iwdw: you could be right—perhaps the truly top talented members of the “next generation” are better attracted to AI by wandering internet blog sequences on “rationality” than some actual progress on AI. I am neither a supergenius nor young so I can’t say for sure.
bambi
Karma: −3
Re your moral dilemma: you’ve stated that you think your approach needs a half-dozen or so supergeniuses (on the level of the titans of physics). Unless they have already been found—and only history can judge that—some recruitment seems necessary. Whether these essays capture supergeniuses is the question.
Demonstrated (published) tangible and rigorous progress on your AI theory seems more likely to attract brilliant productive people to your cause.
Unknown, your comment strikes me as a good way of looking at it.
The “me of now” as a region of configuration space contains residue of causal relationships to other regions of configuration space (“the past” and my memories of it). And the timeless probability field on configuration space causally connects the “me of now” to the “future” (other regions of configuration space). Just because this is true, and—even more profoundly—even though the “me of now” configuration space region has no special status (no shining “moment in the sun” as the privileged focus of a global clock ticking a path through configuration space), I am still what I am and I do what I do (from a local perspective which is all I have detailed information about), which includes making decisions.
Our decisions are based on what we know and believe, so an acceptance of the viewpoint Eliezer has been putting forth is likely to have some impact on decisions we make… I wonder what that impact is, and what should it be?
So what tools do all you self-improving rationalists use to help with the “multiply” part of “shut up and multiply”? A development environment for a programming/scripting language? Mathematica? A desk calculator? Mathcad? Spreadsheet? Pen and paper?
Eliezer, your observers would hopefully have noticed hundreds of millions of years of increasing world-modeling cognitive capability, eventually leading to a species with sufficient capacity to form a substrate for memetic progress, followed by a hundred thousand years and a hundred billion individual lives leading up to now.
Looking at a trilobyte, the conclusion would not be that such future development is “impossible”, but perhaps “unlikely to occur while I’m eating lunch today”.
Ok, sure. Maybe Bayesianism is much more broadly applicable than it seems. And maybe there are fewer fundamental breakthroughs still needed for a sufficient RSI-AI theory than it seems. And maybe the fundamentals could be elaborated into a full framework more easily than it seems. And maybe such a framework could be implemented into computer programming more easily than it seems. And maybe the computing power required to execute the computer program at non-glacial speeds is less than it seems. And maybe the efficiency of the program can be automatically increased more than seems reasonable. And maybe “self improvement” can progress further into the unknown than seems reasonably to guess. And maybe out there in the undiscovered territory there are ways of reasoning about and subsequently controlling matter that are more effective than seems likely, and maybe as these things are revealed we will be too stupid to recognize them.
Maybe.
To make most people not roll their eyes at the prospect, though, they’ll have to be shown something more concrete than a “Maybe AI is like a nuclear reaction” metaphor.
Ok, it looks to me like these answers (invoking the future over and over after accepting that there is no ‘t’) are admissions that this type of physics thinking is just playfulness—no consequences whatsoever, to our own actions or to any observable aspect of the universe.
That’s cool, I misunderstood is all. Maybe life is just a dream, eh?
Eliezer, if you believe all of this, why do you care so much about saving the world from “future” ravenous AIs? The paperclip universes just are and the non-paperclip-universes just are. Go to the beach, man! Chill out. You can’t change anyting; there is nothing to change.
As long as arguing from fictional evidence is ok as long as you admit you’re doing it, somebody should write the novelization.
Bayesian Ninja Army contacted by secret government agency due to imminent detonation of Logic Bomb* in evil corporate laboratory buried deep beneath some exotic location. Hijinks ensue; they fail to stop Logic Bomb detonation but do manage to stuff in a Friendliness supergoal at the last minute. Singularity ensues, with lots of blinky lights and earth-rending. Commentary on the human condition follows, ending in a sequel-preparing twist.
see commentary on yesterday’s post
Ok, the phrase was just an evocative alternative to “scary optimization process” or whatever term the secret society is using these days to avoid saying “AI”—because “AI” raises all sorts of (purportedly) irrelevant associations like consciousness and other anthropomorphisms. The thing that is feared here is really just the brute power of bayesian modeling and reasoning applied to self improvement (through self modeling) and world control (through world modeling).
If an already existing type of malware has claimed the term, invent your own colorful name. How about “Master”?
Phillip Huggan: bambi, IDK anything about hacking culture, but I doubt kids need to read a decision theory blog to learn what a logic bomb is (whatever that is). Posting specific software code, on the other hand...
A Logic Bomb is the thing that Yudkowsky is trying to warn us about. Ice-Nine might be a more apropos analogy, though—the start of a catalytic chain reaction that transforms everything. Homo Sapiens is one such logically exothermic self-sustaining chain reaction but it’s a slow burn because brains suck.
