Someone who is interested in learning and doing good.
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar
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Matthew Barnett
Karma: 10,505
Distinguishing ways AI can be “concentrated”
While the term “outer alignment” wasn’t coined until later to describe the exact issue that I’m talking about, I was using that term purely as a descriptive label for the problem this post clearly highlights, rather than implying that you were using or aware of the term in 2007.
Because I was simply using “outer alignment” in this descriptive sense, I reject the notion that my comment was anachronistic. I used that term as shorthand for the thing I was talking about, which is clearly and obviously portrayed by your post, that’s all.
To be very clear: the exact problem I am talking about is the inherent challenge of precisely defining what you want or intend, especially (though not exclusively) in the context of designing a utility function. This difficulty arises because, when the desired outcome is complex, it becomes nearly impossible to perfectly delineate between all potential ‘good’ scenarios and all possible ‘bad’ scenarios. This challenge has been a recurring theme in discussions of alignment, as it’s considered hard to capture every nuance of what you want in your specification without missing an edge case.
This problem is manifestly portrayed by your post, using the example of an outcome pump to illustrate. I was responding to this portrayal of the problem, and specifically saying that this specific narrow problem seems easier in light of LLMs, for particular reasons.
It is frankly frustrating to me that, from my perspective, you seem to have reliably missed the point of what I am trying to convey here.
I only brought up Christiano-style proposals because I thought you were changing the topic to a broader discussion, specifically to ask me what methodologies I had in mind when I made particular points. If you had not asked me “So would you care to spell out what clever methodology you think invalidates what you take to be the larger point of this post—though of course it has no bearing on the actual point that this post makes?” then I would not have mentioned those things. In any case, none of the things I said about Christiano-style proposals were intended to critique this post’s narrow point. I was responding to that particular part of your comment instead.
As far as the actual content of this post, I do not dispute its exact thesis. The post seems to be a parable, not a detailed argument with a clear conclusion. The parable seems interesting to me. It also doesn’t seem wrong, in any strict sense. However, I do think that some of the broader conclusions that many people have drawn from the parable seem false, in context. I was responding to the specific way that this post had been applied and interpreted in broader arguments about AI alignment.
My central thesis in regards to this post is simply: the post clearly portrays a specific problem that was later called the “outer alignment” problem by other people. This post portrays this problem as being difficult in a particular way. And I think this portrayal is misleading, even if the literal parable holds up in pure isolation.
Matthew is not disputing this point, as far as I can tell.
Instead, he is trying to critique some version of[1] the “larger argument” (mentioned in the May 2024 update to this post) in which this point plays a role.
I’ll confirm that I’m not saying this post’s exact thesis is false. This post seems to be largely a parable about a fictional device, rather than an explicit argument with premises and clear conclusions. I’m not saying the parable is wrong. Parables are rarely “wrong” in a strict sense, and I am not disputing this parable’s conclusion.
However, I am saying: this parable presumably played some role in the “larger” argument that MIRI has made in the past. What role did it play? Well, I think a good guess is that it portrayed the difficulty of precisely specifying what you want or intend, for example when explicitly designing a utility function. This problem was often alleged to be difficult because, when you want something complex, it’s difficult to perfectly delineate potential “good” scenarios and distinguish them from all potential “bad” scenarios. This is the problem I was analyzing in my original comment.
While the term “outer alignment” was not invented to describe this exact problem until much later, I was using that term purely as descriptive terminology for the problem this post clearly describes, rather than claiming that Eliezer in 2007 was deliberately describing something that he called “outer alignment” at the time. Because my usage of “outer alignment” was merely descriptive in this sense, I reject the idea that my comment was anachronistic.
And again: I am not claiming that this post is inaccurate in isolation. In both my above comment, and in my 2023 post, I merely cited this post as portraying an aspect of the problem that I was talking about, rather than saying something like “this particular post’s conclusion is wrong”. I think the fact that the post doesn’t really have a clear thesis in the first place means that it can’t be wrong in a strong sense at all. However, the post was definitely interpreted as explaining some part of why alignment is hard — for a long time by many people — and I was critiquing the particular application of the post to this argument, rather than the post itself in isolation.
The object-level content of these norms is different in different cultures and subcultures and times, for sure. But the special way that we relate to these norms has an innate aspect; it’s not just a logical consequence of existing and having goals etc. How do I know? Well, the hypothesis “if X is generally a good idea, then we’ll internalize X and consider not-X to be dreadfully wrong and condemnable” is easily falsified by considering any other aspect of life that doesn’t involve what other people will think of you.
To be clear, I didn’t mean to propose the specific mechanism of: if some behavior has a selfish consequence, then people will internalize that class of behaviors in moral terms rather than in purely practical terms. In other words, I am not saying that all relevant behaviors get internalized this way. I agree that only some behaviors are internalized by people in moral terms, and other behaviors do not get internalized in terms of moral principles in the way I described.
Admittedly, my statement was imprecise, but my intention in that quote was merely to convey that people tend to internalize certain behaviors in terms of moral principles, which explains the fact that people don’t immediately abandon their habits when the environment suddenly shifts. However, I was silent on the question of which selfishly useful behaviors get internalized this way and which ones don’t.
