As of June 2024, I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
gilch
Karma: 2,665
I don’t know of any officially sanctioned way. But, hypothetically, meeting a publicly-known real human person in person and giving them your public pgp key might work. Said real human could vouch for you and your public key, and no one else could fake a message signed by you, assuming you protect your private key. It’s probably sufficient to sign and post one message proving this is your account (profile bio, probably), and then we just have to trust you to keep your account password secure.
Would it help if we wore helmets?
Yes.
Hissp v0.5.0 is up.
python -m pip install hisspIf you always wanted to learn about Lisp macros, but only know Python, try the Hissp macro tutorials.
That seems to be getting into Game Theory territory. One can model agents (players) with different strategies, even suboptimal ones. A lot of the insight from Game Theory isn’t just about how to play a better strategy, but how changing the rules affects the game.
Not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Universe seems to follow relatively simple deterministic laws. That doesn’t mean you can use quantum field theory to predict the weather. But chaotic systems can be modeled as statistical ensembles. Temperature is a meaningful measurement even if we can’t calculate the motion of all the individual gas molecules.
If you’re referring to human irrationality in particular, we can study cognitive bias, which is how human reasoning diverges from that of idealized agents in certain systematic ways. This is a topic of interest at both the individual level of psychology, and at the level of statistical ensembles in economics.
It’s short for “woo-woo”, a derogatory term skeptics use for magical thinking.
I think the word originates as onomatopoeia from the haunting woo-woo Theremin sounds played in black-and-white horror films when the ghost was about to appear. It’s what the “supernatural” sounds like, I guess.
It’s not about the belief being unconventional as much as it being irrational. Just because we don’t understand how something works doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (it just probably doesn’t), but we can still call your reasons for thinking so invalid. A classic skeptic might dismiss anything associated categorically, but rationalists judge by the preponderance of the evidence. Some superstitions are valid. Prescientific cultures may still have learned true things, even if they can’t express them well to outsiders.
Use a smart but not self-improving AI agent to antagonize the world with the goal of making advanced societies believe that AGI is a bad idea and precipitating effective government actions. You could call this the Ozymandias approach.
ChaosGPT already exists. It’s incompetent to the point of being comical at the moment, but maybe more powerful analogues will appear and wreak havoc. Considering the current prevalence of malware, it might be more surprising if something like this didn’t happen.
We’ve already seen developments that could have been considered AI “warning shots” in the past. So far, they haven’t been enough to stop capabilities advancement. Why would the next one be any different? We’re already living in a world with literal wars killing people right now, and crazy terrorists with various ideologies. It’s surprising what people get used to. How bad would a warning shot have to be to shock the world into action given that background noise? Or would we be desensitized by then by the smaller warning shots leading up to it? Boiling the frog, so to speak. I honestly don’t know. And by the time a warning shot gets that bad, can we act in time to survive the next one?
Intentionally causing earlier warning shots would be evil, illegal, destructive, and undignified. Even “purely” economic damage at sufficient scale is going to literally kill people. Our best chance is civilization stepping up and coordinating. That means regulations and treaties, and only then the threat of violence to enforce the laws and impose the global consensus on any remaining rogue nations. That looks like the police and the army, not terrorists and hackers.
We have already identified some key resources involved in AI development that could be restricted. The economic bottlenecks are mainly around high energy requirements and chip manufacturing.
Energy is probably too connected to the rest of the economy to be a good regulatory lever, but the U.S. power grid can’t currently handle the scale of the data centers the AI labs want for model training. That might buy us a little time. Big tech is already talking about buying small modular nuclear reactors to power the next generation of data centers. Those probably won’t be ready until the early 2030s. Unfortunately, that also creates pressures to move training to China or the Middle East where energy is cheaper, but where governments are less concerned about human rights.
A recent hurricane flooding high-purity quartz mines made headlines because chip producers require it for the crucibles used in making silicon wafers. Lower purity means accidental doping of the silicon crystal, which means lower chip yields per wafer, at best. Those mines aren’t the only source, but they seem to be the best one. There might also be ways to utilize lower-purity materials, but that might take time to develop and would require a lot more energy, which is already a bottleneck.
The very cutting-edge chips required for AI training runs require some delicate and expensive extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to manufacture. They literally have to plasmify tin droplets with a pulsed laser to reach those frequencies. ASML Holdings is currently the only company that sells these systems, and machines that advanced have their own supply chains. They have very few customers, and (last I checked) only TSMC was really using them successfully at scale. There are a lot of potential policy levers in this space, at least for now.
I do not really understand how technical advance in alignment realistically becomes a success path. I anticipate that in order for improved alignment to be useful, it would need to be present in essentially all AI agents or it would need to be present in the most powerful AI agent such that the aligned agent could dominate other unaligned AI agents.
