Thanks Chris, but I think you linked to the wrong thing there, I can’t see your post in the last 3 years of your history either!
HunterJay
Karma: 30
Aye, I agree it is not a solution to avoiding power seeking, only that there may be a slightly easier target to hit if we can relax as many constraints on alignment as possible.
Will check them out, thank you.
Minimum Viable Alignment
I like this story pitch! It seems pretty compelling to me, and a clever way to show the difficulty and stakes of alignment. Good luck!
I am curious if this has changed over the past 6 years since you posted this comment. Do you get the feeling that high profile researchers have shifted even further towards Xrisk concern, or if they continue with the same views as in 2016? Thanks!
I took the original sentence to mean something like “we use things external to the brain to compute things too”, which is clearly true. Writing stuff down to work through a problem is clearly doing some computation outside of the brain, for example. The confusion comes from where you draw the line—if I’m just wiggling my fingers without holding a pen, does that still count as computing stuff outside the brain? Do you count the spinal cord as part of the brain? What about the peripheral nervous system? What about information that’s computed by the outside environment and presented to my eyes? I think it’s kind of an arbitrary line, but reading this charitably their statement can still be correct, I think.
(No response from me on the rest of your points, just wanted to back the author up a bit on this one.)
I really enjoy’d this writeup! I’d probably even go a little bit on the pessimistic (optimistic?) side, and bet that almost all of this technology would be possible with only a few years of development from today—though I suppose it might be 20 if development doesn’t start/ramp up in earnest.
Thanks!
That’s a good point, I’ll write up a brief explanation/disclaimer and put it in as a footnote.
Typo corrected, thanks for that.
I agree, it’s more likely for the first AGI to begin on a supercomputer at a well-funding institution. If you like, you can imagine that this AGI is not the first, but simply the first not effectively boxed. Maybe its programmer simply implemented a leaked algorithm that was developed and previously run by a large project, but changed the goal and tweaked the safeties.
In any case, it’s a story, not a prediction, and I’d defend it as plausible in that context. Any story has a thousand assumptions and events that, in sequence, reduce the probability to infinitesimal. I’m just trying to give a sense of what a takeoff could be like when there is a large hardware overhang and no safety—both of which have only a small-ish chance of occurring. That in mind, do you have an alternative suggestion for the title?
In the spirit of doing low status things with high potential, I am working on a site to allow commissioning of fringe erotica and am looking to hire a second web developer.
The idea is to build a place where people with niche interests can post bounties for specific stories. In my time moonlighting as an erotic author, I’ve noticed a lack of good sites to do freelance erotic writing work. I think the reason for this is that most people think porn is icky, so despite there being a huge market for extremely niche content, the platforms currently available are pretty abysmal. This is our opportunity.
We’re currently in beta and can pay a junior-level wage, with senior-level equity. If you’re a web developer who wants to join a fully remote startup, please reach out.
As with my other startups, I began this project with the goal of generating wealth to put towards alignment research.