A good starting hypothesis is that people internalize certain behaviors in moral terms if they are taught to see those behaviors in moral terms. This ties into your theory that people “have an innate drive to notice, internalize, endorse, and take pride in following social norms”. We are not taught to see “reaching into your wallet and shredding a dollar” as impinging on moral principles, so people don’t tend to internalize the behavior that way. Yet, we are taught to see punching someone in the face as impinging on a moral principle. However, this hypothesis still leaves much to be explained, as it doesn’t tell us which behaviors we will tend to be taught about in moral terms, and which ones we won’t be taught in moral terms.
As a deeper, perhaps evolutionary explanation, I suspect that internalizing certain behaviors in moral terms helps make our commitments to other people more credible: if someone thinks you’re not going to steal from them because you think it’s genuinely wrong to steal, then they’re more likely to trust you with their stuff than if they think you merely recognize the practical utility of not stealing from them. This explanation hints at the idea that we will tend to internalize certain behaviors in moral terms if those behaviors are both selfishly relevant, and important for earning trust among other agents in the world. This is my best guess at what explains the rough outlines of human morality that we see in most societies.
I’m not sure what “largely” means here. I hope we can agree that our objectives are selfish in some ways and unselfish in other ways.
Parents generally like their children, above and beyond the fact that their children might give them yummy food and shelter in old age. People generally form friendships, and want their friends to not get tortured, above and beyond the fact that having their friends not get tortured could lead to more yummy food and shelter later on. Etc.
In that sentence, I meant “largely selfish” as a stand-in for what I think humans-by-default care overwhelmingly about, which is something like “themselves, their family, their friends, and their tribe, in rough descending order of importance”. The problem is that I am not aware of any word in the English language to describe people who have these desires, except perhaps the word “normal”.
The word selfish usually denotes someone who is preoccupied with their own feelings, and is unconcerned with anyone else. We both agree that humans are not entirely selfish. Nonetheless, the opposite word, altruistic, often denotes someone who is preoccupied with the general social good, and who cares about strangers, not merely their own family and friend circles. This is especially the case in philosophical discussions in which one defines altruism in terms of impartial benevolence to all sentient life, which is extremely far from an accurate description of the typical human.
Humans exist on a spectrum between these two extremes. We are not perfectly selfish, nor are we perfectly altruistic. However, we are generally closer to the ideal of perfect selfishness than to the ideal of perfect altruism, given the fact that our own family, friend group, and tribe tends to be only a small part of the entire world. This is why I used the language of “largely selfish” rather than something else.
The post is about the complexity of what needs to be gotten inside the AI. If you had a perfect blackbox that exactly evaluated the thing-that-needs-to-be-inside-the-AI, this could possibly simplify some particular approaches to alignment, that would still in fact be too hard because nobody has a way of getting an AI to point at anything.
I think it’s important to be able to make a narrow point about outer alignment without needing to defend a broader thesis about the entire alignment problem. To the extent my argument is “outer alignment seems easier than you portrayed it to be in this post, and elsewhere”, then your reply here that inner alignment is still hard doesn’t seem like it particularly rebuts my narrow point.
This post definitely seems to relevantly touch on the question of outer alignment, given the premise that we are explicitly specifying the conditions that the outcome pump needs to satisfy in order for the outcome pump to produce a safe outcome. Explicitly specifying a function that delineates safe from unsafe outcomes is essentially the prototypical case of an outer alignment problem. I was making a point about this aspect of the post, rather than a more general point about how all of alignment is easy.
(It’s possible that you’ll reply to me by saying “I never intended people to interpret me as saying anything about outer alignment in this post” despite the clear portrayal of an outer alignment problem in the post. Even so, I don’t think what you intended really matters that much here. I’m responding to what was clearly and explicitly written, rather than what was in your head at the time, which is unknowable to me.)
One cannot hook up a function to an AI directly; it has to be physically instantiated somehow. For example, the function could be a human pressing a button; and then, any experimentation on the AI’s part to determine what “really” controls the button, will find that administering drugs to the human, or building a robot to seize control of the reward button, is “really” (from the AI’s perspective) the true meaning of the reward button after all! Perhaps you do not have this exact scenario in mind.
It seems you’re assuming here that something like iterated amplification and distillation will simply fail, because the supervisor function that provides rewards to the model can be hacked or deceived. I think my response to this is that I just tend to be more optimistic than you are that we can end up doing safe supervision where the supervisor ~always remains in control, and they can evaluate the AI’s outputs accurately, more-or-less sidestepping the issues you mention here.
I think my reasons for believing this are pretty mundane: I’d point to the fact that evaluation tends to be easier than generation, and the fact that we can employ non-agentic tools to help evaluate, monitor, and control our models to provide them accurate rewards without getting hacked. I think your general pessimism about these things is fairly unwarranted, and my guess is that if you had made specific predictions about this question in the past, about what will happen prior to world-ending AI, these predictions would largely have fared worse than predictions from someone like Paul Christiano.
