Humanity is generating and consuming enormous amount of power—why is the power budget even relevant? And even if it was, energy for running brains ultimately comes from Sun—if you include the agriculture energy chain, and “grade” the energy efficiency of brains by the amount of solar energy it ultimately takes to power a brain, AI definitely has a potential to be more efficient. And even if a single human brain is fairly efficient, the human civilization is clearly not. With AI, you can quickly scale up the amount of compute you use, but scaling beyond a single brain is very inefficient.
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- 27 May 2023 19:17 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on No—AI is just as energy-efficient as your brain. by (
I do not see the connection. The gist of Newcomb’s Problem does not change if the player is given a time limit (you have to choose within an hour, or you do not get anything). Time-limited halting problem is of course trivially decidable.
There seems to be some genetic mechanism for at least things like sexual preferences. It is clearly able to locate concepts in neural circuitry, although with some noise around it (hence, fetishes). Similarly for being instinctively scared of certain things (also with noise, hence fobias).
As a few commenters have already pointed out, this “strategy” completely fails in step 2 (“Specify safety properties that we want all AIs to obey”). Even for a “simple” property you cite, “refusal to help terrorists spread harmful viruses”, we are many orders of magnitude of descriptive complexity away from knowing how to state them as a formal logical predicate on the I/O behavior of the AI program. We have no clue how to define “virus” as a mathematical property of the AI sensors in a way that does not go wrong in all kinds of corner cases, even less clue for “terrorist”, and even less clue than that for “help”. The gap between what we know how to specify today and the complexity of your “simple” property is way bigger than the gap between the “simple” property and most complex safety properties people tend to consider...
To illustrate, consider an even simpler partial specification—the AI is observing the world, and you want to formally define the probability that it’s notion of whether it’s seeing a dog is aligned with your definition of a dog. Formally, define a mathematical function of arguments that, with the arguments representing the RGB values for a 1024x1024 image, would capture the true probability that the image contains what you consider to be a dog—so that a neutral network that is proven to compute that particular function can be trusted to be aligned with your definition of a dog, while a neutral network that does something else is misaligned. Well, today we have close to zero clue how to do this. The closest we can do is to train a neutral network to recognize dog pictures, and than whatever function that network happens to compute (which, if written down as a mathematical function, would be an incomprehensible mess that, even if we optimize to reduce the size of, will probably tbe at least thousands of pages long) is the best formal specification we know how to come up with. (For things simpler than dogs we can probably do better by first defining a specification for 3d shapes, then projecting it onto 2d images, but I do not think this approach will be much help for dogs). Note that effectively we are saying to trust the neural network—whatever it learned to do is our best guess on how to formalize what it needed to do! We do not yet know how to do better!!!
Sears tried creating an explicit internal economy. It did not end well. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ayn-rand-destroyed-sears
very little has been said about whether it is possible to construct a complete set of axioms
Huh? Didn’t Gödel conclusively prove that the answer to pretty much every meaningful form of your question is “no”?
Why do you think that refugees will be capable of creating better institutions than those that failed them in theis county of origin? Could it be that a small (relatively speaking) number of refugees can benefit from better institutions of their new country, without diluting the locals so much that the implicit institutional knowledge is lost, but a larger influx of immigrants would just import their “bad” institutions with them?
One theory of democracy’s purpose is to elect the “right” leaders. In this view, questions such as “Who is best equipped to lead this nation?” have a correct answer, and democracy is merely the most effective way to find that answer.
I think this is a very limiting view of instrumental goals of democracy. First, democracy has almost no chance of selecting the best leader—at best, it could help select a better one out of a limited set of options. Second, this ignores a key, IMHO the key, feature of democracy—keeping leaders accountable after they are elected. Democracy does not just start backsliding when a bad leader is elected, it starts backsliding when the allies of that leader become too willing to shield the “dear leader” from accountability.
Ensuring the leaders change is another important feature.
In modern politics, simple messages tend to work a lot better than nuanced ones (which is a thing that Donald Trump masterfully exploited). “X is good/bad” is a much simpler message than “X is good, but only if it’s X1, and not X2″ and having primary opponents claim “By supporting X, [politician] argees with the evil other-siders in their support for X2! [Politician] is an our-sider-in-name-only!”
But maybe having more buckets and more standard APIs is a big part of the solution. E.g. today we have buckets like “ADHD” and “autistic” with some draft APIs attached, but not that long ago those did not exist?