The instrumental convergence of goals implies that a powerful AI would almost certainly act to prevent any rivals from emerging, whether aligned or not. In the intelligence explosion scenario, progress would be rapid enough that the first mover achieves a decisive strategic advantage over the entire world. If we find an alignment solution robust enough to survive the intelligence explosion, it will set up guardrails to prevent most catastrophes, including the emergence of unaligned AGIs.
I don’t expect uniformity of adoption and I don’t necessarily expect alignment to correlate with agent capability. By my estimation, this success path rests on the probability that the organization with the most capable AI agent is also specifically interested in ensuring alignment of that agent. I expect these goals to interfere with each other to some degree such that this confluence is unlikely. Are your expectations different?
Alignment and capabilities don’t necessarily correlate, and that accounts for lot of why my p(doom) is so high. But more aligned agents are, in principle, more useful, so rational organizations should be motivated to pursue aligned AGI, not just AGI. Unfortunately, alignment research seems barely tractable, capabilities can be brute-forced (and look valuable in the short term) and corporate incentive structures being what they are, in practice, what we’re seeing is a reckless amount of risk taking. Regulation could alter the incentives to balance the externality with appropriate costs.
How about “bubble lighting” then?
The forms of approaches that I expected to see but haven’t seen too much of thus far are those similar to the one that you linked about STOP AI. That is, approaches that would scale with the addition of approximately average people.
Besides STOP AI, there’s also the less extreme PauseAI. They’re interested in things like lobbying, protests, lawsuits, etc.
I presume that your high P(doom) already accounts for your estimation of the probability of government action being successful. Does your high P(doom) imply that you expect these to be too slow, or too ineffective?
Yep, most of my hope is on our civilization’s coordination mechanisms kicking in in time. Most of the world’s problems seem to be failures to coordinate, but that’s not the same as saying we can’t coordinate. Failures are more salient, but that’s a cognitive bias. We’ve achieved a remarkable level of stability, in the light of recent history. But rationalists can see more clearly than most just how mad the world still is. Most of the public and most of our leaders fail to grasp some of the very basics of epistemology.
We used to think the public wouldn’t get it (because most people are insufficiently sane), but they actually seem appropriately suspicious of AI. We used to think a technical solution was our only realistic option, but progress there has not kept up with more powerful computers brute-forcing AI. In desperation, we asked for more time. We were pleasantly surprised at how well the message was received, but it doesn’t look like the slowdown is actually happening yet.
As a software engineer, I’ve worked in tech companies. Relatively big ones, even. I’ve seen the pressures and dysfunction. I strongly suspected that they’re not taking safety and security seriously enough to actually make a difference, and reports from insiders only confirm that narrative. If those are the institutions calling the shots when we achieve AGI, we’re dead. We desperately need more regulation to force them to behave or stop. I fear that what regulations we do get won’t be enough, but they might.
Other hopes are around a technical breakthrough that advances alignment more than capabilities, or the AI labs somehow failing in their project to produce AGI (despite the considerable resources they’ve already amassed), perhaps due to a breakdown in the scaling laws or some unrelated disaster that makes the projects too expensive to continue.
However, it seems to be a less reasonable approach if time scales are short or probabilities are high.
I have a massive level of uncertainty around AGI timelines, but there’s an uncomfortably large amount of probability mass on the possibility that through some breakthrough or secret project, AGI was achieved yesterday and not caught up with me. We’re out of buffer. But we might still have decades before things get bad. We might be able to coordinate in time, with government intervention.
I would expect this would include the admission of ideas which would have previously been pruned because they come with negative consequences.
What ideas are those?
Protesters are expected to be at least a little annoying. Strategic unpopularity might be a price worth paying if it gets results. Sometimes extremists shift the Overton Window.
I mean, yes, hence my comment about ChatGPT writing better than this, but if word gets out that Stop AI is literally using the product of the company they’re protesting in their protests, it could come off as hypocrisy.
I personally don’t have a problem with it, but I understand the situation at a deeper level than the general public. It could be a wise strategic move to hire a human writer, or even ask for competent volunteer writers, including those not willing to join the protests themselves, although I can see budget or timing being a factor in the decision.
Or they could just use one of the bigger Llamas on their own hardware and try to not get caught. Seems like an unnecessary risk though.
The press release strikes me as poorly written. It’s middle-school level. ChatGPT can write better than this. Exactly who is your (Stop AI’s) audience here? “The press”?
Exclamation points are excessive. “Heart’s content”? You’re not in this for “contentment”. The “you can’t prove it, therefore I’m right” argument is weak. The second page is worse. “Toxic conditions”? I think I know what you meant, but you didn’t connect it well enough for a general audience. “accelerate our mass extinction until we are all dead”? I’m pretty sure the “all dead” part has to come before the “extinction”. “(and abusing his sister)”? OK, there’s enough in the public record to believe than Sam is not (ahem) “consistently candid”, but I’m at under 50% about the sister abuse even then on priors. Do you want to get sued for libel on top of your jail time? Is that a good strategy?
