The level of understanding of and caring about human values required to not kill everyone and be able to keep many humans alive, is actually pretty low (especially on the knowledge side).
That’s also basically sufficient to motivate wanting to learn more about human values, and being able to, so then the Value Learning process then kicks in: a competent and caring alien zookeeper would want to learn more about their charges’ needs.
We have entire libraries half of whose content is devoted to “how to make humans happy”, and we already fed most of them into our LLMs as training material. On a factual basis, knowing how to make humans happy in quite a lot of detail (and for a RAG agent, looking up details they don’t already have memorized) is clearly well within their capabilities. The part that concerns me is the caring side, and that’s not conceptually complicated: roughly speaking, the question is how to ensure an agent’s selfless caring for humans is consistently a significantly stronger motivation than various bad habits like ambition, competitiveness, and powerseeking that it either picked up from us during the “distillation” of the base model, and/or learnt during RL training.
Also, a question for this quote is what’s the assumed capability/compute level used in this thought experiment?
E.g. if the there was an guide for alien zookeepers (ones already familiar with Terran biochemistry) on how to keep humans, how long would it need to be for the humans to mostly survive?
ASI, or high AGI: capable enough that we’ve lost control and alignment is an existential risk.
ASI, or high AGI: capable enough that we’ve lost control and alignment is an existential risk.
Then the answer is probably kilobytes to megabytes, but at any rate the guide for alien zookeepers can be very short, and that the rest can be learned from data.
I like your point that humans aren’t aligned, and while I’m more optimistic about human alignment than you are, I agree that the level of human alignment currently is not enough to make a superintelligence safe if it only had human levels of motivation/reliability.
Weirdly enough, I think getting aligned superintelligence is both harder and easier than you are, and I’m defining alignment like you, in which we could have a superintelligence deployed into the world that cared at least for humans totally and doesn’t need restraints on it’s power like law enforcement or government of superintelligences.
The thing that makes alignment harder is I believe achieving FOOM for AIs, while unlikely, isn’t obviously impossible, and I believe right around the cusp when AIs start to automate research without humans in the loop is when I suspect a whole lot of algorithmic progress will be done, and the only real bottlenecks are power and physical interfaces like robotics, and if these are easy/very easy to solve, I see fast FOOM as being very plausible.
The thing that makes alignment easier is that currently, alignment generalizes more than capabilities, which is good for us, and it’s looking like influencing an AI’s values through it’s data is far easier than making it have great capabilities like being an autonomous researcher for deep reasons, which means we could get by on smaller data quantities assuming very high sample efficiency:
> In general, it makes sense that, in some sense, specifying our values and a model to judge latent states is simpler than the ability to optimize the world. Values are relatively computationally simple and are learnt as part of a general unsupervised world model where there is ample data to learn them from (humans love to discuss values!). Values thus fall out mostly’for free’ from general unsupervised learning. As evidenced by the general struggles of AI agents, ability to actually optimize coherently in complex stochastic ‘real-world’ environments over long time horizons is fundamentally more difficult than simply building a detailed linguistic understanding of the world.
I like your point that humans aren’t aligned, and while I’m more optimistic about human alignment than you are, I agree that the level of human alignment currently is not enough to make a superintelligence safe if it only had human levels of motivation/reliability.
The most obvious natural experiments about what humans do when they have a lot of power with no checks-and-balances are autocracies. While there are occasional examples (such as Singapore) of autocracies that didn’t work out too badly for the governed, they’re sadly few and far between. The obvious question then is whether “humans who become autocrats” are a representative random sample of all humans, or if there’s a strong selection bias here. It seems entirely plausible that there’s at least some selection effects in the process of becoming an autocrat. A couple of percent of all humans are sociopaths, so if there were a sufficiently strong (two orders of magnitude or more) selection bias, then this might, for example, be a natural experiment about the alignment properties of a set of humans consisting mostly of sociopaths, in which case it usually going badly would be unsurprising.
The thing that concerns me is the aphorism “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. There does seem to be a strong correlation between how long someone has had a lot of power and an increasing likelihood of them using it badly. That’s one of the reasons for term limits in positions like president: humans seem to pretty instinctively not trust a leader after they’ve been in a position of a lot of power with few check-and-balances for roughly a decade. The histories of autocracies tend to reflect them getting worse over time, on decade time-scales. So I don’t think the problem here is just from sociopaths. I think the proportion of humans who wouldn’t eventually be corrupted by a lot of power with no checks-and-balances may be fairly low, comparable to the proportion of honest senior politicians, say.
How much of this argument applies to ASI agents powered by LLMs “distilled” from humans is unclear — it’s much more obviously applicable to uploads of humans that then get upgraded to super-human capabilities.
IMO, there are fairly strong arguments that there is a pretty bad selection effect for people who aim to get into power generally being more Machiavellian/Sociopathic than other people, and at least part of the problem is that the parts of your brain that cares about other people gets damaged when you gain power, which is obviously not good.
