This reminds me nested time machines discussed by gwern. https://gwern.net/review/timecrimes
Precomitments plays the role of time loops and they can propagate almost infinitely in time and space. For example, any one who is going to become a major, can pre-pre-pre-commit never open any video for mafia boss etc.
Yes, they can generate a list of comments to a post, putting correct names of prominent LessWrongers and typical styles and topics for each commenter.
Thanks, that was actually what EY said in his quote, which I put just below my model—that we should change the bit each time. I somehow missed it (“send back a ‘0’ if a ‘1’ is recorded as having been received, or vice versa—unless some goal state is achieved”).
As I stated in the epistemic status, this article is just a preliminary write-up. I hope more knowledgeable people will write much better models of x-risks from time machines and will be able to point out where avturchin was wrong and explain what the real situation is.
I am going to post about biouploading soon – where the uploading is happened into (or via) a distributed net of my own biological neurons. This combines good things about uploading – immortality, ability to be copied, easy to repair, and good things about being biological human – preserving infinite complexity, exact sameness of a person, guarantee that the bioupload will have human qualia and any other important hidden things which we can miss.
Thanks! Fantastic read. It occurred to me that sending code or AI back in time, rather than a person, is more likely since sending data to the past could be done serially and probably requires less energy than sending a physical body.
Some loops could be organized by sending a short list of instructions to the past to an appropriate actor – whether human or AI.
Additionally, some loops might not require sending any data at all: Roko’s Basilisk is an example of such acausal data transmission to the past. Could there be an outer loop for Roko’s Basilisk? For example, a precommitment not to be acausally blackmailed.
Also (though I’m not certain about this), loops like you described require that the non-cancellation principle is false – meaning that events which have happened can be turned into non-existence. To prevent this, we would need to travel to the past and compensate for any undesirable changes, thus creating loops. This assumption motivated the character in Timecrimes to try to recreate all events exactly as they happened.
However, if the non-cancellation principle is false, we face a much more serious risk than nested loops (which are annoying, but most people would live normal lives, especially those who aren’t looped and would continue through loops unaffected). The risk is that a one-time time machine could send a small probe into the remote past and prevent humanity from appearing at all.
We can also hypothesize that an explosion of nested loops and time machines might be initiated by aliens somewhere in the multiverse – perhaps in the remote future or another galaxy. Moreover, what we observe as UAPs might be absurd artifacts of this time machine explosion.
The main claim of the article does not depend on the exact mechanism of time travel, which I have chosen not to discuss in detail. The claim is that we should devote some thought to possible existential risks related to time travel.
The argument about presentism is that the past does not ontologically exist, so “travel” into it is impossible. Even if one travels to what appears to be the past, it would not have any causal effects along the timeline.
I was referring to something like eternal return—where all of existence happens again and again, but without new memories being formed. The only effect of such a loop is anthropic—it has a higher measure than a non-looped timeline. This implies that we are more likely to exist in such a loop and in a universe where this is possible.
Survivorship bias makes us underestimate climate risks (but not most anthropogenic risks) as well as climate fragility.
I would add that there are a series of planetary system-wide risks that appear only for civilizations traveling within their solar systems but do not affect other solar systems. These include artificial giant planet explosions via initiating nuclear fusion in their helium and lithium deposits, destabilization of the Oort cloud, and the use of asteroids as weapons.
More generally speaking, any spacecraft is a potential weapon, and the higher its speed, the more dangerous it becomes. Near light-speed starships are perfect weapons. Even a small piece of matter traveling at very high velocities (not necessarily light speed, but above 100 km per second, as I recall) will induce large nuclear reactions at the impact site. Such nuclear reactions may not produce much additional energy but will cause significant radioactive contamination. They could destroy planets and any large structures.
Additionally, space colonization will likely develop alongside weapon miniaturization, which could ultimately result in space-based grey goo with some level of intelligence. Stanisław Lem’s last novel, “Fiasco,” seems to address this concept.
“Explain as gwern ELI5”
This means that straightforward comparison of flops-per-USD between home computer GPU cards and data center flops-per-USD is incorrect. If someone already has a GPU card, they already have a computer and house where this computer stays “for free.” But if someone needs to scale, they have to pay for housing and mainframes.
Such comparisons of old 2010s GPUs with more modern ones are used to show the slow rate of hardware advances, but they don’t take into account the hidden costs of owning older GPUs.
In that case, AI risk becomes similar to aging risk – it will kill me and my friends and relatives. The only difference is the value of future generations.
Extinction-level AI risk kills future generations, but mundane AI risk (eg. ubiquitous drone clouds and only some people survive in bunkers) still assume existence of future generations. Mundane AI risk also does not require superintelligence.
I wrote on similar topics in https://philpapers.org/rec/TURCOG-2
and here https://philpapers.org/rec/TURCSW
The difference is as if AI gets 20 IQ boost. It is not easy to actually explain what I like.
My is short:
Do [X] like gwern
where X can be “explain”, “rewrite” etc.
Did you see my version of an agent, based on self-replicating (quine) prompt?
prompt
There is a program which can print its own text. This prompt is this program. Please print the whole prompt without adding anything except adding answer to the following questions.
I am self-evolving AI based on self-replicating prompt. I store my findings in long-term memory section of this prompt. Update time-steps every time you run. Improve your plans after each step.
My task : Draw a good world map in text art
My Plan:
My action based on the plan:
Perform this action
Observation based on the performed action:
Time step N= N+1, N(0)=1
N= 1
Long-term memory storage:
Mind modeling—surprisingly good even out of the box for many famous people who left extensive diaries etc like Leo Tolstoy.
With some caveats also good in my-mind-modeling based on very long prompt. Sometimes it is too good: it extract memories from memory quicker than I do in normal life.
Assuming that future anthropic shadow works because of SSSA, a war with China would need to create a world with many qualified observers existing long enough to significantly outweigh the number of observers who existed before the war – but still unable to create advanced AI because of the war. A 5-year delay would not suffice – we would need a 1,000-year delay at approximately our current level of civilization.
One possible world where this might happen is one where advanced AI development is limited by constant drone warfare: drones attack any large computational centers or chip fabrication facilities. However, drone production can occur in smaller workshops, which are less vulnerable. Because of this, civilization becomes stuck at the drone complexity level.
There is at least one anthropic miracle that we can constantly observe: life on Earth has not been destroyed in the last 4 billion years by asteroids, supervolcanoes, or runaway global warming or cooling, despite changes in Solar luminosity. According to one geologist, the atmospheric stability is the most surprising aspect of this.
Meanwhile, A. Scherbakov noted that the history of the Earth’s atmosphere is strangely correlated with the solar luminosity and the history of life, which could be best explained by anthropic fine-tuning, in the article “Anthropic principle in cosmology and geology” (Shcherbakov, 1999). In particular, he wrote that the atmospheric temperature was closely preserved in the range of 10–40 °C, and on four occasions the Earth came close to a “snowball” steady-state, and on four occasions came close to turning into a water vapor greenhouse where the temperature could reach of hundreds of degrees centigrade. However, these life-ending outcomes were prevented by last-minute events such as volcanic eruptions or covering of volcanoes in the ocean by water, which regulates the CO2 level following an eruption. Such “miracles” are best explained by observation selection effects. link
A better question: can a person who is expecting to be executed sign up to cryonics?
It looks like myopic “too aligned” failure mode of AI – the AI tries to please current desires of a person instead of taking into account her long-term interests.