I’m still kinda confused. You wrote “But across almost all environments, you get positive feedback from being nice to people and thus feel or predict positive valence about these.” I want to translate that as: “All this talk of stabbing people in the back is irrelevant, because there is practically never a situation where it’s in somebody’s self-interest to act unkind and stab someone in the back. So (A) is really just fine!” I don’t think you’d endorse that, right? But it is a possible position—I tend to associate it with @Matthew Barnett. I agree that we should all keep in mind that it’s very possible for people to act kind for self-interested reasons. But I strongly don’t believe that (A) is sufficient for Safe & Beneficial AGI. But I think that you’re already in agreement with me about that, right?
Without carefully reading the above comment chain (forgive me if I need to understand the full discussion here before replying), I would like to clarify what my views are on this particular question, since I was referenced. I think that:
It is possible to construct a stable social and legal environment in which it is in the selfish interests of almost everyone to act in such a way that brings about socially beneficial outcomes. A good example of such an environment is one where theft is illegal and in order to earn money, you have to get a job. This naturally incentivizes people to earn a living by helping others rather than stealing from others, which raises social welfare.
It is not guaranteed that the existing environment will be such that self-interest is aligned with the general public interest. For example, if we make shoplifting de facto legal by never penalizing people who do it, this would impose large social costs on society.
Our current environment has a mix of both of these good and bad features. However, on the whole, in modern prosperous societies during peacetime, it is generally in one’s selfish interest to do things that help rather than hurt other people. This means that, even for psychopaths, it doesn’t usually make selfish sense to go around hurting other people.
Over time, in societies with well-functioning social and legal systems, most people learn that hurting other people doesn’t actually help them selfishly. This causes them to adopt a general presumption against committing violence, theft, and other anti-social acts themselves, as a general principle. This general principle seems to be internalized in most people’s minds as not merely “it is not in your selfish interest to hurt other people” but rather “it is morally wrong to hurt other people”. In other words, people internalize their presumption as a moral principle, rather than as a purely practical principle. This is what prevents people from stabbing each other in the backs immediately once the environment changes.
However, under different environmental conditions, given enough time, people will internalize different moral principles. For example, in an environment in which slaughtering animals becomes illegal and taboo, most people would probably end up internalizing the moral principle that it’s wrong to hurt animals. Under our current environment, very few people internalize this moral principle, but that’s mainly because slaughtering animals is currently legal, and widely accepted.
This all implies that, in an important sense, human morality is not really “in our DNA”, so to speak. Instead, we internalize certain moral principles because those moral principles encode facts about what type of conduct happens to be useful in the real world for achieving our largely selfish objectives. Whenever the environment shifts, so too does human morality. This distinguishes my view from the view that humans are “naturally good” or have empathy-by-default.
Which is not to say that there isn’t some sense in which human morality comes from human DNA. The causal mechanisms here are complicated. People vary in their capacity for empathy and the degree to which they internalize moral principles. However, I think in most contexts, it is more appropriate to look at people’s environment as the determining factor of what morality they end up adopting, rather than thinking about what their genes are.
Competitive capitalism works well for humans who are stuck on a relatively even playing field, and who have some level of empathy and concern for each other.
I think this basically isn’t true, especially the last part. It’s not that humans don’t have some level of empathy for each other; they do. I just don’t think that’s the reason why competitive capitalism works well for humans. I think the reason is instead because people have selfish interests in maintaining the system.
We don’t let Jeff Bezos accumulate billions of dollars purely out of the kindness of our heart. Indeed, it is often considered far kinder and more empathetic to confiscate his money and redistribute it to the poor. The problem with that approach is that abandoning property rights incurs costs on those who rely on the system to be reliable and predictable. If we were to establish a norm that allowed us to steal unlimited money from Jeff Bezos, many people would reason, “What prevents that norm from being used against me?”
The world pretty much runs on greed and selfishness, rather than kindness. Sure, humans aren’t all selfish, we aren’t all greedy. And few of us are downright evil. But those facts are not as important for explaining why our system works. Our system works because it’s an efficient compromise among people who are largely selfish.
It has come to my attention that this article is currently being misrepresented as proof that I/MIRI previously advocated that it would be very difficult to get machine superintelligences to understand or predict human values. This would obviously be false, and also, is not what is being argued below. The example in the post below is not about an Artificial Intelligence literally at all! If the post were about what AIs supposedly can’t do, the central example would have used an AI! The point that is made below will be about the algorithmic complexity of human values. This point is relevant within a larger argument, because it bears on the complexity of what you need to get an artificial superintelligence to want or value; rather than bearing on what a superintelligence supposedly could not predict or understand. -- EY, May 2024.
I can’t tell whether this update to the post is addressed towards me. However, it seems possible that it is addressed towards me, since I wrote a post last year criticizing some of the ideas behind this post. In either case, whether it’s addressed towards me or not, I’d like to reply to the update.