But still, I agree with you that an ASI that can entirely run society while only being as aligned as humans are to very distant humans likely ends up in a very bad state for us, possibly enough to be an S-risk or X-risk (I currently see S-risk being more probable than X-risk for ASI if we only had human-level alignment to others.)
I basically agree, for three reasons:
The level of understanding of and caring about human values required to not kill everyone and be able to keep many humans alive, is actually pretty low (especially on the knowledge side).
That’s also basically sufficient to motivate wanting to learn more about human values, and being able to, so then the Value Learning process then kicks in: a competent and caring alien zookeeper would want to learn more about their charges’ needs.
We have entire libraries half of whose content is devoted to “how to make humans happy”, and we already fed most of them into our LLMs as training material. On a factual basis, knowing how to make humans happy in quite a lot of detail (and for a RAG agent, looking up details they don’t already have memorized) is clearly well within their capabilities. The part that concerns me is the caring side, and that’s not conceptually complicated: roughly speaking, the question is how to ensure an agent’s selfless caring for humans is consistently a significantly stronger motivation than various bad habits like ambition, competitiveness, and powerseeking that it either picked up from us during the “distillation” of the base model, and/or learnt during RL training.
ASI, or high AGI: capable enough that we’ve lost control and alignment is an existential risk.
Then the answer is probably kilobytes to megabytes, but at any rate the guide for alien zookeepers can be very short, and that the rest can be learned from data.
I like your point that humans aren’t aligned, and while I’m more optimistic about human alignment than you are, I agree that the level of human alignment currently is not enough to make a superintelligence safe if it only had human levels of motivation/reliability.
Weirdly enough, I think getting aligned superintelligence is both harder and easier than you are, and I’m defining alignment like you, in which we could have a superintelligence deployed into the world that cared at least for humans totally and doesn’t need restraints on it’s power like law enforcement or government of superintelligences.
The thing that makes alignment harder is I believe achieving FOOM for AIs, while unlikely, isn’t obviously impossible, and I believe right around the cusp when AIs start to automate research without humans in the loop is when I suspect a whole lot of algorithmic progress will be done, and the only real bottlenecks are power and physical interfaces like robotics, and if these are easy/very easy to solve, I see fast FOOM as being very plausible.
The thing that makes alignment easier is that currently, alignment generalizes more than capabilities, which is good for us, and it’s looking like influencing an AI’s values through it’s data is far easier than making it have great capabilities like being an autonomous researcher for deep reasons, which means we could get by on smaller data quantities assuming very high sample efficiency:
> In general, it makes sense that, in some sense, specifying our values and a model to judge latent states is simpler than the ability to optimize the world. Values are relatively computationally simple and are learnt as part of a general unsupervised world model where there is ample data to learn them from (humans love to discuss values!). Values thus fall out mostly’for free’ from general unsupervised learning. As evidenced by the general struggles of AI agents, ability to actually optimize coherently in complex stochastic ‘real-world’ environments over long time horizons is fundamentally more difficult than simply building a detailed linguistic understanding of the world.
Link below:
https://www.beren.io/2024-05-15-Alignment-Likely-Generalizes-Further-Than-Capabilities/
I think that we agree on a lot, and only really disagree on how much data is necessary for a good outcome, if at all we disagree.
The most obvious natural experiments about what humans do when they have a lot of power with no checks-and-balances are autocracies. While there are occasional examples (such as Singapore) of autocracies that didn’t work out too badly for the governed, they’re sadly few and far between. The obvious question then is whether “humans who become autocrats” are a representative random sample of all humans, or if there’s a strong selection bias here. It seems entirely plausible that there’s at least some selection effects in the process of becoming an autocrat. A couple of percent of all humans are sociopaths, so if there were a sufficiently strong (two orders of magnitude or more) selection bias, then this might, for example, be a natural experiment about the alignment properties of a set of humans consisting mostly of sociopaths, in which case it usually going badly would be unsurprising.
The thing that concerns me is the aphorism “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. There does seem to be a strong correlation between how long someone has had a lot of power and an increasing likelihood of them using it badly. That’s one of the reasons for term limits in positions like president: humans seem to pretty instinctively not trust a leader after they’ve been in a position of a lot of power with few check-and-balances for roughly a decade. The histories of autocracies tend to reflect them getting worse over time, on decade time-scales. So I don’t think the problem here is just from sociopaths. I think the proportion of humans who wouldn’t eventually be corrupted by a lot of power with no checks-and-balances may be fairly low, comparable to the proportion of honest senior politicians, say.
How much of this argument applies to ASI agents powered by LLMs “distilled” from humans is unclear — it’s much more obviously applicable to uploads of humans that then get upgraded to super-human capabilities.
IMO, there are fairly strong arguments that there is a pretty bad selection effect for people who aim to get into power generally being more Machiavellian/Sociopathic than other people, and at least part of the problem is that the parts of your brain that cares about other people gets damaged when you gain power, which is obviously not good.
But still, I agree with you that an ASI that can entirely run society while only being as aligned as humans are to very distant humans likely ends up in a very bad state for us, possibly enough to be an S-risk or X-risk (I currently see S-risk being more probable than X-risk for ASI if we only had human-level alignment to others.)