thanks for sharing. here’s my thoughts on the possibilities in the quote.
Suffering subroutines—maybe 10-20% likely. i don’t think suffering reduces to “pre-determined response patterns for undesirable situations,” because i can think of simple algorithmic examples of that which don’t seem like suffering.
suffering feels like it’s about the sense of aversion/badness (often in response a situation), and not about the policy “in <situation>, steer towards <new situation>”. (maybe humans were instilled with a policy of steering away from ‘suffering’ states generally, and that’s why evolution made us enter those states in some types of situation?). (though i’m confused about what suffering really is)
i would also give the example of positive-feeling emotions sometimes being narrowly directed. for example, someone can feel ‘excitement/joy’ about a gift or event and want to <go to/participate in> it. sexual and romantic subroutines can also be both narrowly-directed and positive-feeling. though these examples lack the element of a situation being steered away from, vs steering (from e.g any neutral situation) towards other ones.
Suffering simulations—seems likely (75%?) for the estimation of universal attributes, such as the distribution of values. my main uncertainty is about whether there’s some other way for the ASIs to compute that information which is simple enough to be suffering free. this also seems lower magnitude than other classes, because (unless it’s being calculated indefinetely for ever-greater precision) this computation terminates at some point, rather than lasting until heat death (or forever if it turns out that’s avoidable).
Blackmail—i don’t feel knowledgeable enough about decision theory to put a probability on this one, but in the case where it works (or is precommitted to under uncertainty in hopes that it works), it’s unfortunately a case where building aligned ASI would incentive unaligned entities to do it.
Flawed realization—again i’m too uncertain about what real-world paths lead to this, but intuitively, it’s worryingly possible if the future contains LLM-based LTPAs (long term planning agents) intelligent enough to solve alignment and implement their own (possibly simulated) ‘values’.
Suffering subroutines—maybe 10-20% likely. i don’t think suffering reduces to “pre-determined response patterns for undesirable situations,” because i can think of simple algorithmic examples of that which don’t seem like suffering.
Yeah, I agree with this to be clear. Our intended claim wasn’t that just “pre-determined response patterns for undesirable situations” would be enough for suffering. Actually, there were meant to be two separate claims, which I guess we should have distinguished more clearly:
1) If evolution stumbled on pain and suffering, those might be relatively easy and natural ways to get a mind to do something. So an AGI that built other AGIs might also build them to experience pain and suffering (that it was entirely indifferent to), if that happened to be an effective motivational system.
2) If this did happen, then there’s also some speculation suggesting that an AI that wanted to stay in charge might not want to give its worker AGIs things much in the way of things that looked like positive emotions, but did have a reason to give them things that looked like negative emotions. Which would then tilt the balance of pleasure vs. pain in the post-AGI world much more heavily in favor of (emotional) pain.
Now the second claim is much more speculative and I don’t even know if I’d consider it a particularly likely scenario (probably not); we just put it in since much of the paper was just generally listing various possibilities of what might happen. But the first claim—that since all the biological minds we know of seem to run on something like pain and pleasure, we should put a substantial probability on AGI architectures also ending up with something like that—seems much stronger to me.
thanks for sharing. here’s my thoughts on the possibilities in the quote.
Suffering subroutines—maybe 10-20% likely. i don’t think suffering reduces to “pre-determined response patterns for undesirable situations,” because i can think of simple algorithmic examples of that which don’t seem like suffering.
suffering feels like it’s about the sense of aversion/badness (often in response a situation), and not about the policy “in <situation>, steer towards <new situation>”. (maybe humans were instilled with a policy of steering away from ‘suffering’ states generally, and that’s why evolution made us enter those states in some types of situation?). (though i’m confused about what suffering really is)
i would also give the example of positive-feeling emotions sometimes being narrowly directed. for example, someone can feel ‘excitement/joy’ about a gift or event and want to <go to/participate in> it. sexual and romantic subroutines can also be both narrowly-directed and positive-feeling. though these examples lack the element of a situation being steered away from, vs steering (from e.g any neutral situation) towards other ones.
Suffering simulations—seems likely (75%?) for the estimation of universal attributes, such as the distribution of values. my main uncertainty is about whether there’s some other way for the ASIs to compute that information which is simple enough to be suffering free. this also seems lower magnitude than other classes, because (unless it’s being calculated indefinetely for ever-greater precision) this computation terminates at some point, rather than lasting until heat death (or forever if it turns out that’s avoidable).
Blackmail—i don’t feel knowledgeable enough about decision theory to put a probability on this one, but in the case where it works (or is precommitted to under uncertainty in hopes that it works), it’s unfortunately a case where building aligned ASI would incentive unaligned entities to do it.
Flawed realization—again i’m too uncertain about what real-world paths lead to this, but intuitively, it’s worryingly possible if the future contains LLM-based LTPAs (long term planning agents) intelligent enough to solve alignment and implement their own (possibly simulated) ‘values’.
Yeah, I agree with this to be clear. Our intended claim wasn’t that just “pre-determined response patterns for undesirable situations” would be enough for suffering. Actually, there were meant to be two separate claims, which I guess we should have distinguished more clearly:
1) If evolution stumbled on pain and suffering, those might be relatively easy and natural ways to get a mind to do something. So an AGI that built other AGIs might also build them to experience pain and suffering (that it was entirely indifferent to), if that happened to be an effective motivational system.
2) If this did happen, then there’s also some speculation suggesting that an AI that wanted to stay in charge might not want to give its worker AGIs things much in the way of things that looked like positive emotions, but did have a reason to give them things that looked like negative emotions. Which would then tilt the balance of pleasure vs. pain in the post-AGI world much more heavily in favor of (emotional) pain.
Now the second claim is much more speculative and I don’t even know if I’d consider it a particularly likely scenario (probably not); we just put it in since much of the paper was just generally listing various possibilities of what might happen. But the first claim—that since all the biological minds we know of seem to run on something like pain and pleasure, we should put a substantial probability on AGI architectures also ending up with something like that—seems much stronger to me.