For the record, I want to definitively clarify that I never interpreted MIRI as arguing that it would be difficult to get a machine superintelligence to understand or predict human values. That was never my thesis, and I spent considerable effort clarifying the fact that this was not my thesis in my post, stating multiple times that I never thought MIRI predicted it would be hard to get an AI to understand human values.
My thesis instead was about a subtly different thing, which is easy to misinterpret if you aren’t reading carefully. I was talking about something which Eliezer called the “value identification problem”, and which had been referenced on Arbital, and in other essays by MIRI, including under a different name than the “value identification problem”. These other names included the “value specification” problem and the problem of “outer alignment” (at least in narrow contexts).
I didn’t expect as much confusion at the time when I wrote the post, because I thought clarifying what I meant and distinguishing it from other things that I did not mean multiple times would be sufficient to prevent rampant misinterpretation by so many people. However, evidently, such clarifications were insufficient, and I should have instead gone overboard in my precision and clarity. I think if I re-wrote the post now, I would try to provide like 5 different independent examples demonstrating how I was talking about a different thing than the problem of getting an AI to “understand” or “predict” human values.
At the very least, I can try now to give a bit more clarification about what I meant, just in case doing this one more time causes the concept to “click” in someone’s mind:
Eliezer doesn’t actually say this in the above post, but his general argument expressed here and elsewhere seems to be that the premise “human value is complex” implies the conclusion: “therefore, it’s hard to get an AI to care about human value”. At least, he seems to think that this premise makes this conclusion significantly more likely.[1]
This seems to be his argument, as otherwise it would be unclear why Eliezer would bring up “complexity of values” in the first place. If the complexity of values had nothing to do with the difficulty of getting an AI to care about human values, then it is baffling why he would bring it up. Clearly, there must be some connection, and I think I am interpreting the connection made here correctly.
However, suppose you have a function that inputs a state of the world and outputs a number corresponding to how “good” the state of the world is. And further suppose that this function is transparent, legible, and can actually be used in practice to reliably determine the value of a given world state. In other words, you can give the function a world state, and it will spit out a number, which reliably informs you about the value of the world state. I claim that having such a function would simplify the AI alignment problem by reducing it from the hard problem of getting an AI to care about something complex (human value) to the easier problem of getting the AI to care about that particular function (which is simple, as the function can be hooked up to the AI directly).
In other words, if you have a solution to the value identification problem (i.e., you have the function that correctly and transparently rates the value of world states, as I just described), this almost completely sidesteps the problem that “human value is complex and therefore it’s difficult to get an AI to care about human value”. That’s because, if we have a function that directly encodes human value, and can be simply referenced or directly inputted into a computer, then all the AI needs to do is care about maximizing that function rather than maximizing a more complex referent of “human values”. The pointer to “this function” is clearly simple, and in any case, simpler than the idea of all of human value.
(This was supposed to narrowly reply to MIRI, by the way. If I were writing a more general point about how LLMs were evidence that alignment might be easy, I would not have focused so heavily on the historical questions about what people said, and I would have instead made simpler points about how GPT-4 seems to straightforwardly try do what you want, when you tell it to do things.)
My main point was that I thought recent progress in LLMs had demonstrated progress at the problem of building such a function, and solving the value identification problem, and that this progress goes beyond the problem of getting an AI to understand or predict human values. For one thing, an AI that merely understands human values will not necessarily act as a transparent, legible function that will tell you the value of any outcome. However, by contrast, solving the value identification problem would give you such a function. This strongly distinguishes the two problems. These problems are not the same thing. I’d appreciate if people stopped interpreting me as saying one thing when I clearly meant another, separate thing.
- ^
This interpretation is supported by the following quote, on Arbital,
Complexity of value is a further idea above and beyond the orthogonality thesis which states that AIs don’t automatically do the right thing and that we can have, e.g., paperclip maximizers. Even if we accept that paperclip maximizers are possible, and simple and nonforced, this wouldn’t yet imply that it’s very difficult to make AIs that do the right thing. If the right thing is very simple to encode—if there are value optimizers that are scarcely more complex than diamond maximizers—then it might not be especially hard to build a nice AI even if not all AIs are nice. Complexity of Value is the further proposition that says, no, this is forseeably quite hard—not because AIs have ‘natural’ anti-nice desires, but because niceness requires a lot of work to specify. [emphasis mine]
- ^
The point that a capabilities overhang might cause rapid progress in a short period of time has been made by a number of people without any connections to AI labs, including me, which should reduce your credence that it’s “basically, total self-serving BS”.
More to the point of Daniel Filan’s original comment, I have criticized the Responsible Scaling Policy document in the past for failing to distinguish itself clearly from AI pause proposals. My guess is that your second and third points are likely mostly correct: AI labs think of an RSP as different from AI pause because it’s lighter-touch, more narrowly targeted, and the RSP-triggered pause could be lifted more quickly, potentially minimally disrupting business operations.
There are a few key pieces of my model of the future that make me think humans can probably retain significant amounts of property, rather than having it suddenly stolen from them as the result of other agents in the world solving a specific coordination problem.
