After doing some more research I am not sure that it’s always possible to derive a public key knowing only the evaluation key; it seems to depend on the actual FHE scheme.
So the trilemma may be unaffected by this hypothetical. There’s also the question of duplication vs. unification for an observer that has the option to stay at base level reality or enter a homomorphically encrypted computation and whether those should be considered equivalent (enough).
To perform homomorphic operations you need the public key, and that also allows one to encrypt any new value and perform further hidden computations under that key. The private key allows decryption of the values.
I suppose you could argue that the homomorphically encrypted mind exists ala mathematical realism even if the public key is destroyed, but it would be something “outside reality” computing future states of the encrypted mind after the public key is no longer available.
It’s possible to alter a homomorphic computation in arbitrary ways without knowing the decryption key.
An omniscient observer can homomorphically encrypt a copy of themselves under the same key as the encrypted mind and run a computation of its own copy examining every aspect of the internal mental states of the subject, since they share the same key.
If there are N homomorphically encrypted minds in reality then the omniscient observer will have to create N layers of homomorphic computation in order for the innermost computation to yield the observation of all N minds’ internal states, each passed in turn to a sub-computation, and relying on the premise that homomorphically encrypted minds are conscious for the inner observer to be conscious.
The question is whether encoding all of reality and homomorphically encrypting it necessarily causes a loss of fidelity. If yes, one of the trilemmas still holds. Otherwise there’s no trilemma and the innermost omniscient observer sees all of reality and all internal mental states. I’d argue that for a meaningful omniscient observer to exist it is the case that encoding of reality (into the mind of the observer) must not result in a loss of fidelity. There could be some edge-cases where a polynomial amount of fidelity is lost due to the homomorphic encryption that wouldn’t be lost to the “natural” omniscient observer’s encoding of reality, but I think it stretches the practical definition of omniscience for an observer.
I think the argument extends to physics but the polynomial loss of fidelity is more likely to cause problems in a very homomorphically-encrypted-mind-populated universe.
If the argument is that 1e9 very smart humans at 100x speed yield safe superintelligent outcomes “soon”, how is that very different from “pause everything now and let N very smart humans figure out safe, aligned superintelligent outcomes over an extended timeframe, on the order of 1e11/N days/years”? It’s just time-shifting safe human work.
I also worry that billions of very smart super-fast humans might decide to try building superintelligence directly, as fast as they can, so that we get doom in months instead of years
I didn’t know Corona had a beach vibe, but I have seen a number of Corona ads. Does this mean advertising doesn’t have much effect on me (beyond name-brand recognition)? I think I associate Corona more with tacos than anything else.
Go is in that weird spot that chess was for ~decades[0] where the best humans could beat some of the best engines but it was getting harder, until Rybka, Stockfish and others closed the door and continued far beyond human ability (measured by ELO). AlphaGo is barely a decade old, and it does seem like progress on games has taken a decade or more to become fully superhuman from the first challenges to human world champions.
I think it is the case that when the deep learning approach Stockfish used became superhuman it very quickly became dramatically superhuman within a few years/months despite years of earlier work and slow growth. There seems to be explosive gains in capability at ~years-long intervals.
Similarly, most capability gains in math, essay writing, and writing code have periods of explosive growth and periods of slow growth. So far none of the trends in these three at human level have more than ~5 years of history; earlier systems could provide rudimentary functionality but were significantly constrained by specially designed harnesses or environments they operated within as opposed to the generality of LLMs.
So I think the phrase “do X at all” really applies to the general way that deep learning has allowed ML to do X with significantly fewer or no harnesses. Constraint search and expert systems have been around for decades with slow improvements but deep learning is not a direct offshoot of those approaches and so not quite the same “AI” doing X to compare the progress over time.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/xtjstq/the_strongest_engines_over_time/
It’s the level of detail that’s the real risk. Sora or Veo would generate motion video and audio, bringing even more false life into the counterfactual. People get emotionally attached to characters in movies; imagine trying not to form attachments to interactive videos of your own counterfactual children who call you “Mom” or “Dad”. Your dead friend or relative could emotionally-believably talk to you from beyond the grave.
