This is one technical point that younger people are often amazed to hear, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of TV broadcast was perfectly ephemeral, producing no records at all. Not just that the original copies were lost or never digitised or impossible to track down or whatever, but that nothing of the sort ever existed. The technology for capturing, broadcasting, and displaying a TV signal is so much easier than the tech for recording one, that there were several decades when the only recordings of TV came from someone setting up a literal film camera pointed at a TV and capturing the screen on photographic film, and that didn’t happen much.
(This also meant that old TV was amazingly low latency. The camera sensor scanned through, producing the signal, which went through some analog circuitry and straight onto the air, into the circuitry of your TV and right onto the screen. The scanning of the electron beam across the screen was synchronised with the scanning of the camera sensor. At no point was even a single frame stored—I need to check the numbers but I think if you were close to the TV station, you’re looking at the top of the frame before the bottom of the frame is even captured by the camera)
Robert Miles
What about NMR or XRF? XRF can non-destructively tell you the elemental composition of a sample, which (if the sample is pure) can often pin down the compound, and NMR spectroscopy is also non destructive and can give you some info about chemical structure too
This is an interesting post!
I’m new to alignment research—any tips on how to prove what the inner goal actually is?
Haha! haaaaa 😢
Not least being the military implications. If you have widely available tech that lets you quickly and cheaply accelerate something car-sized to a velocity of Mach Fuck (they’re meant to circle the earth in 4.2 hours, making them 2 or 3 times faster than a rifle bullet), that’s certainly a dual use technology.
AI Safety Chatbot
Covid was a big learning experience for me, but I’d like to think about more than one example. Covid is interesting because, compared to my examples of birth control and animal-free meat, it seems like with covid humanity smashed the technical problem out of the park, but still overall failed by my lights because of the political situation.
How likely does it seem that we could get full marks on solving alignment but still fail due to politics? I tend to think of building a properly aligned AGI as a straightforward win condition, but that’s not a very deeply considered view. I guess we could solve it on a whiteboard somewhere but for political reasons it doesn’t get implemented in time?
Holly Elmore and Rob Miles dialogue on AI Safety Advocacy
Stampy’s AI Safety Info soft launch
I think almost all of these are things that I’d only think after I’d already noticed confusion, and most are things I’d never say in my head anyway. A little way into the list I thought “Wait, did he just ask ChatGPT for different ways to say “I’m confused”?”.
I expect there are things that pop up in my inner monologue when I’m confused about something, that I wouldn’t notice, and it would be very useful to have a list of such phrases, but your list contains ~none of them.
Edit: Actually the last three are reasonable. Are they human written?
One way of framing the difficulty with the lanternflies thing is that the question straddles the is-ought gap. It decomposes pretty cleanly into two questions: “What states of the universe are likely to result from me killing vs not killing lanternflies” (about which Bayes Rule fully applies and is enormously useful), and “Which states of the universe do I prefer?”, where the only evidence you have will come from things like introspection about your own moral intuitions and values. Your values are also a fact about the universe, because you are part of the universe, so Bayes still applies I guess, but it’s quite a different question to think about.
If you have well defined values, for example some function from states (or histories) of the universe to real numbers, such that larger numbers represent universe states that you would always prefer over smaller numbers, then every “should I do X or Y” question has an answer in terms of those values. In practice we’ll never have that, but still it’s worth thinking separately about “What are the expected consequences of the proposed policy?” and “What consequences do I want”, which a ‘should’ question implicitly mixes together.
I’ve always thought of it like, it doesn’t rely on the universe being computable, just on the universe having a computable approximation. So if the universe is computable, SI does perfectly, if it’s not, SI does as well as any algorithm could hope to.
A slightly surreal experience to read a post saying something I was just tweeting about, written by a username that could plausibly be mine.
Do we even need a whole new term for this? Why not “Sudden Deceptive Alignment”?
I think in some significant subset of such situations, almost everyone present is aware of the problem, so you don’t always have to describe the problem yourself or explicitly propose solutions (which can seem weird from a power dynamics perspective). Sometimes just drawing the group’s attention to the meta level at all, initiating a meta-discussion, is sufficient to allow the group to fix the problem.
This is good and interesting. Various things to address, but I only have time for a couple at random.
I disagree with the idea that true things necessarily have explanations that are both convincing and short. In my experience you can give a short explanation that doesn’t address everyone’s reasonable objections, or a very long one that does, or something in between. If you understand some specific point about cutting edge research, you should be able to properly explain it to a lay person, but by the time you’re done they won’t be a lay person any more! If you restrict your explanation to “things you can cover before the person you’re explaining to decides this isn’t worth their time and goes away”, many concepts simply cannot ever be explained to most people, because they don’t really want to know.
So the core challenge is staying interesting enough for long enough to actually get across all of the required concepts. On that point, have you seen any of my videos, and do you have thoughts on them? You can search “AI Safety” on YouTube.
Similarly, do you thoughts on AISafety.info ?
Are we not already doing this? I thought we were already doing this. See for example this talk I gave in 2018
https://youtu.be/pYXy-A4siMw?t=35
I guess we can’t be doing it very well though
Structured time boxes seem very suboptimal, steamrollering is easy enough to deal with by a moderator “Ok let’s pause there for X to respond to that point”
This would make a great YouTube series
Edit: I think I’m going to make this a YouTube series
Other tokens that require modelling more than a human:
The results sections of scientific papers—requires modelling whatever the experiment was about. If humans could do this they wouldn’t have needed to run the experiment
Records of stock price movements—in principle getting zero loss on this requires insanely high levels of capability
Very interesting! I think this is one of the rare times where I feel like a post would benefit from an up-front Definition. What actually is Leakage, by intensional definition?