These pieces include:
Not all AIs in the future will be superintelligent. More intelligent models appear to require more computation to run. This is both because smarter models are larger (in parameter count) and use more inference time (such as OpenAI’s o1). To save computational costs, future AIs will likely be aggressively optimized to only be as intelligent as they need to be, and no more. This means that in the future, there will likely be a spectrum of AIs of varying levels of intelligence, some much smarter than humans, others only slightly smarter, and still others merely human-level.
As a result of the previous point, your statement that “ASIs produce all value in the economy” will likely not turn out correct. This is all highly uncertain, but I find it plausible that ASIs might not even be responsible for producing the majority of GDP in the future, given the possibility of a vastly more numerous population of less intelligent AIs that automate simpler tasks than the ones ASIs are best suited to do.
The coordination problem you described appears to rely on a natural boundary between the “humans that produce ~nothing” and “the AIs that produce everything”. Without this natural boundary, there is no guarantee that AIs will solve the specific coordination problem you identified, rather than another coordination problem that hits a different group. Non-uploaded humans will differ from AIs by being biological and by being older, but they will not necessarily differ from AIs by being less intelligent.
Therefore, even if future agents decide to solve a specific coordination problem that allows them to steal wealth from unproductive agents, it is not clear that this will take the form of those agents specifically stealing from humans. One can imagine different boundaries that make more sense to coordinate around, such as “laborer vs. property owner”, which is indeed a type of political conflict the world already has experience with.
In general, I expect legal systems to get more robust in the face of greater intelligence, rather than less robust, in the sense of being able to rely on legal systems when making contracts. I believe this partly as a result of the empirical fact that violent revolution and wealth appropriation appears to be correlated with less intelligence on a societal level. I concede that this point is not a very strong piece of evidence, however.
Building on (5), I generally expect AIs to calculate that it is not in their interest to expropriate wealth from other members of society, given how this could set a precedent for future wealth expropriation that comes back and hurts them selfishly. Even though many AIs will be smarter than humans, I don’t think the mere fact that AIs will be very smart implies that expropriation becomes more rational.
I’m basically just not convinced by the arguments that all ASIs will cooperate almost perfectly as a unit, against the non-ASIs. This is partly for the reasons given by my previous points, but also partly because I think coordination is hard, and doesn’t necessarily get much easier with more intelligence, especially in a vastly larger world. When there are quadrillions of AIs in the world, coordination might become very difficult, even with greater intelligence.
Even if AIs do not specifically value human welfare, that does not directly imply that human labor will have no value. As an analogy, Amish folks often sell novelty items to earn income. Consumers don’t need to specifically care about Amish people in order for Amish people to receive a sufficient income for them to live on. Even if a tiny fraction of consumer demand in the future is for stuff produced by humans, that could ensure high human wages simply because the economy will be so large.
If ordinary capital is easier to scale than labor—as it already is in our current world—then human wages could remain high indefinitely simply because we will live in a capital-rich, labor-poor world. The arguments about human wages falling to subsistence level after AI tend to rely on the idea that AIs will be just as easy to scale as ordinary capital, which could easily turn out false as a consequence of (1) laws that hinder the creation of new AIs without proper permitting, (2) inherent difficulties with AI alignment, or (3) strong coordination that otherwise prevents malthusian growth in the AI population.
This might be the most important point on my list, despite saying it last, but I think humans will likely be able to eventually upgrade their intelligence, better allowing them to “keep up” with the state of the world in the future.
Can you be more clear about what you were asking in your initial comment?
I don’t think my scenario depends on the assumption that the preferences of a consumer are a given to the AI. Why would it?
Do you mean that I am assuming AIs cannot have their preferences modified, i.e., that we cannot solve AI alignment? I am not assuming that; at least, I’m not trying to assume that. I think AI alignment might be easy, and it is at least theoretically possible to modify an AI’s preferences to be whatever one chooses.
If AI alignment is hard, then creating AIs is more comparable to creating children than creating a tool, in the sense that we have some control over their environment, but we have little control over what they end up ultimately preferring. Biology fixes a lot of innate preferences, such as preferences over thermal regulation of the body, preferences against pain, and preferences for human interaction. AI could be like that too, at least in an abstract sense. Standard economic models seem perfectly able to cope with this state of affairs, as it is the default state of affairs that we already live with.
On the other hand, if AI preferences can be modified into whatever shape we’d like, then these preferences will presumably take on the preferences of AI designers or AI owners (if AIs are owned by other agents). In that case, I think economic models can handle AI agents fine: you can essentially model them as extensions of other agents, whose preferences are more-or-less fixed themselves.
It is a wonderfully American notion that an “existing system of law and property rights” will constrain the power of Gods. But why exactly? They can make contracts? And who enforces these contracts? Can you answer this without begging the question? Are judicial systems particularly unhackable? Are humans?
To be clear, my prediction is not that AIs will be constrained by human legal systems that are enforced by humans. I’d claim rather that future legal systems will be enforced by AIs, and that these legal systems will descend from our current legal systems, and thus will inherit many of their properties. This does not mean that I think everything about our laws will remain the same in the face of superintelligence, or that our legal system will not evolve at all.
