I’m Tamsin Leake, co-founder and head of research at Orthogonal, doing agent foundations.
Tamsin Leake
Karma: 2,648
I am a utilitarian and agree you with comment.
The intent of the post was
to make people weigh whether to publish or not, because I think some people are not weighing this enough
to give some arguments in favor of “you might be systematically overestimating the utility of publishing”, because I think some people are doing that
I agree people should take the utilitalianly optimal action, I just think they’re doing the utilitarian calculus wrong or not doing the calculus at all.
I think research that is mostly about outer alignment (what to point the AI to) rather than inner alignment (how to point the AI to it) tends to be good — quantilizers, corrigibility, QACI, decision theory, embedded agency, indirect normativity, infra bayesianism, things like that. Though I could see some of those backfiring the way RLHF did — in the hands of a very irresponsible org, even not very capabilities-related research can be used to accelerate timelines and increase race dynamics if the org doing it thinks it can get a quick buck out of it.
I don’t buy the argument that safety researchers have unusually good ideas/research compared to capability researchers at top labs
I don’t think this particularly needs to be true for my point to hold; they only need to have reasonably good ideas/research, not unusually good, for them to publish less to be a positive thing.
That said, if someone hasn’t thought at all about concepts like “differentially advancing safety” or “capabilities externalities,” then reading this post would probably be helpful, and I’d endorse thinking about those issues.
That’s a lot of what I intend to do with this post, yes. I think a lot of people do not think about the impact of publishing very much and just blurt-out/publish things as a default action, and I would like them to think about their actions more.
One straightforward alternative is to just not do that; I agree it’s not very satisfying but it should still be the action that’s pursued if it’s the one that has more utility.
I wish I had better alternatives, but I don’t. But the null action is an alternative.
Please stop publishing ideas/insights/research about AI
It certainly is possible! In more decision-theoritic terms, I’d describe this as “it sure would suck if agents in my reference class just optimized for their own happiness; it seems like the instrumental thing for agents in my reference class to do is maximize for everyone’s happiness”. Which is probly correct!
But as per my post, I’d describe this position as “not intrinsically altruistic” — you’re optimizing for everyone’s happiness because “it sure would sure if agents in my reference class didn’t do that”, not because you intrinsically value that everyone be happy, regardless of reasoning about agents and reference classes and veils of ignorance.
decision theory is no substitute for utility function
some people, upon learning about decision theories such as LDT and how it cooperates on problems such as the prisoner’s dilemma, end up believing the following:
my utility function is about what i want for just me; but i’m altruistic (/egalitarian/cosmopolitan/pro-fairness/etc) because decision theory says i should cooperate with other agents. decision theoritic cooperation is the true name of altruism.
it’s possible that this is true for some people, but in general i expect that to be a mistaken analysis of their values.
decision theory cooperates with agents relative to how much power they have, and only when it’s instrumental.
in my opinion, real altruism (/egalitarianism/cosmopolitanism/fairness/etc) should be in the utility function which the decision theory is instrumental to. i actually intrinsically care about others; i don’t just care about others instrumentally because it helps me somehow.
some important aspects that my utility-function-altruism differs from decision-theoritic-cooperation includes:
i care about people weighed by moral patienthood, decision theory only cares about agents weighed by negotiation power. if an alien superintelligence is very powerful but isn’t a moral patient, then i will only cooperate with it instrumentally (for example because i care about the alien moral patients that it has been in contact with); if cooperating with it doesn’t help my utility function (which, again, includes altruism towards aliens) then i won’t cooperate with that alien superintelligence. corollarily, i will take actions that cause nice things to happen to people even if they’ve very impoverished (and thus don’t have much LDT negotiation power) and it doesn’t help any other aspect of my utility function than just the fact that i value that they’re okay.
if i can switch to a better decision theory, or if fucking over some non-moral-patienty agents helps me somehow, then i’ll happily do that; i don’t have goal-content integrity about my decision theory. i do have goal-content integrity about my utility function: i don’t want to become someone who wants moral patients to unconsentingly-die or suffer, for example.
there seems to be a sense in which some decision theories are better than others, because they’re ultimately instrumental to one’s utility function. utility functions, however, don’t have an objective measure for how good they are. hence, moral anti-realism is true: there isn’t a Single Correct Utility Function.
decision theory is instrumental; the utility function is where the actual intrinsic/axiomatic/terminal goals/values/preferences are stored. usually, i also interpret “morality” and “ethics” as “terminal values”, since most of the stuff that those seem to care about looks like terminal values to me. for example, i will want fairness between moral patients intrinsically, not just because my decision theory says that that’s instrumental to me somehow.
