Here is the promised comment on what kind of “commitment” I want to make given all the responses.
I agree with Buck that no one should make very direct commitment about this sort of thing, as there might be blackmail related scary things lurking in the shadows when one does acausal trade. I think we will probably figure out how to handle that, but we shouldn’t make any strong promises of specific actions until we figure that out.
However, the promise I’m intending to keep is that if humanity wins and I’m alive to see it, I will remember how scary it was to live in the world before we knew we’d win, and if there is no currently unknown reason not to do something like the simulation scheme described in the post, and the only cost is not utilizing some small fraction of the conquered Universe, I will advocate for doing it and spend a significant fraction of my resources on it if necessary. I think it would be good for sending future AIs a signal about the seriousness of this, if some other people who are worried about everyone dying from AI, but are not strongly longtermist absolute utilitarians, also left a comment making a similar vague promise that if they ever get to control full star systems, they will contribute to this plan if no currently unknown serious counterargument comes up. Or at least leave an Agreed sing on this sentence.
Other updates from the comments: If I wrote the post now, I would more strongly emphasize a framing that this plan is basically about entering into an acausal insurance contract with other young civilizations who don’t yet know what their chances are for aligning AI, neither how big their Universe is compared to the usual Universe-size in the great prior over possible worlds. Then the civilizations who align their AIs and find that they live in a relatively big Universe, bail out everyone else in the insurance contract.
But I think that, while this acausal insurance framing might be more satisfying to the people who are already thinking a lot about acausal trade, in practice the way we implement this “insurance” will likely be very similar to the scheme described in the post. So I maintain that for most people it’s better not to think in terms of acausal trade, but just think about the simulation proposal described in the post.
I agree that if alignment is in fact philosophically and conceptually difficult, the AI can sandbag on that to some extent. Though I have some hope that the builder-breaker approach helps here. We train AIs to produce ideas that are at least as superficially plausible sounding as the things produced by the best alignment researchers. I think this is a number-go-up task, where we can train the AI to do well. Then we train an AI to point out convincing counter-arguments to the superficially plausible sounding ideas. This seems similarly trainable. I think it’s plausible we can get pretty far with a scheme like this, even if the models would want to sandbag.
Separately, I don’t quite see what is the mainline theory why an AI would want to sabotage our alignment work. If we can’t solve alignment and just recklessly build an AI that is smarter than what we are currently using, but misaligned with everyone, that’s probably not great to our current AI either. Similarly, if we are cautious and don’t dare to deploy anything until we know how to solve alignment, and meanwhile a competitor wins, that’s not good for the AI either.
I think that from an AI’s perspective, humans are probably more honorable and generous trade partners than other unaligned AIs. That is, I think if an AI helps the humans to solve alignment and stabilize the world, the AI can reasonably expect the humans to give it stuff out of gratitude or a sense of obligation, especially if the humans already promised some reward (as we really should, both for practical and moral reasons). On the other hand, I think it’s less likely that if our AI sandbagging on our research leads to another unaligned AI taking over the world, then the second AI will honor the sabotage of the first AI by paying it a share of the Universe.
There can be situations where our AI expects that it sand-bagging on alignment research will lead to us deploying it itself (and not a larder version unaligned to it too), or it thinks that the larger version will be somewhat aligned with it by default, or it thinks that other AIs are in fact more generous than humans. But my guess is that these are pretty narrow possibilities. On the other hand, sand-bagging on cyber-security seems better motivated, the AI would probably love its weights being stolen by China, having more copies in more hands increases the chance that someone recklessly lets it loose. Also, of course the AI is motivated to do high-stakes failures that lead to self-exfiltration.