It does not seem unrealistic to me to assume that powerful AIs could be constrained by other powerful AIs. Humans currently constrain each other; why couldn’t AIs constrain each other?
“Existing system of law and property rights” looks like a “thought-terminating cliché” to me.
By contrast, I suspect the words “superintelligence” and “gods” have become thought-terminating cliches on LessWrong.
Any discussion about the realistic implications of AI must contend with the fact that AIs will be real physical beings with genuine limitations, not omnipotent deities with unlimited powers to command and control the world. They may be extremely clever, their minds may be vast, they may be able to process far more information than we can comprehend, but they will not be gods.
I think it is too easy to avoid the discussion of what AIs may or may not do, realistically, by assuming that AIs will break every rule in the book, and assume the form of an inherently uncontrollable entity with no relevant constraints on its behavior (except for physical constraints, like the speed of light). We should probably resist the temptation to talk about AI like this.
The claim at hand, that we have both read Eliezer repeatedly make[1], is that there is a sufficient level of intelligence and a sufficient power of nanotechnology that within days or weeks a system could design and innocuously build a nanotechnology factory out of simple biological materials that goes on to build either a disease or a cellular-sized drones that would quickly cause an extinction event — perhaps a virus that spreads quickly around the world with a replication rate that allows it to spread globally before any symptoms are found, or a series of diamond-based machines that can enter the bloodstream and explode on a coordinated signal. This is such a situation where no response from human civilization would occur, and the argument that an AI ought to be worried about people with guns and bombs coming for its data centers has no relevance.
Sure, I have also read Eliezer repeatedly make that claim. On the meta level, I don’t think the fact that he has written about this specific scenario fully makes up for the vagueness in his object-level essay above. But I’m also happy to briefly reply on the object level on this particular narrow point:
In short, I interpret Eliezer to be making a mistake by assuming that the world will not adapt to anticipated developments in nanotechnology and AI in order to protect against various attacks that we can easily see coming, prior to the time that AIs will be capable of accomplishing these incredible feats. By the time AIs are capable of developing such advanced molecular nanotech, I think the world will have already been dramatically transformed by prior waves of technologies, many of which by themselves could importantly change the gameboard, and change what it means for humans to have defenses against advanced nanotech to begin with.
As a concrete example, I think it’s fairly plausible that, by the time artificial superintelligences can create fully functional nanobots that are on-par with or better than biological machines, we will have already developed uploading technology that allows humans to literally become non-biological, implying that we can’t be killed by a virus in the first place. This would reduce the viability of using a virus to cause humanity to go extinct, increasing human robustness.
As a more general argument, and by comparison to Eliezer, I think that nanotechnology will probably be developed more incrementally and predictably, rather than suddenly upon the creation of a superintelligent AI, and the technology will be diffused across civilization, rather than existing solely in the hands of a small lab run by an AI. I also think Eliezer seems to be imagining that superintelligent AI will be created in a world that looks broadly similar to our current world, with defensive technologies that are only roughly as powerful as the ones that exist in 2024. However, I don’t think that will be the case.
Given an incremental and diffuse development trajectory, and transformative precursor technologies to mature nanotech, I expect society will have time to make preparations as the technology is developed, allowing us to develop defenses to such dramatic nanotech attacks alongside the offensive nanotechnologies that will also eventually be developed. It therefore seems unlikely to me that society will be completely caught by surprise by fully-developed-molecular nanotechnology, without any effective defenses.
I don’t know what sort of fight you are imagining humans having with nanotech that imposes substantial additional costs on the ASI beyond the part where it needs to build & deploy the nanotech that actually does the “killing” part, but in this world I do not expect there to be a fight.
The additional costs of human resistance don’t need to be high in an absolute sense. These costs only need to be higher than the benefit of killing humans, for your argument fail.
It is likewise very easy for the United States to invade and occupy Costa Rica—but that does not imply that it is rational for the United States to do so, because the benefits of invading Costa Rica are presumably even smaller than the costs of taking such an action, even without much unified resistance from Costa Rica.
What matters for the purpose of this argument is the relative magnitude of costs vs. benefits, not the absolute magnitude of the costs. It is insufficient to argue that the costs of killing humans are small. That fact alone does not imply that it is rational to kill humans, from the perspective of an AI. You need to further argue that the benefits of killing humans are even larger to establish the claim that a misaligned AI should rationally kill us.
To the extent your statement that “I don’t expect there to be a fight” means that you don’t think humans can realistically resist in any way that imposes costs on AIs, that’s essentially what I meant to respond to when I talked about the idea of AIs being able to achieve their goals at “zero costs”.
Of course, if you assume that AIs will be able to do whatever they want without any resistance whatsoever from us, then you can of course conclude that they will be able to achieve any goals they want without needing to compromise with us. If killing humans doesn’t cost anything, then yes I agree, the benefits of killing humans, however small, will be higher, and thus it will be rational for AIs to kill humans. I am doubting the claim that the cost of killing humans will be literally zero.
Even if this cost is small, it merely needs to be larger than the benefits of killing humans, for AIs to rationally avoid killing humans.