That’s the kind of thing only the ultra-rich could have conceived of having someone fabricate for them in the past, and it would have come with at least some checks and balances. Now kids in elementary school can necromance their dead parent or whatever.
Realistically, I think it will become “normal” to have your counterfactual worlds easily accessible in this way and the new generations will simply adapt and develop internal safeguards against getting exploited by it, much like we learn how to deal with realistic dreams. I honestly don’t know about the rest of us hitting it later in adulthood.
I’m curious what happens if you try on a different suspension of disbelief; imagine peoples’ lives if they lack only growth mindset and not any other moral or agentic abilities.
I find quite a bit of difference in behavior between smart people who believe things about what and who they are, and the people who believe things about how they have acted, can change, and may act in the future.
Smart people without growth mindset often rabbithole into things like legalistic religions and overcoming what they perceive as unalterable weaknesses inherent to their nature, or try to maximize their perceived inherent strengths, ignoring development of new skills and abilities. Introspection is like a checklist of how well they’ve done against a platonic ideal, with maybe some planning to avoid unwinnable situations.
Smart people with growth mindset usually focus on therapy (e.g. understanding their patterns of behavior and the outcomes and how they might alter those patterns in a persistent way), learning new skills and behaviors, possibly some mind-altering substances, and interacting with a lot of diverse other people to understand how they might change or acquire new beliefs and behaviors. Introspection is an exploration of possibilities and personal history and values and how to begin winning in previously unwinnable situations.
Less smart people tend to follow similar patterns, but slower or needing more guidance to proceed.
I think that we have both the bitter lesson that transformers will continue to gain capabilities with scale and also that there are optimizations that will apply to intelligent models generally and orthogonally to computing scale. The latter details seem dangerous to publicize widely in case we happen to be in the world of a hardware overhang allowing AGI or RSI (which I think could be achieved easier/sooner by a “narrower” coding agent and then leading rapidly to AGI) on smaller-than-datacenter clusters of machines today.
There’s quite a difference between a couple frontier labs achieving AGI internally and the whole internet being able to achieve AGI on a llama/deepseek base model, for example.
I think MAIM might only convince people who have p(doom) < 1%.
If we’re at the point that we can convincingly say to each other “this AGI we’re building together can not be used to harm you” we are way closer to p(doom) == 0 than we are right now, IMHO.
Otherwise why would the U.S. or China promising to do AGI research in a MAIMable way be any more convincing than the strategies at alignment that would first be necessary to trust AGI at all? The risk is “anyone gets AGI” until p(doom) is low, and at that point I am unsure if any particular country would choose to forego AGI if it didn’t perfectly align politically because, again, for one random blob of humanness to convince an alien-minded AGI to preserve aspects of the random blob it cares about, it’s likely to encompass 99.9% of what other human blobs care about.
Where that leaves us is that if U.S. and China have very different estimates of p(doom) they are unlikely to cooperate at all in making AGI progress legible to each other. And if they have similar p(doom) they either cooperate strongly to prevent all AGI or cooperate to build the same thing, very roughly.
I have significant misgivings about the comparison with MAD which relies on overwhelming destructive response being available and thus renders a debilitating first-strike being unavailable.
With AGI a first strike seems both likely to succeed and predicted in advance by several folks in several ways (full takeover, pivotal act, singleton outcome) whereas only a few (Von Neumann) argued for a first strike before the USSR obtained nuclear weapons, with no arguments I am aware of after they did.
If an AGI takeover is likely to trigger MAD itself then that is a separate and potentially interesting line of reasoning, but I don’t see the inherent teeth in MAIM. If countries are in a cold war rush to AGI then the most well-funded and covert attempt will achieve AGI first and likely initiate a first strike that circumvents MAD itself through new technological capabilities.
For Golang:
Writing unit test cases is almost automatic (Claude 3.5 and now Claude 3.7). It’s good at the specific test setup necessary and the odd syntax/boilerplate that some testing libraries require. At least 5x speedup.
Autosuggestions (Cursor) are net positive, probably 2x-5x speedup depending on how familiar I am with the codebase.
