39. Nothing we can do with a safe-by-default AI like GPT-3 would be powerful enough to save the world (to ‘commit a pivotal act’), although it might be fun. In order to use an AI to save the world it needs to be powerful enough that you need to trust its alignment, which doesn’t solve your problem.
I think a weak proto-AI could be useful for step 1 of the following plan:
Invent some human-enhancement methods to massively amplify the abilities of your researchers.
Use your enhanced researchers to make a friendly AGI faster than your competitors make any AGI.
Some human-enhancement ideas sitting in my mind:
reducing or removing the need for sleep or exercise
reversing age-related cognitive decline (and physical decline for that matter)
electronically facilitated brain-to-brain communication
brain-computer interfaces that are faster and less effortful than keyboards or screens
drugs altering brain chemistry so you think faster or better (e.g. is there any measurable chemical difference between average brains and geniuses’ brains? If so, can you use drugs to make the one work like the other?)
enlarging heads via surgery and growing more brain cells (this is slightly horrifying)
getting something close to The Matrix’s “downloading skills into your brain”—teaching modules that observe your brain-state, possibly alter it directly, and possibly implant some hardware whose interface your brain learns
It seems like any one of these, if it worked, might give you the 1.5x factor mentioned (or more), assuming your competitors didn’t adopt it quickly enough. (Would they? I don’t think I could see a normal company requiring all its researchers to go through these enhancement procedures in, say, less than a few years after they’d been developed; nor Western governments. China, maybe.) A proto-AI is not necessary for any of them, but it might be the fastest way.
I like the idea of enhanced researchers for a few reasons:
going off Fred Brooks’s “The Mythical Man-Month”, a smallish group of enhanced researchers might outperform arbitrarily large groups of “normal” humans
leaks, and other “unilateralist’s curse” issues, are less of an issue with smaller groups
at least for some of these enhancements, the programmers would be less likely to make bugs/mistakes, and therefore, if there are situations where “one stupid bug makes the difference between success and failure”, we’d have a better chance
the rest of humanity would benefit from these enhancement techniques too
Hmm, that seems to depend on what assumptions you make. Suppose it takes N years to develop proto-AI to the point where it can find a sleep-mimicking drug, and after that it would take M more years to develop general AI, and M * 1.5 more years to develop friendly general AI. If M is much higher than how long it takes for the FAI researchers to start using the drug (which I imagine could be a few months), then the FAI researchers might be enhanced for most of the M-year period before competitors make AGI.
I think you’re assuming M is really low. My intuition is that many of these enhancements wouldn’t require much more than a well-funded team and years of work with today’s technology (but fewer years with proto-AI), and that N is much smaller than M. But this depends a lot on the details of the enhancement problems and on the current state of biotechnology and bioinformatics, and I don’t know very much. Are there people associated with MIRI and such who work on human bioenhancement?
I think a weak proto-AI could be useful for step 1 of the following plan:
Invent some human-enhancement methods to massively amplify the abilities of your researchers.
Use your enhanced researchers to make a friendly AGI faster than your competitors make any AGI.
Some human-enhancement ideas sitting in my mind:
reducing or removing the need for sleep or exercise
reversing age-related cognitive decline (and physical decline for that matter)
electronically facilitated brain-to-brain communication
brain-computer interfaces that are faster and less effortful than keyboards or screens
drugs altering brain chemistry so you think faster or better (e.g. is there any measurable chemical difference between average brains and geniuses’ brains? If so, can you use drugs to make the one work like the other?)
enlarging heads via surgery and growing more brain cells (this is slightly horrifying)
getting something close to The Matrix’s “downloading skills into your brain”—teaching modules that observe your brain-state, possibly alter it directly, and possibly implant some hardware whose interface your brain learns
It seems like any one of these, if it worked, might give you the 1.5x factor mentioned (or more), assuming your competitors didn’t adopt it quickly enough. (Would they? I don’t think I could see a normal company requiring all its researchers to go through these enhancement procedures in, say, less than a few years after they’d been developed; nor Western governments. China, maybe.) A proto-AI is not necessary for any of them, but it might be the fastest way.
I like the idea of enhanced researchers for a few reasons:
going off Fred Brooks’s “The Mythical Man-Month”, a smallish group of enhanced researchers might outperform arbitrarily large groups of “normal” humans
leaks, and other “unilateralist’s curse” issues, are less of an issue with smaller groups
at least for some of these enhancements, the programmers would be less likely to make bugs/mistakes, and therefore, if there are situations where “one stupid bug makes the difference between success and failure”, we’d have a better chance
the rest of humanity would benefit from these enhancement techniques too
The human enhancement part of this would need to move really really really fast to beat the AGI power scaling and proliferation timelines.
Hmm, that seems to depend on what assumptions you make. Suppose it takes N years to develop proto-AI to the point where it can find a sleep-mimicking drug, and after that it would take M more years to develop general AI, and M * 1.5 more years to develop friendly general AI. If M is much higher than how long it takes for the FAI researchers to start using the drug (which I imagine could be a few months), then the FAI researchers might be enhanced for most of the M-year period before competitors make AGI.
I think you’re assuming M is really low. My intuition is that many of these enhancements wouldn’t require much more than a well-funded team and years of work with today’s technology (but fewer years with proto-AI), and that N is much smaller than M. But this depends a lot on the details of the enhancement problems and on the current state of biotechnology and bioinformatics, and I don’t know very much. Are there people associated with MIRI and such who work on human bioenhancement?