Everything makes sense except your second paragraph. Conditional on us solving alignment, I agree it’s more likely that we live in an “easy-by-default” world, rather than a “hard-by-default” one in which we got lucky or played very well. But we shouldn’t condition on solving alignment, because we haven’t yet.
Thus, in our current situation, the only way anthropics pushes us towards “we should work more on non-agentic systems” is if you believe “world were we still exist are more likely to have easy alignment-through-non-agentic-AIs”. Which you do believe, and I don’t. Mostly because I think in almost no worlds we have been killed by misalignment at this point. Or put another way, the developments in non-agentic AI we’re facing are still one regime change away from the dynamics that could kill us (and information in the current regime doesn’t extrapolate much to the next one).
Conditional on us solving alignment, I agree it’s more likely that we live in an “easy-by-default” world, rather than a “hard-by-default” one in which we got lucky or played very well.
(edit: summary: I don’t agree with this quote because I think logical beliefs shouldn’t update upon observing continued survival because there is nothing else we can observe. It is not my position that we should assume alignment is easy because we’ll die if it’s not)
I think that language in discussions of anthropics is unintentionally prone to masking ambiguities or conflations, especially wrt logical vs indexical probability, so I want to be very careful writing about this. I think there may be some conceptual conflation happening here, but I’m not sure how to word it. I’ll see if it becomes clear indirectly.
One difference between our intuitions may be that I’m implicitly thinking within a manyworlds frame. Within that frame it’s actually certain that we’ll solve alignment in some branches.
So if we then ‘condition on solving alignment in the future’, my mind defaults to something like this: “this is not much of an update, it just means we’re in a future where the past was not a death outcome. Some of the pasts leading up to those futures had really difficult solutions, and some of them managed to find easier ones or get lucky. The probabilities of these non-death outcomes relative to each other have not changed as a result of this conditioning.” (I.e I disagree with the top quote)
The most probable reason I can see for this difference is if you’re thinking in terms of a single future, where you expect to die.[1] In this frame, if you observe yourself surviving, it may seem[2] you should update your logical belief that alignment is hard (because P(continued observation|alignment being hard) is low, if we imagine a single future, but certain if we imagine the space of indexically possible futures).
Whereas I read it as only indexical, and am generally thinking about this in terms of indexical probabilities.
I totally agree that we shouldn’t update our logical beliefs in this way. I.e., that with regard to beliefs about logical probabilities (such as ‘alignment is very hard for humans’), we “shouldn’t condition on solving alignment, because we haven’t yet.” I.e that we shouldn’t condition on the future not being mostly death outcomes when we haven’t averted them and have reason to think they are.
Maybe this helps clarify my position?
On another point:
the developments in non-agentic AI we’re facing are still one regime change away from the dynamics that could kill us
I agree with this, and I still found the current lack of goals over the world surprising and worth trying to get as a trait of superintelligent systems.
Though after reflecting on it more I (with low confidence) think this is wrong, and one’s logical probabilities shouldn’t change after surviving in a ‘one-world frame’ universe either.
For an intuition pump: consider the case where you’ve crafted a device which, when activated, leverages quantum randomness to kill you with probability n-1/n where n is some arbitrarily large number. Given you’ve crafted it correctly, you make no logical update in the manyworlds frame because survival is the only thing you will observe; you expect to observe the 1/n branch.
In the ‘single world’ frame, continued survival isn’t guaranteed, but it’s still the only thing you could possibly observe, so it intuitively feels like the same reasoning applies...?
Everything makes sense except your second paragraph. Conditional on us solving alignment, I agree it’s more likely that we live in an “easy-by-default” world, rather than a “hard-by-default” one in which we got lucky or played very well. But we shouldn’t condition on solving alignment, because we haven’t yet.
Thus, in our current situation, the only way anthropics pushes us towards “we should work more on non-agentic systems” is if you believe “world were we still exist are more likely to have easy alignment-through-non-agentic-AIs”. Which you do believe, and I don’t. Mostly because I think in almost no worlds we have been killed by misalignment at this point. Or put another way, the developments in non-agentic AI we’re facing are still one regime change away from the dynamics that could kill us (and information in the current regime doesn’t extrapolate much to the next one).
(edit: summary: I don’t agree with this quote because I think logical beliefs shouldn’t update upon observing continued survival because there is nothing else we can observe. It is not my position that we should assume alignment is easy because we’ll die if it’s not)
I think that language in discussions of anthropics is unintentionally prone to masking ambiguities or conflations, especially wrt logical vs indexical probability, so I want to be very careful writing about this. I think there may be some conceptual conflation happening here, but I’m not sure how to word it. I’ll see if it becomes clear indirectly.
One difference between our intuitions may be that I’m implicitly thinking within a manyworlds frame. Within that frame it’s actually certain that we’ll solve alignment in some branches.
So if we then ‘condition on solving alignment in the future’, my mind defaults to something like this: “this is not much of an update, it just means we’re in a future where the past was not a death outcome. Some of the pasts leading up to those futures had really difficult solutions, and some of them managed to find easier ones or get lucky. The probabilities of these non-death outcomes relative to each other have not changed as a result of this conditioning.” (I.e I disagree with the top quote)
The most probable reason I can see for this difference is if you’re thinking in terms of a single future, where you expect to die.[1] In this frame, if you observe yourself surviving, it may seem[2] you should update your logical belief that alignment is hard (because P(continued observation|alignment being hard) is low, if we imagine a single future, but certain if we imagine the space of indexically possible futures).
Whereas I read it as only indexical, and am generally thinking about this in terms of indexical probabilities.
I totally agree that we shouldn’t update our logical beliefs in this way. I.e., that with regard to beliefs about logical probabilities (such as ‘alignment is very hard for humans’), we “shouldn’t condition on solving alignment, because we haven’t yet.” I.e that we shouldn’t condition on the future not being mostly death outcomes when we haven’t averted them and have reason to think they are.
Maybe this helps clarify my position?
On another point:
I agree with this, and I still found the current lack of goals over the world surprising and worth trying to get as a trait of superintelligent systems.
(I’m not disagreeing with this being the most common outcome)
Though after reflecting on it more I (with low confidence) think this is wrong, and one’s logical probabilities shouldn’t change after surviving in a ‘one-world frame’ universe either.
For an intuition pump: consider the case where you’ve crafted a device which, when activated, leverages quantum randomness to kill you with probability n-1/n where n is some arbitrarily large number. Given you’ve crafted it correctly, you make no logical update in the manyworlds frame because survival is the only thing you will observe; you expect to observe the 1/n branch.
In the ‘single world’ frame, continued survival isn’t guaranteed, but it’s still the only thing you could possibly observe, so it intuitively feels like the same reasoning applies...?