A 3D density map does not reveal the chemical structure of the material in the interior. You’re describing abilities of X-ray scanning consistent with Constantin’s description, which fall far short of a “tricorder” or detecting fentanyl inside a car. Looking it up airport scanners can also use millimeter-wave scanning, which I believe still fits Constantin’s high-level description of scanning methods in the high-penetration/low-detail side of the tradeoff.
itaibn0
Karma: 663
By the same token, I’m generally opposed to grand unified theories of the body. The shoulder involves a ball-and-socket joint, and the kidney filters blood. OK cool, those are two important facts about the body. I’m happy to know them! I don’t feel the need for a grand unified theory of the body that includes both ball-and-socket joints and blood filtration as two pieces of a single grand narrative.
I think I am generally on board with you on your critiques of FEP, but I disagree with this framing against grand unified theories. The shoulder and the kidney are both made of cells. They both contain DNA which is translated into proteins. They are both are designed by an evolutionary process.
Grand unified theories exist, and they are precious. I want to eke out every sliver of generality wherever I can. Grand unified theories are also extremely rare, and far more common in the public discourse are fakes that create an illusion of generality without making any substantial connections. The style of thinking that looks at a ball-and-socket joint and a blood filtration system and immediately thinks “I need to find how these are really the same” rather than studying these two things in detail and separately is apt to create these false grand unifications, and altho I haven’t looked into FEP as deeply as you or other commenters the writing I have seen on it smells more like this mistake than true generality.
But a big reason I care about exposing these false theories and the bad mental habits that are conducive to them is precisely because I care so much about true grand unified theories. I want grand unified theories to shine like beacons so we can notice their slightest nudge, and feel the faint glimmer of a new one when it is approaching from the distance, rather than be hidden by a cacophony of overblown rhetoric coming from random directions.
I think MIRI’s Logical Inductor idea can be factored into two components, one of which contains the elegant core that is why this idea works so well, and the other is an arbitrary embellishment that obscures what is actually going on. Of course I am calling for this to be recognized and that people should only be teaching and thinking about the elegant core. The elegant core is infinitary markets: Markets that exist for an arbitrarily long time, with commodities that can take arbitrarily long to return dividends, and infinitely many market participants who use every computable strategy. The hack is that the commodities are labeled by sentences in a formal language and the relationships between them are governed by a proof systems. This creates a misleading pattern that that the value of the commodity labeled phi appears to measure the probability that phi is true; in fact what it measures is more like the probability the that proof system will eventually affirm that phi is true, or more precisely like the probability that phi is true in a random model of the theory. Of course what we really care about is the probability phi is actually true, meaning true in the standard model where the things labeled “natural numbers” are actual natural numbers and so on. By combining proof systems and infinitary markets, one obscures how much of the “work” in obtaining accurate information is done by either. I think it is better to study these two things separately. Since proof systems are already well-studies and infinitary markets are the novel idea in MIRI’s work, that means they should primarily study infinitary markets.
I think it is a mistake to focus on these kinds weird effects as “biological systems using quantum mechanics”, because it ignores the much more significant ways quantum mechanics is essential for all the ordinary things that are ubiquitous in biological systems. The stability of every single atom depends on quantum mechanics, and every chemical bond requires quantum mechanics to model. For the intended implication on the difficulty of Whole Bird Emulation, these ordinary usages of QM are much more significant. There are a huge number of different kinds of molecular interactions in a bird’s body and each one requires solving a multi-particle Schroedinger equation. The computation work for this one effect is tiny in comparison.
As I understand, the unique thing about this effect is that it involves much longer coherence times than in molecular interactions. This is cool, but unless you can argue that birds have error-correcting quantum computers inside them, which is incredibly unlikely, I don’t think it is that relevant to AI timelines.
While I like a lot of Hanson’s grabby alien model, I do not buy the inference that since humans appeared early in cosmological history, that implies that the cosmic commons are taken quickly and so a lower bound on how often grabby aliens appear. I think that is neglecting the possibility that the early universe is inherently more conducive to creating life, so most life is created early, but these lifeforms may be very far apart.
Eliezer is very explicit and repeats many times in that essay, including in the very segment you quote, that his code of meta-honesty does in fact compel you to never lie in a meta-honesty discussion. The first 4 paragraphs of your comment are not elaborating with what Eliezer really meant, they are disagreeing with him. Reasonable disagreements too, in my opinion, but conflating them with Eliezer’s proposal is corrosive to the norms that allows people to propose and test new norms.
I had trouble making the connection between the first two paragraphs and the rest. Are you introducing what you mean by an “alarm” and then giving a specific proposal for an alarm afterwards? Is there significance in how the example alarms are in response to specific words being misleading?
Writing suggestion: Expand the acronym “ELK” early in the piece. I looked at the title and my first question was what ELK is, I quickly skimmed the piece and wasn’t able to find out until I clicked on the link to the ELK document. I now see it’s also expanded in the tag list, which I normally don’t examine. I haven’t read the article more closely than a skim.
On further thought I want to walk back a bit:
I confess my comment was motivated by seeing something where it looked like I could make a quick “gotcha” point, which is a bad way to converse.
