In another life I wrote Gemini Song and The Coven series. Now I’m working on the pause.
Bridgett Kay
Karma: 190
If it helps anyone suffering from existential fear, I’m very glad I put it out here.
The Last Light
Thank you! I’ll work on that and see if I have any other questions.
“(I typically closed my eyes briefly and generated a small pleasurable feeling.)”—could you explain a little further how to do this? I’m not good at this at all and I think it would be an extremely useful skill for me. Apologies if you’ve answered this elsewhere.
Mind the Gap
“Future progress is a part of current human values” of course- the danger lies in the “future” always being just that- the future. One would naturally hope that it wouldn’t go this way, but continuously putting off the future because now is always the present is a possible outcome. It can even be a struggle with current models to get them to generate novel ideas, because of a stubbornness not to say anything for which there is not yet evidence.
Thank you for that criticism- I hadn’t necessarily given that point enough thought, and I think I am starting to see where the weaknesses are.
Yeah- calling myself a failed scifi writer really was half in jest- had some very limited success as an indie writer for a good number of years, and recently need has made me shift direction. Thank you for the encouragement, though!
“If your conclusion is that we don’t know how to do value alignment, I and I think most alignment thinkers would agree with you. If the conclusion is that AGI is useless, I don’t think it is at all.”
Sort of- I worry that it may be practically impossible for current humans to align AGI to the point of usefulness.
“If we had external help that allowed us to focus more on what we truly want—like eliminating premature death from cancer or accidents, or accelerating technological progress for creative and meaningful projects—we’d arrive at a very different future. But I don’t think that future would be worse; in fact, I suspect it would be significantly better.”
That’s my intuition and hope- but I worry that these things are causally entangled with things that we don’t anticipate. To use your example- what if we only ask an aligned and trusted AGI to cure premature death by disease and accident, which wouldn’t greatly conflict with most people’s values in the way that radical life extension would, but then a sudden loss of an entire healthcare and insurance industry results, causing such a total economic collapse that causes vast swaths of people to starve. (I don’t think this would actually happen, but it’s an example of the kind of unforeseen consequence that getting a wish suddenly granted may cause, when you ask an instruction following AGI to give, without counting on a greater intelligence to project and weigh all of the consequences.)
I also worry about the phrase “a human you trust.”
Again- this feels like cynicism, if not the result of a catastrophizing mind (which I know I have.) I think you make a very good argument- I’m probably indulging too much in black-and-white thought- that there’s a way to fulfill these desires quickly enough that we are able to relieve more suffering than we would have if left to our devices, but still slow enough to monitor unforeseen consequences. Maybe the bigger question is just whether we will.
[Question] Alignment Paradox and a Request for Harsh Criticism
Does anyone have any generally helpful advice for someone who doesn’t really get vibes? Should I just continue to be more timid than normal, or is there a helpful heuristic I can use (aside from the ‘don’t talk to strangers, don’t join MLM’s, be wary of things that are too good to be true’ stuff that our parents tell us at a young age.)
1991/1992, actually (Harry Potter was born July 1980, and the story takes place the school year after his 11th birthday.)
Seems to me that the only winning move is not to play.
This might be our third, fourth fifth… nth chance.
Thank you.
Meta Alignment: Communication Wack-a-Mole
This is legitimate- the definition of weirdness was kept open-ended. I intended weirdness to be any behavior that is divergent from what most in a certain group considers to be the status quo, but even within a group, each member may have a different definition of what weird behavior is, and a consensus will be difficult to pin down.
I would consider rudeness to be weird behavior under this definition. It is a social behavior that comes with the cost of disrupting social cohesion. What is considered rude, vs. frank and straightforward, will vary from person to person even within a group, and may change over time as people within the group analyze whether the cost of the behavior is worth the social cost of ostracizing the individual who engages in that behavior. For example, cursing was considered much more rude by my parent’s generation than the current generation. It took time and discourse for the status quo to change, and for people to decide that cursing is less harmful than was once imagined.
As for whether I’m trying to excuse my character flaws, that may well be the case. In learning how to more effectively examine the costs and benefits of my behavior, I hope to recognize what is a flaw, and what is not, and to mend the former.
We don’t know how to align asteroids’ trajectories, so it’s important to use smaller asteroids to align larger ones- like a very large game of amateur billiards.
I love this! But I find myself a little disappointed there’s not a musical rendition of the “I have been a good bing” dialogue.
As one scales up a system, any small misalignment within that system will become more apparent- more skewed. I use shooting an arrow as an example. Say you shoot an arrow at a target from only a few feet away. If you are only a few degrees off from being lined up with the bullseye, when you shoot the close target your arrow will land very close to the bullseye. However, if you shoot a target many yards away with the same degree of error, your arrow will land much, much farther from the bullseye.
So if you get a less powerful AI aligned with your goals to a degree where everything looks fine, and then assign it the task of aligning a much more powerful AI, then any small flaw in the alignment of the less powerful AI will go askew far worse in the more powerful AI. What’s worse- since you assigned the less powerful AI the task aligning the larger AI, you won’t be able to see exactly what the flaw was until it’s too late, because if you’d been able to see the flaw, you would have aligned the larger AI yourself.
I had a related (and admittedly somewhat strange) experience to this. I had a dream in which I was given a koan and told to use it to seek enlightenment. When I woke up I wrote down the koan and decided to meditate on it. I gained some wisdom from it, but I also noticed that I was starting to feel empty. Not a peaceful one-ness kind of empty- just empty empty. I realized that if experienced anything like ego death in my present state, it would go very, very badly. It seems counterintuitive, but knew I had to find myself before I continued on the path- to find myself before I lost myself, if that makes any sense. It’s as if in order to reach transcendence, there had to be something worth transcending.