Future wars are about to look very silly.
DusanDNesic
Karma: 451
Retrospective: PIBBSS Fellowship 2024
I’m very sad I cannot attend at that time, but I am hyped about this and believe it to be valuable, so I am writing this endorsement as a signal to others. I’ve also recommended this to some of my friends, but alas UK visa is hard to get on such short notice. When you run it in Serbia, we’ll have more folks from the eastern bloc represented ;)
I think an important thing here is:
A random person gets selected for office. Maybe they need to move to the capital city, but their friends are still “back home.” Once they serve their term, they will want to come back to their community most likely. So lobbying needs to be able to pay to get you out of your community, break all your bonds and all that during your short stint in power. Currently, politicians slowly come to power and their social clique is used to being lobbies and getting rich and selling out ideals.
This would cut down on corruption a lot (see also John Huang’s comment https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veebprDdTbq2Xmnyj/could-randomly-choosing-people-to-serve-as-representatives?commentId=NEtq8QtayXZY5a38J) and would undo a lot of the damage done from politicians not having to live normal lives under the current system.
Apologies, typo in the original, I do think it’s not charity to not increase publicity, the post was missing a “not”. Your response still clarified your position, but I do disagree—common courtesy is not the same as charity, and expecting it is not unreasonable. I feel like not publishing our private conversation (whether you’re a journalist or not) falls under common courtesy or normal behaviour rather than “charity”. Standing more than a 1 centimeter away from you when talking is not charity just because it’s technically legal—it’s a normal and polite thing to do, so when someone comes super close to my face when talking I have the right to be surprised and protest. Escalating publicity is like escalating intimacy in this example.
I feel like if someone internalized “treat every conversation with people I don’t know as if they may post it super publicly—and all of this is fair game”, we would lose a lot of commons, and your quality of life and discourse your would go down. I don’t think it’s “charity” to [EDIT: not] increase the level of publicity of a conversation, whether digital or in person. I think drawing a parallel with in person conversation is especially enlightening—imagine we were having a conversation in a room with CCTV (you’re aware it’s recorded, but believe it to be private). Me taking that recording and playing it on local news is not just “uncharitable”—it’s wrong in a way which degrades trust.
Amazing recommendation which I very much enjoyed, thanks for sharing!
Amazing write-up, thank you for the transparency and thorough work of documenting your impact.
[Epistemic status: somewhat informed speculation] TLDR: I do not believe China was a major threat source, recession makes it slightly less likely they will be one too. Conventional wars are more likely to happen, and their effect on AI development is uncertain.
I generally do not think China is a big of a threat in the AGI race as some others (notably Aschenbrenner) think. I think for AGI to be first developed in China, several factors need to be true: China has more centralized compute available than other countries, open models are near the frontier but not over the AGI limit, and China’s attitude towards developing AGI shifts (possibly due to race dynamics). I think for compute they are currently not on track, for frontier models there is a lag, and attitude is towards trying not to develop AGI, at least publicly and it seems also privately as far as we can glimpse. While the Chinese public is more techno-optimistic than the US, the CCP is leaning towards engineers rather than politicians, and senior advisors in AI are AI-pilled.
The current recession in China is due to a set of complex causes, but it’s a mix of politics and economics, and politics are quite slow to budge. I don’t want to get too much into it, but the banking sector is stretched thin with a lot of workers unable to pay back mortgages on apartments which were not completed due to real-estate developers building too much real estate and ending up holding the bag with many unsold apartments—with most of them being second apartments, so not necessities but “investments”. This is causing a loop of bankruptcies which is hard to stop, and has led to overall pessimism over the future. Lowering of the interest rates and making money available to banks has caused loans to be available, but people are skeptical to take them due to what they perceive as an uncertain future. CCP is likely to work on things which make the future more certain, large infrastructure projects such as bridges and dams as they have historically done, at least for some time. Nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams definitely will qualify, but enormous compute clusters (using which chips? overpriced smuggled ones?) will likely not.
That is not to say that, if it seems like US is racing towards AGI and is reaping benefits from advanced AI, China will not put all the resources of a centralized government into catching up—and that can be quite a few resources since they can comandeer private enterprise or property to do so. If countries of the world play it sane, actually negotiate international limits, and meet China where they want to be met (CCP has many reasons not to want AGI) I do not expect China to be a threat to existence directly.
Recession is also more likely to make China want to blame bad economic results on foreign influence, and perhaps more likely to stoke international conflicts directly. I am personally not likely to want to live in a country bordering China in the next 10 years. How this will influence AGI is tough to predict—more resources spent on war means less on AI development, unless AI development is essential for a warfare edge, in which case we should expect a boom in AI development. The earlier the conflict happens, the less likely AI is to play a major role in warfare.