Reading the original comment more carefully, I’m seeing how I disagree with it. It says (emphasis mine)
in practice the problems of infinite ethics are more likely to be solved at the level of maths, as opposed on the level of ethics and thinking about what this means for actual decisions.
I highly doubt this problem will be solved purely on the level of math, and expect it will involve more work on the level of ethics than on the level of foundations of mathematics. However, I think taking an overly realist view on the conventions mathematicians have chosen for dealing with infinities is an impediment to thinking about these issues, and studying alternative foundations is helpful to ward against that. The problems of infinite ethics, especially for uncountable infinities, seem to especially rely on such realism. I do expect a solution to such issues, to the extent it is mathematical at all, could be formalized in ZFC. The central thing I liked about the comment is the call to rethink the relationship of math and mathematical infinity to reality, and that doesn’t necessary require changing our foundations, just changing our attitude towards them.
If the only alternative you can conceive of for ZFC is removing the axiom of choice then you are proving Jan_Kulveit’s point.
I was reading the story for the first quotation entitled “The discovery of x-risk from AGI”, and I noticed something around quotation that doesn’t make sense to me and I’m curious if anyone can tell what Eliezer Yudkowsky was thinking. As referenced in a previous version of this post, after the quoted scene highest Keeper commits suicide. Discussing the impact of this, EY writes,
And in dath ilan you would not set up an incentive where a leader needed to commit true suicide and destroy her own brain in order to get her political proposal taken seriously. That would be trading off a sacred thing against an unsacred thing. It would mean that only true-suicidal people became leaders. It would be terrible terrible system design.
So if anybody did deliberately destroy their own brain in attempt to increase their credibility—then obviously, the only sensible response would be to ignore that, so as not create hideous system incentives. Any sensible person would reason out that sensible response, expect it, and not try the true-suicide tactic.
The second paragraph is clearly a reference to acausal decision theory, people making a decision because how they anticipate others react to expecting that this is how they make the decision rather than the direct consequences of the decision. I’m not sure if it really makes sense, a self-indulgent reminder that nobody has knows any systematic method for producing prescriptions from acausal decision theories in cases where purportedly they differs from causal decision theory in everyday life. Still, it’s fiction, I can suspend my disbelief.
The confusing thing is that in the story the actual result of the suicide is exactly what this passage says shouldn’t be the result. It convinces the Representatives to take the proposal more seriously and implement it. This passage is just used to illustrate how shocking the suicide was, no additional considerations are described why for the reasoning is incorrect in those circumstances. So it looks like the Representatives are explicitly violating the Algorithm which supposedly underlies the entire dath ilan civilization and is taught to every child at least in broad strokes, in spite of being the second-highest ranked governing body of dath ilan.
Really all I need is that a strategy that takes n bits to specify will be performed by 1 in of all random strategies. Maybe a random strategy consists of a bunch of random motions that cancel each other out, and in 1 in of strategies in between these random motions are directed actions that add up to performing this n-bit strategy. Maybe 1 in strategies start off by typing this strategy to another computer and end with shutting yourself off, so that in the remaining bits of the strategy will be ignored. A prefix-free encoding is basically like the latter situation except ignoring the bits after a certain point is built into the encoding rather than being an outcome of the agent’s interaction with the environment.
How do you make spoiler tags?
A neat thought experiment! At the end of it all, you no longer need to exchange fruit, you can just keep the fruit in place and exchange the identity of the people instead.
Thanks too for responding. I hope our conversation will be productive.
A crucial notion that plays into many of your objections is the distinction between “inner intelligence” and “outer intelligence” of an object (terms derived from “inner vs. outer optimizer”). Inner intelligence is the intelligence the object has in itself as an agent, determined through its behavior in response to novel situation, and outer intelligence is the intelligence that it requires to create this object, and is determined through the ingenuity of its design. I understand your “AI hypothesis” to mean that any solution to the control problem must have inner intelligence. My response is claiming that while solving the control problem may require a lot of outer intelligence, I think it only a requires a small amount of inner intelligence. This is because it seems like the environment in Conway’s Game of Life with random dense initial conditions is very low variety and requires a small number of strategies to handle. (Although just as I’m open-minded about intelligent life somehow arising in this environment, it’s possible that there are patterns much frequent than abiogenesis that make the environment much more variegated.)
Matter and energy and also approximately homogeneously distributed in our own physical universe, yet building a small device that expands its influence over time and eventually rearranges the cosmos into a non-trivial pattern would seem to require something like an AI.
The universe is only homogeneous at the largest scales, at smaller scales it is highly inhomogeneities in highly diverse ways like stars and planets and raindrops. The value of our intelligence comes from being able to deal with the extreme diversity of intermediate-scale structures. Meanwhile, at the computationally tractable scale in CGOL, dense random initial conditions do not produce intermediate-scale structures between the random small-scale sparks and ashes and the homgeneous large-scale. That said, conditional on life being rare in the universe, I expect that the control problem for our universe requires lower-than-human inner intelligence.
You mention the difficulty of “building a small device that...”, but that is talking about outer intelligence. Your AI hypothesis states that, however such a device can or cannot be built, the device itself must be an AI. That’s where I disagree.