And the other part of it—maybe society need to be more careful not to round out the small buckets (e.g. the witness accounts example from the OP)?
Yes, in updating my family on today’s news I told them that P(WW3) increased in non-trivial ways today—based on mostly similar observations.
There is also a bit more to your point #2 - not only the West does not consider this annexation legitimate, but it also makes any scenario where the fighting stops with Russia maintaining control over these territories less acceptable to the West (and Ukraine), so the path to any pieceful resolution of the conflict just became that much narrower. And that in turn leaves more avenues open for things to escalate.
5b—yes, 2020 amendments to the constitution of Russian Federation included adding the following paragraph to article 67:
2.1. Российская Федерация обеспечивает защиту своего суверенитета и территориальной целостности. Действия (за исключением делимитации, демаркации, редемаркации государственной границы Российской Федерации с сопредельными государствами), направленные на отчуждение части территории Российской Федерации, а также призывы к таким действиям не допускаются.
Rough translation (I am a native Russian speaker born in Moscow leaving in US): 2.1. Russian Federation unsures the protection of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Actions (excluding delimitation and demarcation of the national border of Russian Federation with the neighboring states) aimed at alienation of a part of the territory of Russian Federation, or appeals for such actions are prohibited.
Note the “appeals” part in the end—it would make it nearly impossible for any Russian officials to even discuss the possibility of reversing the annexations...
Looks like a good summary of their current positions, but how about willingness to update their position and act decisively and based on actual evidence/data? De Santis’s history of anti-mask/anti-vaccine stances have to be taken into account, perhaps? Same for Kennedy?
The withdrawal letter claims “The University has not operated its market in compliance with the terms of [2014 NAL Letter]”, but does not seem to provide any specifics whatsowever on what they think was violated...
Perhaps one aspect of minimum wage that you are missing is that this is different from price control of fungible goods is several important aspects, that everything else being equal:
Higher minimum wage means higher demand for goods consumed by minimum wage employees.
Higher minimum wage incentivises employers to invest more in their employee productivity (training, better work conditions, etc)
Same employees may be more productive if you pay them higher wages, and you may be able to get better employees.
In some cases 2+3 might means that there may be several equilibrium points that are roughly equally good for the employers—either hire high-turnover low-productivity people with lower wages, or hire lower-turnover higher-productivity people for higher wages, and effect #1 is enough for the higher minimum wage to just be a win-win (which is perhaps why some employers actually support minimum wage laws).
Your world descriptions and your objections seem to focus on HRAD being the only prerequisite to being able to create an aligned AGI, rather than simply one of them (and is the one worth focusing on because of a combination of factors, such as—which areas of research are the least attended to by other researches, which areas could provide insights useful to then attack other ones, which ones are the most likely to be on a critical path, etc). It could very well be an “overwhelming priority” as you stated the position you are trying to understand, without the goal being “to come up with a theory of rationality [...] that [...] allows one to build an agent from the ground up”.
I am thinking of the following optimization problem. Let R1 be all the research that we anticipate getting completed by the mainstream AI community by the time they create an AGI. Let R2 be the smallest amount of successful research such that R1+R2 allows you to create an aligned AGI. What research questions we know to formulate today, and have a way to start attacking today that are the most likely to be in R2? And among the top choices, which ones are also 1) more likely to produce insights that would help with other parts of R2, and 2) less likely to compress the AGI timeline even further? It seems possible to believe in HRAD being such a good choice (working backwards from R2) without being in one of your world’s (all of which work forward from HRAD).
Insufficiently tested, not ready to be placed in production. Test in a sandbox (city, or a small state) first.
What would cause the paperclip maximiser to care about the number of paperclips in some hypothetical unknown other reality, over the number of paperclips in whatever reality it actually finds itself in?
There is also the element of Pascal wager here—there is no particular reason to think that any choice in this reality would have any specific effect on the outer reality, so can as well ignore the possibility.
Right, which is why the claim is immediately more suspect if Xavier is a close friend/relative/etc.
Grammar issue in your Russian version—should be “Как я могу взять уток домой из парка?”, or even better: “Как мне забрать уток из парка домой?”
For a while, I tended to be running late in certain situations. I would glance at my watch, notice I am late, and think “oh, f***!” One day, I caught myself where being in a similar situation, I glanced at my watch, and immediately thought “oh, f***!”—then realized I did not actually do the step where I figure out what time my watch displayed, and whether I was running behind. In fact, that particular time I was still OK on time...