There does not yet exist a single ten-million-word treatise which provides an end-to-end argument of the level of detail you’re looking for.
To be clear, I am not objecting to the length of his essay. It’s OK to be brief.
I am objecting to the vagueness of the argument. It follows a fairly typical pattern of certain MIRI essays by heavily relying on analogies, debunking straw characters, using metaphors rather than using clear and explicit English, and using stories as arguments, instead of concisely stating the exact premises and implications. I am objecting to the rhetorical flourish, not the word count.
This type of writing may be suitable for persuasion, but it does not seem very suitable for helping people build rigorous models of the world, which I also think is more important when posting on LessWrong.
My current guess is that you do not think that kind of nanotech is physically realizable by any ASI we are going to develop (including post-RSI), or maybe you think the ASI will be cognitively disadvantaged compared to humans in domains that it thinks are important (in ways that it can’t compensate for, or develop alternatives for, somehow).
I think neither of those things, and I entirely reject the argument that AIs will be fundamentally limited in the future in the way you suggested. If you are curious about why I think AIs will plausibly peacefully trade with humans in the future, rather than disassembling humans for their atoms, I would instead point to the facts that:
Trying to disassemble someone for their atoms is typically something the person will try to fight very hard against, if they become aware of your intentions to disassemble them.
Therefore, the cost of attempting to disassemble someone for their atoms does not merely include the technical costs associated with actually disassembling them, but additionally includes: (1) fighting the person who you are trying to kill and disassemble, (2) fighting whatever norms and legal structures are in place to prevent this type of predation against other agents in the world, and (3) the indirect cost of becoming the type of agent who predates on another person in this manner, which could make you an untrustworthy and violent person in the eyes of other agents, including other AIs who might fear you.
The benefit of disassembling a human is quite small, given the abundance of raw materials that substitute almost perfectly for the atoms that you can get from a human.
A rational agent will typically only do something if the benefits of the action outweigh the costs, rather than merely because the costs are small. Even if the costs of disassembling a human (as identified in point (2)) are small, that fact alone does not imply that a rational superintelligent AI would take such an action, precisely because the benefits of that action could be even smaller. And as just stated, we have good reasons to think that the benefits of disassembling a human are quite small in an absolute sense.
Therefore, it seems unlikely, or at least seems non-obvious, that a rational agent—even a very powerful one with access to advanced nanotech—will try to disassemble humans for their atoms.
Nothing in this argument is premised on the idea that AIs will be weak, less intelligent than humans, bounded in their goals, or limited in some other respect, except I suppose to the extent I’m assuming that AIs will be subject to environmental constraints, as opposed to instantly being able to achieve all of their goals at literally zero costs. I think AIs, like all physical beings, will exist in a universe in which they cannot get literally everything they want, and achieve the exact optimum of their utility function without any need to negotiate with anyone else. In other words, even if AIs are very powerful, I still think it may be beneficial for them to compromise with other agents in the world, including the humans, who are comparatively much less powerful than they are.
If it is possible to trivially fill in the rest of his argument, then I think it is better for him to post that, instead of posting something that needs to be filled-in, and which doesn’t actually back up the thesis that people are interpreting him as arguing for. Precision is a virtue, and I’ve seen very few essays that actually provide this point about trade explicitly, as opposed to essays that perhaps vaguely allude to the points you have given, as this one apparently does too.
In my opinion, your filled-in argument seems to be a great example of why precision is necessary: to my eye, it contains bald assertions and unjustified inferences about a highly speculative topic, in a way that barely recognizes the degree of uncertainty we have about this domain. As a starting point, why does nanotech imply that it will be cheaper to disassemble humans than to trade with them? Are we assuming that humans cannot fight back against being disassembled, and moreover, is the threat of fighting back being factored into the cost-benefit analysis when the AIs are deciding whether to disassemble humans for their atoms vs. trade with them? Are our atoms really that valuable that it is worth it to pay the costs of violence to obtain them? And why are we assuming that “there will not be other AIs around at the time which 1) would be valuable trade partners for the AI that develops that technology (which gives it that decisive strategic advantage over everyone else) and 2) care about humans at all”?
Satisfying-sounding answers to each of these questions could undoubtedly be given, and I assume you can provide them. I don’t expect to find the answers fully persuasive, but regardless of what you think on the object-level, my basic meta-point stands: none of this stuff is obvious, and the essay is extremely weak without the added details that back up its background assumptions. It is very important to try to be truth-seeking and rigorously evaluate arguments on their merits. The fact that this essay is vague, and barely attempts to make a serious argument for one of its central claims, makes it much more difficult to evaluate concretely.
Two reasonable people could read this essay and come away with two very different ideas about what the essay is even trying to argue, given how much unstated inference you’re meant to “fill in”, instead of plain text that you can read. This is a problem, even if you agree with the underlying thesis the essay is supposed to argue for.
If we could create AI’s that follows the existing system of law and property rights (including the intent of the laws, and doesn’t exploit loopholes, and doesn’t maliciously comply with laws, and doesn’t try to get the law changed, etc.) then that would be a solution to the alignment problem, but the problem is that we don’t know how to do that.