I admire your courage and hope you make an impact, but if you’re willing to pay these heavy costs, of getting arrested, and facing jail time etc., then please try to win! Your necessity defense is an interesting idea, but if this is the best you can do, it will fail. If you can afford to hire a good defense attorney, you can afford a better writer! Tell me how this is move is 4-D chess and not just a blunder.
The mods probably have access to better analytics. I, for one, was a long-time lurker before I said anything.
My current estimate of P(doom) in the next 15 years is 5%. That is, high enough to be concerned , but not high enough to cash out my retirement. I am curious about anyone harboring a P(doom) > 50%. This would seem to be high enough to support drastic actions. What work has been done to develop rational approaches to such a high P(doom)?
I mean, what do you think we’ve been doing all along?
I’m at like 90% in 20 years, but I’m not claiming even one significant digit on that figure. My drastic actions have been to get depressed enough to be unwilling to work in a job as stressful as my last one. I don’t want to be that miserable if we’ve only got a few years left. I don’t think I’m being sufficiently rational about it, no. It would be more dignified to make lots of money and donate it to the organization with the best chance of stopping or at least delaying our impending doom. I couldn’t tell you which one that is at the moment though.
Some are starting to take more drastic actions. Whether those actions will be effective remains to be seen.
In my view, technical alignment is not keeping up with capabilities advancement. We have no alignment tech robust enough to even possibly survive the likely intelligence explosion scenario, and it’s not likely to be developed in time. Corporate incentive structure and dysfunction makes them insufficiently cautious. Even without an intelligence explosion, we also have no plans for the likely social upheaval from rapid job loss. The default outcome is that human life becomes worthless, because that’s already the case in such economies.
Our best chance at this point is probably government intervention to put the liability back on reckless AI labs for the risks they’re imposing on the rest of us, if not an outright moratorium on massive training runs.
Gladstone has an Action Plan. There’s also https://www.narrowpath.co/.
On a related topic, I am looking to explore how to determine the right scale of the objective function for revenge (or social correction if you prefer a smaller scope). My intuition is that revenge was developed as a mechanism to perform tribal level optimizations. In a situation where there has been a social transgression, and redressing that transgression would be personally costly but societally beneficial, what is the correct balance between personal interest and societal interest?
This is a question for game theory. Trading a state of total anarchy for feudalism, a family who will avenge you is a great deterrent to have. It could even save your life. Revenge is thus a good thing. A moral duty, even. Yes, really. For a smaller scope, being quick to anger and vindictive will make others reluctant to mess with you.
Unfortunately, this also tends to result in endless blood feuds as families get revenge for the revenge for the revenge, at least until one side gets powerful enough to massacre the other. In the smaller scope, maybe you exhaust yourself or risk getting killed fighting duels to protect your honor.
We’ve found that having a central authority to monopolize violence rather than vengeance and courts to settle disputes rather than duels works better. But the instincts for anger and revenge and taking offense are still there. Societies with the better alternatives now consider such instincts bad.
Unfortunately, this kind of improved dispute resolution isn’t available at the largest and smallest scales. There is no central authority to resolve disputes between nations, or at least not ones powerful enough to prevent all wars. We still rely on the principle of vengeance (second strike) to deter nuclear wars. This is not an ideal situation to be in. At the smaller scale, poor inner-city street kids join gangs that could avenge them, use social media show off weapons they’re not legally allowed to have, and have a lot of anger and bluster, all to try to protect themselves in a system that can’t or won’t do that for them.
So, to answer the original question, the optimal balance really depends on your social context.
The main idea here is that one can always derive a “greater” set (in terms of cardinality) from any given set, even if the given set is already infinite, because there are higher degrees of infinity. There is no greatest infinity, just like there is no largest number. So even if (hypothetically) a Being with infinite knowledge exists, there could be Beings with greater knowledge than that. No matter which god you choose, there could be one greater than that, meaning there are things the god you chose doesn’t know (and hence He isn’t “omniscient”, and therefore isn’t “God”, because this was a required attribute.)
I don’t know how to interpret “all existing objects”, because I don’t know what counts as an “object” in your definition. Set theory doesn’t require ur-objects (although those are known variations) and just starts with the empty set, meaning all “objects” are themselves sets. The powerset operation evaluates to the set of all subsets of a set. The powerset of a set always has greater cardinality than the set you started with. That is, for any given collection of “objects”, the number of possible groupings of those objects is always a greater number than the number of objects, even if the collection of objects you started with had an infinite number to begin with. So no, this doesn’t prove that an infinite universe cannot exist, just that there are degrees of infinities (and no “greatest” one).
Naiive set theory leads to paradoxes when defining self-referential sets. The idea of “infinite” gods seem to have similar problems. There are various ways to resolve this. The typical one used in foundations of mathematics is the notion of a collection that is too large to be a set, a “proper class”. (“Class” used to be synonymous with “set”.) But later on in the discussion it was pointed out that this isn’t the only possible resolution.