I would feel better about this if there was something closer to (1) on which to discuss what is probably the most important topic in history (AI alignment). But noted.
I’m generally not a fan of increasing the amount of illegible selection effects.
On the privacy side, can lesswrong guarantee that, if I never click on Recommended, then recombee will never see an (even anonymized) trace of what I browse on lesswrong?
Here the thing that I’m calling evil is pursuing short-term profits at the cost of non-negligeably higher risk that everyone dies.
Regardless of how good their alignment plans are, the thing that makes OpenAI unambiguously evil is that they created a strongly marketed public product and, as a result, caused a lot public excitement about AI, and thus lots of other AI capabilities organizations were created that are completely dismissive of safety.
There’s just no good reason to do that, except short-term greed at the cost of higher probability that everyone (including people at OpenAI) dies.
(No, “you need huge profits to solve alignment” isn’t a good excuse — we had nowhere near exhausted the alignment research that can be done without huge profits.)
There’s also the case of harmful warning shots: for example, if it turns out that, upon seeing an AI do a scary but impressive thing, enough people/orgs/states go “woah, AI is powerful, I should make one!” or “I guess we’re doomed anyways, might as well stop thinking about safety and just enjoy making profit with AI while we’re still alive”, to offset the positive effect. This is totally the kind of thing that could be the case in our civilization.
There could be a difference but only after a certain point in time, which you’re trying to predict / plan for.
What you propose, ≈”weigh indices by kolmogorov complexity” is indeed a way to go about picking indices, but “weigh indices by one over their square” feels a lot more natural to me; a lot simpler than invoking the universal prior twice.
If you use the UTMs for cartesian-framed inputs/outputs, sure; but if you’re running the programs as entire worlds, then you still have the issue of “where are you in time”.
Say there’s an infinitely growing conway’s-game-of-life program, or some universal program, which contains a copy of me at infinitely many locations. How do I weigh which ones are me?
It doesn’t matter that the UTM has a fixed amount of weight, there’s still infinitely many locations within it.
Is quantum phenomena anthropic evidence for BQP=BPP? Is existing evidence against many-worlds?
Suppose I live inside a simulation ran by a computer over which I have some control.
-
Scenario 1: I make the computer run the following:
pause simulation if is even(calculate billionth digit of pi): resume simulationSuppose, after running this program, that I observe that I still exist. This is some anthropic evidence for the billionth digit of pi being even.
Thus, one can get anthropic evidence about logical facts.
-
Scenario 2: I make the computer run the following:
pause simulation if is even(calculate billionth digit of pi): resume simulation else: resume simulation but run it a trillion times slowerIf you’re running on the non-time-penalized solomonoff prior, then that’s no evidence at all — observing existing is evidence that you’re being ran, not that you’re being ran fast. But if you do that, a bunch of things break including anthropic probabilities and expected utility calculations. What you want is a time-penalized (probably quadratically) prior, in which later compute-steps have less realityfluid than earlier ones — and thus, observing existing is evidence for being computed early — and thus, observing existing is some evidence that the billionth digit of pi is even.
-
Scenario 3: I make the computer run the following:
pause simulation quantum_algorithm <- classical-compute algorithm which simulates quantum algorithms the fastest infinite loop: use quantum_algorithm to compute the result of some complicated quantum phenomena compute simulation forwards by 1 stepObserving existing after running this program is evidence that BQP=BPP — that is, classical computers can efficiently run quantum algorithms: if BQP≠BPP, then my simulation should become way slower, and existing is evidence for being computed early and fast (see scenario 2).
Except, living in a world which contains the outcome of cohering quantum phenomena (quantum computers, double-slit experiments, etc) is very similar to the scenario above! If your prior for the universe is a programs, penalized for how long they take to run on classical computation, then observing that the outcome of quantum phenomena is being computed is evidence that they can be computed efficiently.
-
Scenario 4: I make the computer run the following:
in the simulation, give the human a device which generates a sequence of random bits pause simulation list_of_simulations <- [current simulation state] quantum_algorithm <- classical-compute algorithm which simulates quantum algorithms the fastest infinite loop: list_of_new_simulations <- [] for simulation in list_of_simulations: list_of_new_simulations += [ simulation advanced by one step where the device generated bit 0, simulation advanced by one step where the device generated bit 1 ] list_of_simulations <- list_of_new_simulationsThis is similar to what it’s like to being in a many-worlds universe where there’s constant forking.