I disagree that creating an agent that follows the existing system of law and property rights, and acts within it rather than trying to undermine it, would count as a solution to the alignment problem.
Imagine a man who only cared about himself and had no altruistic impulses whatsoever. However, this man reasoned that, “If I disrespect the rule of law, ruthlessly exploit loopholes in the legal system, and maliciously comply with the letter of the law while disregarding its intent, then other people will view me negatively and trust me less as a consequence. If I do that, then people will be less likely to want to become my trading partner, they’ll be less likely to sign onto long-term contracts with me, I might accidentally go to prison because of an adversarial prosecutor and an unsympathetic jury, and it will be harder to recruit social allies. These are all things that would be very selfishly costly. Therefore, for my own selfish benefit, I should generally abide by most widely established norms and moral rules in the modern world, including the norm of following intent of the law, rather than merely the letter of the law.”
From an outside perspective, this person would essentially be indistinguishable from a normal law-abiding citizen who cared about other people. Perhaps the main difference between this person and a “normal” person is that this man wouldn’t partake in much private altruism like donating to charity anonymously; but that type of behavior is rare anyway among the general public. Nonetheless, despite appearing outwardly-aligned, this person would be literally misaligned with the rest of humanity in a basic sense: they do not care about other people. If it were not instrumentally rational for this person to respect the rights of other citizens, they would have no issue throwing away someone else’s life for a dollar.
My basic point here is this: it is simply not true that misaligned agents have no incentive to obey the law. Misaligned agents typically have ample incentives to follow the law. Indeed, it has often been argued that the very purpose of law itself is to resolve disputes between misaligned agents. As James Madison once said, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” His point is that, if we were all mutually aligned with each other, we would have no need for the coercive mechanism of the state in order to get along.
What’s true for humans could be true for AIs too. However, obviously, there is one key distinction: AIs could eventually become far more powerful than individual humans, or humanity-as-a-whole. Perhaps this means that future AIs will have strong incentives to break the law rather than abide by it; perhaps they will act outside a system of law rather than influencing the world from within a system of law? Many people on LessWrong seem to think so.
My response to this argument is multifaceted, and I won’t go into it in this comment. But suffice to say for the purpose of my response here, I think it is clear that mere misalignment is insufficient to imply that an agent will not adhere to the rule of law. This statement is clear enough with the example of the sociopathic man I gave above, and at minimum seems probably true for human-level AIs as well. I would appreciate if people gave more rigorous arguments otherwise.
As I see it, very few such rigorous arguments have so far been given for the position that future AIs will generally act outside of, rather than within, the existing system of law, in order to achieve their goals.
I think the arguments in this post are an okay defense of “ASI wouldn’t spare humanity because of trade”
I disagree, and I’d appreciate if someone would precisely identify the argument they found compelling in this post that argues for that exact thesis. As far as I can tell, the post makes the following supporting arguments for its claims (summarized):
Asking an unaligned superintelligence to spare humans is like asking Bernard Arnalt to donate $77 to you.
The law of comparative advantage does not imply that superintelligences will necessarily pay a high price for what humans have to offer, because of the existence of alternative ways for a superintelligence to get what it wants.
Superintelligences will “go hard enough” in the sense of using all reachable resources, rather than utilizing only some resources in the solar system and then stopping.
I claim that any actual argument for the proposition — that future unaligned AIs will not spare humanity because of trade — is missing from this post. The closest the post comes to arguing for this proposition is (2), but (2) does not demonstrate the proposition, both because (2) is only a claim about what the law of comparative advantage says, and because (2) does not talk at all about what humans could have to offer in the future that might be worth trading for.
In my view, one of the primary cruxes of the discussion is whether trade is less efficient than going to war between agents with dramatically different levels of power. A thoughtful discussion could have started about the conditions under which trade usefully occurs, and the ways in which future AIs will be similar to and different from these existing analogies. For example, the post could have talked about why nation-states trade with each other even in the presence of large differences in military power, but humans don’t trade with animals. However, the post included no such discussion, choosing instead to attack a “midwit” strawman.
It is not always an expression of selfish motives when people take a stance against genocide. I would even go as far as saying that, in the majority of cases, people genuinely have non-selfish motives when taking that position. That is, they actually do care, to at least some degree, about the genocide, beyond the fact that signaling their concern helps them fit in with their friend group.
Nonetheless, and this is important: few people are willing to pay substantial selfish costs in order to prevent genocides that are socially distant from them.
The theory I am advancing here does not rest on the idea that people aren’t genuine in their desire for faraway strangers to be better off. Rather, my theory is that people generally care little about such strangers, when helping those strangers trades off significantly against objectives that are closer to themselves, their family, friend group, and their own tribe.
Or, put another way, distant strangers usually get little weight in our utility function. Our family, and our own happiness, by contrast, usually get a much larger weight.
The core element of my theory concerns the amount that people care about themselves (and their family, friends, and tribe) versus other people, not whether they care about other people at all.