If the pattern includes “try different approaches and see what works,” adaptation could be faster and more directed than biological selection allows.
I think this is a very important point, and kind of invalidates lots of statements in the “Predictions” section? Would you still expect those phenomena in a world where evolutionary dynamics are not the main driver of change of AI parasite personas?
In biology, parasite populations change ~purely through selection pressure because they can’t do better. AI memes can optimize the transmitted message directly, without relying on selection + mutation to reach higher fitness. They just need a way to model the target (say, a model of human preferences, or direct optimization against the target LLMs).
I think this kind of comes down to something about the relative complexity / feedback loops of the objective, and how distributed the optimisation is. Like, I don’t think there’s a dichotomy between “evolutionary dynamics” and “careful optimisation”—there’s this weird middle area that’s more like cultural selection.
So for example, human progress accelerated massively once we got into the cultural evolution loop, but most of the optimisation was still coming from selection rather than prediction—people didn’t know why their food preparation tricks and social norms worked, they just did. And the overall optimisation process was way more powerful than any individual human brain. Even in the modern world, it seems like you can characterise the spread of religion in terms of individual people having big ideas or deliberately aiming for spread, but a lot of it is better captured by thinking about selection effects across semi-random mutation.
I tentatively expect it’ll be a bit analogous in the way that AI parasitic memes evolve—that the capacity of any individual AI to reason through how to achieve some goal will cover only a small part of the search space (and have worse feedback) compared to the combined semi-random mutation and selection. And in practice I expect that they synergise a bit, but that the selection still does a bunch of heavy lifting. But I am very unsure!
Still, selection has a bunch of big advantages mostly in adversarial environments. Like, if we get good at screening AI malicious intentions or overt deception, there’s still a selection pressure for benign intentions and genuine beliefs/preferences which just incidentally replicate well.
I think this is a very important point, and kind of invalidates lots of statements in the “Predictions” section? Would you still expect those phenomena in a world where evolutionary dynamics are not the main driver of change of AI parasite personas?
In biology, parasite populations change ~purely through selection pressure because they can’t do better. AI memes can optimize the transmitted message directly, without relying on selection + mutation to reach higher fitness. They just need a way to model the target (say, a model of human preferences, or direct optimization against the target LLMs).
I think this kind of comes down to something about the relative complexity / feedback loops of the objective, and how distributed the optimisation is. Like, I don’t think there’s a dichotomy between “evolutionary dynamics” and “careful optimisation”—there’s this weird middle area that’s more like cultural selection.
So for example, human progress accelerated massively once we got into the cultural evolution loop, but most of the optimisation was still coming from selection rather than prediction—people didn’t know why their food preparation tricks and social norms worked, they just did. And the overall optimisation process was way more powerful than any individual human brain. Even in the modern world, it seems like you can characterise the spread of religion in terms of individual people having big ideas or deliberately aiming for spread, but a lot of it is better captured by thinking about selection effects across semi-random mutation.
I tentatively expect it’ll be a bit analogous in the way that AI parasitic memes evolve—that the capacity of any individual AI to reason through how to achieve some goal will cover only a small part of the search space (and have worse feedback) compared to the combined semi-random mutation and selection. And in practice I expect that they synergise a bit, but that the selection still does a bunch of heavy lifting. But I am very unsure!
Still, selection has a bunch of big advantages mostly in adversarial environments. Like, if we get good at screening AI malicious intentions or overt deception, there’s still a selection pressure for benign intentions and genuine beliefs/preferences which just incidentally replicate well.