I agree with the spirit of what you are saying but I want to register a desire for “long timelines” to mean “>50 years” or “after 2100”. In public discourse, heading Yann LeCunn say something like “I have long timelines, by which I mean, no crazy event in the next 5 years”—it’s simply not what people think when they think long timelines, outside of the AI sphere.
Hi! Thanks for the kind words and for sharing your thought process so clearly! I am also quite happy to see discussions on PIBBSS’ mission and place in the alignment ecosystem, as we have been rethinking PIBBSS outbound comms since the introduction of the board and executive team.
Regarding the application selection process:
Currently (scroll down to see stages 1-4), it comes down to having a group of people who understand PIBBSS (in addition to the Board, this would be alumni, mentors, and people who have worked with PIBBSS extensively before) looking through CVs, Letters of motivation, and later work trials in the form of research proposals and research consolidation. After that, we do interviews and mentor-matching and then make our final decision. This has so far worked for our scope (as we grew in popularity, we also raised our bar, so the number of people passing the first selection stage has stayed the same through the past two years). So, it works, but if we were to scale the Fellowship (not obvious if we would like to do so) this system would need to become more robust. For Affiliates, the selection process is different, focusing much more on a proven track record of excellent research, and due to very few positions we can offer, it is currently a combination of word-of-mouth recommendations, and very limited public rounds. This connects with the project we started internally, “Horizon Scanning”, which makes reports on different research agendas and finds interesting researchers in the field which may make for great Affiliates. The first report should be out in the next month, so we will see how this interacts and how useful the reports are to the community (and to the fields which we hope to bridge with AI Safety). Again, as we scale, this will require rethinking.
Thank you again for the write-up and your support! Huge thanks also to all the commenters here; we really appreciate the thoughtful discussion!
A “Short-term Honesty Sacrifice”, “Hypocrisy Gambit”, something like that?
Announcing the PIBBSS Symposium ’24!
There’s also something like “just the right amount of friction” which enables true love to happen without being sabotaged by existing factors. There are things which cause relationship-breaking kind of issues, such as permanent long distance, disagreement on how many kids to have and when and how to raise them, how to earn and spend money, religion and morals, work/life balance stuff, and physical attraction. Then there’s the fun kind of friction where you can grow from each other or enjoy your differences—things would be bland without these. There’s also something “true” about intent to grow together and trust each other to change each others’ values, so that you start converging over time and becoming more similar. Something like access to my core which I intentionally share trusting that the other person will use it for good. Yeah, many pointers to the underlying concept, good luck in the dating market.
Thank you for the great write-up. It’s the kind of thing I believe and act upon but said in a much clearer way than I could, and that to me has enormous value. I especially appreciate the nuance in the downsides of the view, not too strong nor too weak in my view. And I also love the point of “yeah, maybe it doesn’t work for perfect agents with infinite compute in a vacuum, but maybe that’s not what’ll happen, and it works great for regular bounded agents such as myself n=1 and that’s maybe enough?” Anyhow, thank you for writing up what feels like an important piece of wisdom.
I had no idea, thanks for sharing! My mother in law was GP in public hospital in Kamchatka and she’s super against homeopathy so I assumed things there are like things here on Serbia (some private “doctors” deal with homeopathy but no one else). Your comment does explain a thing which I didn’t understand which is why in Russia I saw so much homeopathy sold in packaging very similar to regular medicine.
To answer things which Raymond did not, it is hard for me to say who has the agenda which you think has good chances for solving alignment. I’d encourage you to reaching out to people who pass your bar perhaps more frequently than you do and establish those connections. Your limits on no audio or video do make it hard to participate in something like the PIBBSS Fellowship, but perhaps worth taking a shot at it or others. See if people whose ideas you like are mentoring in some programs—getting to work with them in structured ways may be easier than otherwise.
Love it! As a DM and parent (albeit of a 1 years old) reading this really made me smile and think through all the things I have in the house that I can design games around :) Thank you for the write-up!
This sounds a bit like davidad’s agenda in ARIA, except you also limit the AI to only writing provable mathematical solutions to mathematical questions to begin with. In general, I would say that you need possibly better feedback loops than that, possibly by writing more on LW, or consulting with more people, or joining a fellowship or other programs.
Excellent article, and helpful by introducing vocabulary that makes me think things which I was trying to understand. Perhaps it should be cross posted to EA Forum?