Yes, in this scenario, there is no “mutual destruction”, the way there is in quantum. But with decohering everett branches, you can totally build exponentially many non-mutually-destructing timelines too! For example, you can choose to make important life decisions based on the output of the RNG, and end up with exponentially many different lives each with some (exponentially little) quantum amplitude, without any need for those to be compressible together, or to be able to mutually-destruct. That’s what decohering means! “Recohering” quantum phenomena interacts destructively such that you can compute the output, but decohering* phenomena just branches.
The amount of different simulations that need to be computed increases exponentially with simulation time.
Observing existing after running this program is very strange. Yes, there are exponentially many me’s, but all of the me’s are being ran exponentially slowly; they should all not observe existing. I should not be any of them.
This is what I mean by “existing is evidence against many-worlds” — there’s gotta be something like an agent (or physics, through some real RNG or through computing whichever variables have the most impact) picking a only-polynomially-large set of decohered non-compressible-together timelines to explain continuing existing.
Some friends tell me “but tammy, sure at step N each you has only 1/2^N quantum amplitude, but at step N there’s 2^N such you’s, so you still have 1 unit of realityfluid” — but my response is “I mean, I guess, sure, but regardless of that, step N occurs 2^N units of classical-compute-time in the future! That’s the issue!”.
Some notes:
-
I heard about pilot wave theory recently, and sure, if that’s one way to get single history, why not. I hear that it “doesn’t have locality”, which like, okay I guess, that’s plausibly worse program-complexity wise, but it’s exponentially better after accounting for the time penalty.
-
What if “the world is just Inherently Quantum”? Well, my main answer here is, what the hell does that mean? It’s very easy for me to imagine existing inside of a classical computation (eg conway’s game of life); I have no idea what it’d mean for me to exist in “one of the exponentially many non-compressible-together decohered exponenially-small-amplitude quantum states that are all being computed forwards”. Quadratically-decaying-realityfluid classical-computation makes sense, dammit.
-
What if it’s still true — what if I am observing existing with exponentially little (as a function of the age of the universe) realityfluid? What if the set of real stuff is just that big?
Well, I guess that’s vaguely plausible (even though, ugh, that shouldn’t be how being real works, I think), but then the tegmark 4 multiverse has to contain no hypotheses in which observers in my reference class occupy more than exponentially little realityfluid.
Like, if there’s a conway’s-game-of-life simulation out there in tegmark 4, whose entire realityfluid-per-timestep is equivalent to my realityfluid-per-timestep, then they can just bruteforce-generate all human-brain-states and run into mine by chance, and I should have about as much probability of being one of those random generations as I’d have being in this universe — both have exponentially little of their universe’s realityfluid! The conway’s-game-of-life bruteforced-me has exponentially little realityfluid because she’s getting generated exponentially late, and quantum-universe me has exponentially little realityfluid because I occupy exponentially little of the quantum amplitude, at every time-step.
See why that’s weird? As a general observer, I should exponentially favor observing being someone who lives in a world where I don’t have exponentially little realityfluid, such as “person who lives only-polynomially-late into a conway’s-game-of-life, but happened to get randomly very confused about thinking that they might inhabit a quantum world”.
Existing inside of a many-worlds quantum universe feels like aliens pranksters-at-orthogonal-angles running the kind of simulation where the observers inside of it to be very anthropically confused once they think about anthropics hard enough. (This is not my belief.)
-
I didn’t see a clear indication in the post about whether the music is AI-generated or not, and I’d like to know; was there an indication I missed?
(I care because I’ll want to listen to that music less if it’s AI-generated.)
Unlike on your blog, the images on the lesswrong version of this post are now broken.
Taboo the word “intelligence”.
An agent can superhumanly-optimize any utility function. Even if there are objective values, a superhuman-optimizer can ignore them and superhuman-optimize paperclips instead (and then we die because it optimized for that harder than we optimized for what we want).
Rather, ” us” — the good alignment researchers who will be careful at all about the long term effects of our actions, unlike capabilities researchers who are happy to accelerate race dynamics and increase p(doom) if they make a quick profit out of it in the short term.