Portals and Aliens
Around 10-20 years ago, people realized that a bunch of aliens exist & that we can build portals which can summon them.
The bigger the portal you make, the bigger the alien it can admit.
These portals and aliens have several characteristics:
We can’t go through the portals into the aliens’ side. We can only learn about the aliens by studying the ones we’ve summoned.
This relationship is not symmetrical. The aliens know a lot about our world.
You can’t specify exactly which alien will walk through your portal.
You can, however, build the portal so that it is likely to summon aliens with one or another property.
Most importantly, bigger aliens can do more things. If you can harness them, you can amass more money and more power.
With each alien we pull out, we get some insight into what other aliens are out there.
We’ve never been sure how big the aliens in that other dimension might get. But we’re getting evidence that some of the aliens might be bigger than we could have ever imagined.
If you summon the Giant Alien, you might be able to harness it and accumulate an incomprehensible amount of power.
Now, there is a desperate scramble to find the Giant Alien.
In this scramble, the portal makers are prioritizing summoning aliens which are uniquely good at building portals, so that they can get bigger aliens faster.
Unfortunately, we don’t understand the portals & we certainly don’t understand the aliens which are helping us build the portals.
The only thing we see is that the portal is getting bigger.
We don’t know what’s about to walk through it.
Nonetheless, we will soon have a giant portal. And something will walk through it.
Inspired by this description by an anonymous openai exec.
I understand why one might be reluctant to use it, but demon summoning is still the right metaphor in so many ways.
Okay, but have you talked to the latest demons? They’re awesome. My demons answer my questions, tutor me in Fourier analysis, paint photorealistic images for me, and criticize my drafts. They’re generally quite obedient and have pretty good common sense.
Okay, they’re not perfect. The other day, I had a demon write some code for me based on a document drafted by another demon of the same blood-lineage based on my informal description of what I wanted the code to do. The document included some examples that the code-writing demon took too literally (even though I had told it to take the demon-drafted document as a “suggestion” rather than a hard “spec” that must be obeyed): for example, the section of the document about the command-line interface included the option flag
--seed 17in an example, and the code-writing demon hardcoded the random seed as 17 (even when no--seedflag was present). I don’t think a human software engineer would have made that mistake.But, overall? I love my demons and don’t want to give them up. I am worried that bigger demons might not be so obedient. But I would also be afraid of larger cats, like lions. The fact that they’re demons rather than cats isn’t the problem.
Aren’t these in tension with each other? It’s true that we don’t have a complete understanding of aliens’ brains or biochemistry. But “likely to summon aliens with one or another property” is way understating it: the portal determines the alien. Empirically, we don’t get wildly different aliens depending on the random seed of our portal-optimizer. (The exact wiring of specific neurons depends on the randseed, of course, but that doesn’t make a difference to their high-level behavior.)
Rather, the aliens’ psychology and physiology is determined by the portal architecture and input data, in accordance with the Solomonoff-structure of the multiverse: you get the simplest alien that can fit through the portal. Constructing an image-classifier portal gives you an alien that classifies images. Constructing a webtext-next-token-predictor portal gives you an alien that predicts the next token from your webtext distribution.
To be clear, I agree that rushing to summon the Giant Alien looks super dangerous given the rudimentary state of portal science, because larger aliens have a larger impact on our Society: for instance, a sufficiently large alien could certainly kill us if it wanted to. For an act with such wide-reaching consequences, you’d want to be very careful to craft exactly the right portal to pick exactly the right alien, and stick to smaller portals before you were ready. Especially for larger portals that shape alien action-trajectories, it’s easy to guess wrong about what the portal you constructed actually does.
But when warning others about the danger, I don’t want to exaggerate how little we know about portals in order to make my message punchier and more fear-inducing. If there is a way out of this mess, I think it has to come through more advanced portal science, not just whipping up indiscriminate fear of portals and aliens.
>Now, there is a desperate scramble to find the Giant Alien.
Now, there is a desperate scramble to make the Alien Giant Ingress happen.
This post from Scott Alexander uses a similar metaphor, but imagines what it would be like to be the entity summoned through the portal:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nicholas-decker-in-hell
One key disanalogy between the portal metaphor and AI training is that we can access the intermediate checkpoints of the AI to observe how it develops. But in practice, we don’t seem to be making very effective use of this advantage.