A Logic Bomb has the following components: a modeling language and model-transformation operators based on Bayesian logic. A decision system (including goals and reasoning methods) that decides which operators to apply. A sufficiently complete self-model described in the modeling language. Similar built-in models of truth, efficiency, the nature of the physical universe (say, QM), and (hopefully) ethics.
Flip the switch and watch the wavefront expand at the speed of light.
I assume that the purpose here is not so much to teach humanity to think and behave rationally, but rather to teach a few people to do so, or attract some who already do, then recruit them into the Bayesian Ninja Army whose purpose is to make sure that the immininent inevetable construction and detonation of a Logic Bomb has results we like.
Thanks Patrick, I did sort of get the gist, but went into the ditch from there on that point.
I have been posting rather snarky comments lately as I imagined this was where the whole series was going and frankly it seems like lunacy to me (the bit about evidence being passe was particularly sweet). But I doubt anybody wants to hear me write that over and over (if people can be argued INTO believing in the tooth fairy then maybe they can be argued into anything after all). So I’ll stop now.
I hereby dub the imminent magical self-reprogramming seed AI: a “Logic Bomb”
and leave you with this:
Every hint you all insist on giving to the churning masses of brillint kids with computers across the world for how to think about and build a Logic Bomb is just another nail in your own coffins.
Sorry, the first part of that was phrased too poorly to be understood. I’ll just throw “sufficiently advanced YGBM technology” on the growing pile of magical powers that I am supposed to be terrified of and leave it at that.
Sorry, Hopefully Anonymous, I missed the installment where “you gotta belive me” was presented as a cornerstone of rational argument.
The fact that a group of humans (CBI) is sometimes able to marginally influence the banana-brand-buying probabilities of some individual humans does not imply much in my opinion. I wouldn’t have thought that extrapolating everything to infinity and beyond is much of a rational method. But we are all here to learn I suppose.
Hmm, the lesson escapes me a bit. Is it
1) Once you became a true rationalist and overcome your biases, what you are left with is batshit crazy paranoid delusions
or
2) If we build an artificial intelligence as smart as billions of really smart people, running a hundred trillion times faster than we do (so 10^23 x human-equivalence), give it an unimaginably vast virtual universe to develop in, then don’t pay any attention to what it’s up to, we could be in danger because a sci-fi metaphor on a web site said so
or
3) We must institute an intelligence-amplification eugenics program so that we will be capable of crushing our creators should the opportunity arise
I’m guessing (2). So, um, let’s not then. Or maybe this is supposed to happen by accident somehow? Now that I have Windows Vista maybe my computer is 10^3 human-equivalents and so in 20 years a pc will be 10^10 human equivalents and the internet will let our pc’s conspire to kill us? Of course, even our largest computers cannot perform the very first layers of input data sorting tasks one person does effortlessly, but that’s only my biases talking I suppose.
Given this perspective on what Science does and does not encourage, can you explain the phenomenon of String Theory to us?
Sufficiently-advanced Bayesian rationality is indistinguishable from magic.
How fun!
It’s possible to be “smart” and a nutter at the same time you know.
If you think that Science rewards coming up with stupid theories and disproving them just as much as more productive results, I can hardly even understand what you mean by Science beyond the “observe, hypothesize, test, repeat” overview given to small children as an introduction to the scientific method. Was Eliezer-18 blind to anything beyond such simple rote forumulas?
Negative results are forgiven but hardly ever rewarded (unless the theory disproven is widely believed).
If you’d put aside the rather bizarre bitterness and just say: “Bayesian rationality is a good way to pick which theories to test. Here’s some non-toy examples worked through to demonstrate how” that would be much more useful than these weird parables and goofy “I am an outcast” rants.
Where do we get sufficient self-confidence to pull probabilities for ill-defined and under-measured quantities out of our butts so we can use them in The Formula?
Is there any actually interesting intellectual task that rests on nice justifiable grounded probabilities?
There are many terms and concepts that don’t pay for themselves, though we might not agree on which ones. For example, I think Goedel’s Theorem is one of them… its cuteness and abstract splendor doesn’t offset the dumbness it invokes in people trying to apply it. “Consciousness” and “Free Will” are two more.
If the point here is to remove future objections to the idea that AI programs can make choices and still be deterministic, I guess that’s fair but maybe a bit pedantic.
Personally I provisionally accept the basic deterministic reductionist view that Eliezer has been sketching out. “Provisionally” because our fundamental view of reality and our place in it has gone through many transformations throughout history and it seems unlikely that exactly today is where such revelations end. But since we don’t know what might be next we work with what we have even though it is likely to look naive in retrospect from the future.
The viewpoint also serves to make me happy and relatively carefree… doing important things is fun, achieving successes is rewarding, helping people makes you feel good. Obsessive worry and having the weight of the world on one’s shoulders is not fun. “Do what’s fun” is probably not the intended lesson to young rationalists, but it works for me!