Now it could actually be that in our own physical universe it is also possible to build not-very-intelligent machines that begin small but eventually rearrange the cosmos. In this case I am personally more interested in the nature of these machines than in “intelligent machines”, because the reason I am interested in intelligence in the first place is due to its capacity to influence the future in a directed way, and if there are simpler avenues to influence in the future in a directed way then I’d rather spend my energy investigating those avenues than investigating AI. But I don’t think it’s possible to influence the future in a directed way in our own physical universe without being intelligent.
Again, the distinction between inner and outer intelligence is crucial. In a pure mathematical sense of existence there exist arrangements of matter that solve the control problem for our universe, but for that to be relevant for our future there has also has to be a natural process that creates these arrangements of matter at a non-negligible rate. If the arrangement requires a high outer intelligence then this process must be intelligent. (For this discussion, I’m considering natural selection to be a form of intelligent design.) So intelligence is still highly relevant for influencing the future. Machines that are mathematically possible cannot practically be created are not “simpler avenues to influence in the future”.
“to solve the control problem in an environment full of intelligence only requires marginally more intelligence at best”
What do you mean by this?
Sorry. I meant that the solution to the control problem need only be marginally more intelligent than the intelligent beings in its environment. The difference in intelligence between a controller in an intelligent environment and a controller in a unintelligent environment may be substantial. I realize the phrasing you quote is unclear.
In chess, one player can systematically beat another if the first is ~300 ELO rating points higher, but I’m considering that as a marginal difference in skill on the scale from zero-strategy to perfect play. If our environment is creating the equivalent of a 2000 ELO intelligence, and the solution to the control problem has 2300 ELO, then the specification of the environment contributed 2000 ELO of intelligence, and the specification of the control problem only contributed an extra 300 ELO. In other words, open-world control problems need not be an efficient way of specifying intelligence.
But if one entity reliably outcompetes another entity, then on what basis do you say that this other entity is the more intelligent one?
On the basis of distinguishing narrow intelligence from general intelligence. A solution to the control problem is guaranteed to outcompete other entities in force or manipulation, but it might be worse at most other tasks. The sort of thing I had in mind for “NP-hard problems in military strategy” would be “this particular pattern of gliders is particularly good at penetrating a defensive barrier, and the only way to find this pattern is through a brute force search”. Knowing this can the controller a decisive advantage at military conflicts without making it any better at any other tasks, and can permit the controller to have lower general intelligence while still dominating.
Thanks. I also found an invite link in a recent reddit post about this discussion (was that by you?).
While I appreciate the analogy between our real universe and simpler physics-like mathematical models like the game of life, assuming intelligence doesn’t arise elsewhere in your configuration, this control problem does not seem substantially different or more AI-like from any other engineering problems. After all, there are plenty of other problems that involve leveraging a narrow form of control on a predicable physical system to achieve a more refined control, ex. building a rocket that hits a specific target. The structure that arises from a randomly initialized pattern in Life should be homogeneous in a statistical sense a so highly predictable. I expect almost all of it should stabilize to debris of stable periodic patterns. It’s not clear whether it’s possible to manipulate or clear the debris in controlled ways, but if it is possible, then a single strategy will work for the entire grid. It may take a great deal of intelligence to come up with such a strategy, but once such a strategy is found it can be hard-coded into the initial Life pattern, without any need for an “inner optimizer”. The easiest-to-design solution may involve computer-like patterns, with the pattern keeping track of state involved in debris-clearing and each part tracking its location to determine its role in making the final smiley pattern, but I don’t see any need for any AI-like patterns beyond that. On the other hand, if there are inherent limits in the ability to manipulate debris then no amount of reflection by our starting pattern is going to fix that.
That is assuming intelligence doesn’t arise in the random starting pattern. If it does, our starting configuration would to overpower every other intelligence that arises and tries to control the space, and this would reasonably require it to be intelligent itself. But if this is the case then the evolution of the random pattern already encodes the concept of intelligence in a much simpler way then this control problem. To predict the structures that would arise from a random initial configuration the idea of intelligence would naturalistic come up. Meanwhile, to solve the control problem in an environment full of intelligence only requires marginally more intelligence at best, and compared to the no-control prediction problem the control problem adds off some complexity for not very much increase in intelligence. Indeed, the solution to the control problem may even be less intelligent than the structures it competes against, and make up for that with hard-coded solutions to NP-hard problems in military strategy.
On a different note, I’m flattered to see a reference in the comments to some of my own thoughts on working through debris in the Game of Life. It was surprising to see interest in that resurge, and especially surprising to see that interest come from people in AI alignment.
Thanks for linking to my post! I checked the other link, on Discord, and for some reason it’s not working.
Do you know of any source that gives the same explanations in text instead of video?
Edit: Never mind, the course has links to “Lecture PDF” that seem to summarize them. For the first lecture the summary is undetailed and I couldn’t make sense of it without watching the videos, but they appear to get more detailed later on.
It seemed to me like the natural thing to do is to sue any government organization that is not abiding by the ERA, claiming that they are violating the constitution. Is anyone doing that?