1 alignment target that perfectly captures all our preferences.
Are you so sure that there is not a single interesting, a priori deducible fact about the superintelligent economy beyond “a singleton is in charge and everything is utopia”?
End points are easier to infer than trajectories, so sure, I think there’s some reasonable guesses you can try to make about how the world might look after aligned superintelligence, should we get it somehow.
For example, I think it’s a decent bet that basically all minds would exist solely as uploads almost all of the time, because living directly in physical reality is astronomically wasteful and incredibly inconvenient. Turning on a physical lamp every time you want things to be brighter means wiggling about vast numbers of particles and wasting an ungodly amount of negentropy just for the sake of the teeny tiny number of bits about these vast numbers of particles that actually make it to your eyeballs, and the even smaller number of bits that actually end up influencing your mind state and making any difference to your perception of the world. All of the particles[1] in the lamp in my bedroom, the air its light shines through, and the walls it bounces off, could be so much more useful arranged in an ordered dance of logic gates where every single movement and spin flip is actually doing something of value. If we’re not being so incredibly wasteful about it, maybe we can run whole civilisations for aeons on the energy and negentropy that currently make up my bedroom. What we’re doing right now is like building an abacus out of supercomputers. I can’t imagine any mature civilisation would stick with this.
It’s not that I refuse to speculate about how a world post aligned superintelligence might look. I just didn’t think that your guess was very plausible. I don’t think pre-existing property rights or state structures would matter very much in such a world, even if we don’t get what is effectively a singleton, which I doubt. If a group of superintelligent AGIs is effectively much more powerful and productive than the entire pre-existing economy, your legal share of that pre-existing economy is not a very relevant factor in your ability to steer the future and get what you want. The same goes for pre-existing military or legal power.
Something like a crux here is I believe the trajectories non-trivially matter for which end-points we get, and I don’t think it’s like entropy where we can easily determine the end-point without considering the intermediate trajectory, because I do genuinely think some path-dependentness is present in history, which is why even if I were way more charitable towards communism I don’t think this was ever defensible:
[...] Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say it was irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work. He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out.
As far as I know, my post started the recent trend you complain about.
Several commenters on this thread (e.g. @Lucius Bushnaq here and @MondSemmel here) mention LessWrong’s growth and the resulting influx of uninformed new users as the likely cause. Any such new users may benefit from reading my recently-curated review of Planecrash, the bulk of which is about summarising Yudkowsky’s worldview.
If there’s decision-making about scarce resources, you will have an economy. Even superintelligence does not necessarily imply infinite abundance of everything, starting with the reason that our universe only has so many atoms. Multipolar outcomes seem plausible under continuous takeoff, which the consensus view in AI safety (as I understand it) sees as more likely than fast takeoff. I admit that there are strong reasons for thinking that the aggregate of a bunch of sufficiently smart things is agentic, but this isn’t directly relevant for the concerns about humans within the system in my post.
In his review of Peter Singer’s commentary on Marx, Scott Alexander writes:
Peter Thiel might call this “indefinite optimism”: delay all planning or visualisation because there’s some later point where it’s trusted things will all sort themselves out. Now, if you think that takeoff will definitely be extremely hard and the resulting superintelligence will effortlessly take over the world, then obviously it makes sense to focus on what that superintelligence will want to do. But what if takeoff lasts months or years or decades? (Note that there can be lots of change even within months if the stakes look extreme to powerful actors!) Aren’t you curious about what an aligned superintelligence will end up deciding about society and humans? Are you so sure about the transition period being so short and the superintelligence being so unitary and multipolar outcomes being so unlikely that we’ll never have to worry about problems downstream of the incentive issues and competitive pressures that I discuss (which Beren recently had an excellent post on)? Are you so sure that there is not a single interesting, a priori deducible fact about the superintelligent economy beyond “a singleton is in charge and everything is utopia”?
The default outcome is an unaligned superintelligence singleton destroying the world and not caring about human concepts like property rights. Whereas an aligned superintelligence can create a far more utopian future than a human could come up with, and cares about capitalism and property rights only to the extent that that’s what it was designed to care about.
So I indeed don’t get your perspective. Why are humans still appearing as agents or decision-makers in your post-superintelligence scenario at all? If the superintelligence for some unlikely reason wants a human to stick around and to do something, then it doesn’t need to pay them. And if a superintelligence wants a resource, it can just take it, no need to pay for anything.
@L Rudolf L can talk on his own, but for me, a crux probably is I don’t expect either unaligned superintelligence singleton or a value aligned superintelligence creating utopia as the space of likely outcomes within the next few decades.