I think people have a lot of trouble envisioning or imagining what the end of humanity and our ecosystem would be like. We have disaster movies; many of them almost end humanity and leave some spark of hope or perspective at the end. Instead, imagine any disaster movie scenario where it ends somewhere before that moment and instead there’s just a dead, empty planet left to be disassembled or abandoned. The perspective is that history and ecology have been stripped away from the ball of rock without a trace remaining because none of it mattered enough to a superintelligence to preserve even a record of it. Emotionally, it should feel like burning treasured family photographs and keepsakes.
Also potentially relevant article that my friend found recently: under-mask beard-covers https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35662553/
I think it might be as simple as not making threats against agents with compatible values.
In all of Yudkowsky’s fiction the distinction between threats (and unilateral actions removing consent from another party) and deterrence comes down to incompatible values.
The baby-eating aliens are denied access to a significant portion of the universe (a unilateral harm to them) over irreconcilable values differences. Harry Potter transfigures Voldemort away semi-permanently non-consensually because of irreconcilable values differences. Carissa and friends deny many of the gods their desired utility over value conflict.
Planecrash fleshes out the metamorality with the presumed external simulators who only enumerate the worlds satisfying enough of their values, with the negative-utilitarians having probably the strongest “threat” acausally by being more selective.
Cooperation happens where there is at least some overlap in values and so some gains from trade to be made. If there are no possible mutual gains from trade then the rational action is to defect at a per-agent cost up to the absolute value of the negative utility of letting the opposing agent achieve their own utility. Not quite a threat, but a reality about irreconcilable values.
It looks like recursive self-improvement is here for the base case, at least. It will be interesting to see if anyone uses solely Phi-4 to pretrain a more capable model.
“What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?”
There are three doors. Two are labeled Monday, and one is labeled Tuesday. Behind each door is a Sleeping Beauty. In a waiting room, many (finite) more Beauties are waiting; every time a Beauty is anesthetized, a coin is flipped and taped to their forehead with clear tape. You open all three doors, the Beauties wake up, and you ask the three Beauties The Question. Then they are anesthetized, the doors are shut, and any Beauties with a Heads showing on their foreheads or behind a Tuesday door are wheeled away after the coin is removed from their forehead. The Beauty with a Tails on their forehead behind the Monday door is wheeled behind the Tuesday door. Two new Beauties are wheeled behind the two Monday doors, one with Heads and one with Tails. The experiment repeats.
You observe that Tuesday Beauties always have a Tails taped to their forehead. You always observe that one Monday Beauty has a Tails showing, and one has a Heads showing. You also observe that every Beauty says 1⁄3, matching the ratio of Heads to Tails showing, and it is apparent that they can’t see the coins taped to their own or each other’s foreheads or the door they are behind. Every Tails Beauty is questioned twice. Every Heads Beauty is questioned once. You can see all the steps as they happen, there is no trick, every coin flip has 1⁄2 probability for Heads.
There is eventually a queue of Waiting Sleeping Beauties with all-Heads or all-Tails showing and a new Beauty must be anesthetized with a new coin; the queue length changes over time and sometimes switches face. You can stop the experiment when the queue is empty, as a random walk guarantees to happen eventually, if you like tying up loose ends.
I think consequentialism is the robust framework for achieving goals and I think my top goal is the flourishing of (most, the ones compatible with me) human values.
That uses consequentialism as the ultimate lever to move the world but refers to consequences that are (almost) entirely the results of our biology-driven thinking and desiring and existing, at least for now.
On a recent re-read I think I understand a bit better.
It’s true that individual humans can’t realistically avoid giving in to threats or even accidentally threatening others, but institutions can commit to it as a legible position, e.g. “we will not negotiate with terrorists”.
If an irrational entity has the ability to unilaterally destroy the universe then it’s probably going to get destroyed anyway, so it makes more sense to follow through on precommitments in the real world and in counterfactuals to coordinate with actually rational agents.
I think the key is that if we all went MAD legibly at the same time then things would work out a lot better. And refusing to give in to threats doesn’t necessarily mean destruction, it can be as simple as collectively refusing to pay ransomware attackers even though it is currently more expensive, in the expectation that eventually it will be less expensive.