I’m trying to understand what people would like out of digital ecology. What would one achieve with an ecological theory of AI, and what aspects of digital ecology are people interested in? My DMs are open if someone wants to opine privately.
once artificial species and communities exist, they will compete with us and each other for energy and compute (any other scarce resources?). there will be cooperation, healthy competition, unhealthy competition, conflict and perhaps war. we need to be able to predict all these behaviors. what will cause phase shifts? what operational modalities will populations of artificial species have that individual models do not? what capability changes should we watch for? what should we expect from artificial species “evolution” (which may be dominantly Lamarckian!). is control safety possible? okay, but how? are there particular change rate limits that we should enforce to give humans a chance to respond effectively? what share of the shrimp welfare project funding should they get, or—post-ASI—what share of the shrimp welfare project funding should they allocate to humans?
broadly, artificial species is to individual models as human individuals are to cells. It is an entirely different area of study.
Are you looking for what people want (“like”), or what people expect?
The main productive value will be if evolution can produce new capabilities, and/or implement existing capabilities with far fewer resources.
Probably also a lot more insight into alignment, and a lot more clumsy failed attempts that we can study.
I don’t think either is “good” per-se, but it might force society to take the whole situation more seriously.
My main concern is that it puts a very sharp floor on how much we can slow down. It would take global coordination to rebuild the internet into something safe from self-replicators, and my odds on that sort of cooperation are still fairly low. US-China is a lot easier than “every nation that has substantial data centers / servers”
I was looking more for what the ecological perspective explains or hopes to explain about AI. What aspects of AI does ecological theory want to explain, and how can we get there? _rpd’s comment was helpful and I am appreciative.
I’m trying to understand what people would like out of digital ecology. What would one achieve with an ecological theory of AI, and what aspects of digital ecology are people interested in? My DMs are open if someone wants to opine privately.
once artificial species and communities exist, they will compete with us and each other for energy and compute (any other scarce resources?). there will be cooperation, healthy competition, unhealthy competition, conflict and perhaps war. we need to be able to predict all these behaviors. what will cause phase shifts? what operational modalities will populations of artificial species have that individual models do not? what capability changes should we watch for? what should we expect from artificial species “evolution” (which may be dominantly Lamarckian!). is
controlsafety possible? okay, but how? are there particular change rate limits that we should enforce to give humans a chance to respond effectively? what share of the shrimp welfare project funding should they get, or—post-ASI—what share of the shrimp welfare project funding should they allocate to humans?broadly, artificial species is to individual models as human individuals are to cells. It is an entirely different area of study.
Are you looking for what people want (“like”), or what people expect?
The main productive value will be if evolution can produce new capabilities, and/or implement existing capabilities with far fewer resources.
Probably also a lot more insight into alignment, and a lot more clumsy failed attempts that we can study.
I don’t think either is “good” per-se, but it might force society to take the whole situation more seriously.
My main concern is that it puts a very sharp floor on how much we can slow down. It would take global coordination to rebuild the internet into something safe from self-replicators, and my odds on that sort of cooperation are still fairly low. US-China is a lot easier than “every nation that has substantial data centers / servers”
I was looking more for what the ecological perspective explains or hopes to explain about AI. What aspects of AI does ecological theory want to explain, and how can we get there? _rpd’s comment was helpful and I am appreciative.