For the unaligned superintelligence point, my basic reasons is I now believe the alignment problem got significantly easier compared to 15 years ago, I’ve become more bullish on AI control working out since o3, and I’ve come to think instrumental convergence is probably correct for some AIs we build in practice, but that instrumental drives are more constrainable on the likely paths to AGI and ASI.
For the alignment point, a big reason for this is I now think a lot of what makes an AI aligned is primarily data, compared to inductive biases, and one of my biggest divergences with the LW community comes down to me thinking that inductive bias is way less necessary for alignment than people usually think, especially compared to 15 years ago.
For AI control, one update I’ve made for o3 is that I believe OpenAI managed to get the RL loop working in domains where outcomes are easily verifiable, but not in domains where verifying is hard, and programming/mathematics are such domains where verifying is easy, but the tie-in is that capabilities will be more spikey/narrow than you may think, and this matters since I believe narrow/tool AI has a relevant role to play in an intelligence explosion, so you can actually affect the outcome by building narrow capabilities AI for a few years, and the fact that AI capabilities are spikey in domains where we can easily verify outcomes is good for eliciting AI capabilities, which is a part of AI control.
For the singleton point, it’s probably because I believe takeoff is both slow and somewhat distributed enough such that multiple superintelligent AIs can arise.
For the value-aligned superintelligence creating a utopia for everyone, my basic reason for why I don’t really believe in this is because I believe value conflicts are effectively irresolvable due to moral subjectivism, which forces the utopia to be a utopia for some people, and I expect the set of people that are in an individual utopia to be small in practice (because value conflicts become more relevant for AIs that can create nation-states all by themselves.)
For why humans are decision makers, this is probably because AI is either controlled or certain companies have chosen to make AIs follow instruction-following drives, and that actually succeeding.
And why must alignment be binary? (aligned, or misaligned, where misaligned necessarily means it destroys the world and does not care about property rights)
Why can you not have an a superintelligence that is only misaligned when it comes to issues of wealth distribution?
Relatedly, are we sure that CEV is computable?
I guess we could in theory fail and only achieve partial alignment, but that seems like a weird scenario to imagine. Like shooting for a 1 in big_number target (= an aligned mind design in the space of all potential mind designs) and then only grazing it. How would that happen in practice?
And what does it even mean for a superintelligence to be “only misaligned when it comes to issues of wealth distribution”? Can’t you then just ask your pretty-much-perfectly-aligned entity to align itself on that remaining question?
Are you saying that the 1 aligned mind design in the space of all potential mind designs is an easier target than the subspace composed of mind designs that does not destroy the world? If so, why? is it a bigger target? is it more stable?
No, because the you who can ask (the persons in power) is themselves misaligned with the 1 alignment target that perfectly captures all our preferences.
End points are easier to infer than trajectories, so sure, I think there’s some reasonable guesses you can try to make about how the world might look after aligned superintelligence, should we get it somehow.
For example, I think it’s a decent bet that basically all minds would exist solely as uploads almost all of the time, because living directly in physical reality is astronomically wasteful and incredibly inconvenient. Turning on a physical lamp every time you want things to be brighter means wiggling about vast numbers of particles and wasting an ungodly amount of negentropy just for the sake of the teeny tiny number of bits about these vast numbers of particles that actually make it to your eyeballs, and the even smaller number of bits that actually end up influencing your mind state and making any difference to your perception of the world. All of the particles[1] in the lamp in my bedroom, the air its light shines through, and the walls it bounces off, could be so much more useful arranged in an ordered dance of logic gates where every single movement and spin flip is actually doing something of value. If we’re not being so incredibly wasteful about it, maybe we can run whole civilisations for aeons on the energy and negentropy that currently make up my bedroom. What we’re doing right now is like building an abacus out of supercomputers. I can’t imagine any mature civilisation would stick with this.
It’s not that I refuse to speculate about how a world post aligned superintelligence might look. I just didn’t think that your guess was very plausible. I don’t think pre-existing property rights or state structures would matter very much in such a world, even if we don’t get what is effectively a singleton, which I doubt. If a group of superintelligent AGIs is effectively much more powerful and productive than the entire pre-existing economy, your legal share of that pre-existing economy is not a very relevant factor in your ability to steer the future and get what you want. The same goes for pre-existing military or legal power.
Well, the conserved quantum numbers of my room, really.
Assuming that which end point you get to doesn’t depend on the intermediate trajectories at least.
Something like a crux here is I believe the trajectories non-trivially matter for which end-points we get, and I don’t think it’s like entropy where we can easily determine the end-point without considering the intermediate trajectory, because I do genuinely think some path-dependentness is present in history, which is why even if I were way more charitable towards communism I don’t think this was ever defensible: