I’ve been thinking about non AI catastrophic risks.
One that I’ve not seen talked about is the idea of cancerous ideas. That is ideas that spread throughout a population and crowd out other ideas for attention and resources.
This could lead to civilisational collapse due to basic functions not being performed.
Safeguards for this are partitioning the idea space and some form of immune system that targets ideas that spread uncontrollably.
Trying something new a hermetic discussion group on computers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/computeralchemy/s/Fin62DIVLs
By corporation I am mainly thinking about current cloud/SaaS providers. There might be a profitable hardware play here, if you can get enough investment to do the R&D.
Self-managing computer systems and AI
One of my factors in thinking about the development of AI is self-managing systems, as humans and animals self manage.
It is possible that they will be needed to manage the complexity of AI, once we move beyond LLMs. For example they might be needed to figure out when to train on new data in an efficient way and how much resources to devote to different AI sub processes in real time depending upon the problems being faced.
They will change the AI landscape making it easier for people to run their own AIs, for this reason it is unlikely that corporations will develop them or release them to the outside world (much like corporations cloud computing infra is not open source) as it will erode their moats.
Modern computer systems have and rely on the concept of a super user. It will take lots of engineering effort to remove that and replace it with something new.
With innovation being considered the purview of corporations are we going to get stuck in a local minima of cloud compute based AI, that is easy for corporations to monetise?
Looks like someone has worked on this kind of thing for different reasons https://www.worlddriven.org/
I was thinking of having evals that controlled deployment of LLMs could be something that needs multiple stakeholders to agree upon.
Butt really it is a general use pattern.
Agreed code as coordination mechanism
Code nowadays can do lots of things, from buying items to controlling machines. This presents code as a possible coordination mechanism, if you can get multiple people to agree on what code should be run in particular scenarios and situations, that can take actions on behalf of those people that might need to be coordinated.
This would require moving away from the “one person committing code and another person reviewing” code model.
This could start with many people reviewing the code, people could write their own test sets against the code or AI agents could be deputised to review the code (when that becomes feasible). Only when an agreed upon number of people thinking the code should it be merged into the main system.
Code would be automatically deployed, using gitops and the people administering the servers would be audited to make sure they didn’t interfere with running of the system without people noticing.
Code could replace regulation in fast moving scenarios, like AI. There might have to be legal contracts that you can’t deploy the agreed upon code or use the code by itself outside of the coordination mechanism.
As well as thinking about the need for the place in terms of providing a space for research, it is probably worth thinking about the need for a place in terms of what it provides the world. What subjects are currently under-represented in the world and need strong representation to guide us to a positive future? That will guide who you want to lead the organisation.
I admit that it is extreme circumstances that would make slavery consensual and justified. My thinking was if existential risk was involved, you might consent to slavery to avert it. It would have to be a larger entity than a single human doing the enslaving, because I think I agree that individuals shouldn’t do consequentialism. Like being a slave to the will of the people, in general. Assuming you can get that in some way.
I don’t follow the reasoning here
So let’s say the person has given up autonomy to avert existential risk, they should perhaps get something in return. Maybe they get influence, but they can’t use influence for their own benefit (as one of the deontological rules stipulates that is disallowed). So they are stuck trying to avert existential risk with no pay off. If you unenslave them you remove the will of the people’s voice and maybe increase existential risk or s risks.
Hmm, sorry went off on a bit of tangent here. All very unlikely agreed.
Tangential but is there ever justified unconscious slavery. For example if you asked whether you consent to slavery and then your mind wiped, might you get into a situation where the slave doesn’t know they consented to it, but the slave master is justified in treating them like a slave.
You would probably need a justification for the master slave relationship. Perhaps it is because it needs to be hidden for a good reason? Or to create a barrier against interacting with the ethical. In order to dissolve such slavery, understanding the justifications for why the slavery started would be important.
Proposal for new social norm—explicit modelling
Something that I think would make rationalists more effective at convincing people is if we had explicit models of the things we care about.
Currently we are at the stage of physicists arguing that the atom bomb might ignite the atmosphere without concrete math and models of how that might happen.
If we do this for lots of issues and have a norm of making models composable this would have further benefits.
People would use the models to make real world decisions with more accuracy
We would create frameworks for modelling that would be easily composable, that other people would use
Both would raise the status and knowledge of the rationalist community.
Does it make sense to plan for one possible world or do you think that the other possible worlds are being adequately planned for and it is only the fast unilateral take off that is neglected currently?
Limiting AI to operating in space makes sense. You might want to pay off or compensate all space launch capability in some way as there would likely be less need.
Some recompense for the people who paused working on AI or were otherwise hurt in the build up to AI makes sense.
Also trying to communicate ahead of time what a utopic vision of AI and humans might look like, so the cognitive stress isn’t too major is probably a good idea to commit to.
Committing to support multilateral acts if unilateral acts fail is probably a good idea too. Perhaps even partnering with a multilateral effort so that effort on shared goals can be spread around?
Relatedly I am thinking about improving the wikipedia page on recursive self-improvement. Does anyone have any good papers I should include? Ideally with models.
I’m starting a new blog here. It is on modelling self-modifying systems, starting with AI. Criticisms welcome
I’m wary about that one, because that isn’t a known “general” intelligence architecture, so we can expect AIs to make better learning algorithms for deep neural networks, but not necessarily themselves.
I’d like to see more discussion of this, I read some of the FOOM debate but I’m assuming that there has been more discussion of this important issue since?
I suppose the key question is for recursive self-improvement. We can give hardware improvement (improved hardware allows design of more complex and better hardware) because we are on the treadmill already. But how likely is algorithmic self-improvement. For an intelligence to be able to improve itself algorithmically the following seem to need to hold.
The system needs to understand itself
There has to be some capacity that can be improved without detriment to some other capacity (else you are doing some self-optimization and not necessarily improvement)
If it is the memeplex that gives us our generality (as is suggested by our flowering of discovery over the past 250 years compared to the past 300,000 years of homo sapiens), it might not be understandable. It would be in the weights or equivalents in whatever the AI uses. No human would understand it either.
Fiddling about with weights without knowledge would likely lead to trade offs and so you might not have the second consideration holding.
I’m not saying AI won’t change history, but we need an accurate view of how it will change things.
Found “The Future of Man” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in a bookshop. Tempted to wite a book review. It discusses some interesting topics, like the planetisation of Mankind. However it treats them as inevitable, rather as something contingent on us getting our act together. Anyone interested in a longer review?
Edit: I think his faith in the super natural plays a part in the assumption of inevitability.
Unearthing my old dissertation. Still think there is something to it
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-lmOXSfUXYvbhlFcs04VAzl-mKB8ZJfR/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=113969196762487274190&rtpof=true&sd=true