Doing AI Safety research for ethical reasons.
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Martín Soto
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My understanding from discussions with the authors (but please correct me):
This post is less about pragmatically analyzing which particular heuristics work best for ideal or non-ideal agents in common environments (assuming a background conception of normativity), and more about the philosophical underpinnings of normativity itself.
Maybe it’s easiest if I explain what this post grows out of:
There seems to be a widespread vibe amongst rationalists that “one-boxing in Newcomb is objectively better, because you simply obtain more money, that is, you simply win”. This vibe is no coincidence, since Eliezer and Nate, in some of their writing about FDT, use language strongly implying that decision theory A is objectively better than decision theory B because it just wins more. Unfortunately, this intuitive notion of winning cannot actually be made into a philosophically valid objective metric. (In more detail, a precise definition of winning is already decision-theory-complete, so these arguments beg the question.) This point is well-known in philosophical academia, and was already succinctly explained in a post by Caspar (which the authors mention).
In the current post, the authors extend a similar philosophical critique to other widespread uses of winning, or background assumptions about rationality. For example, some people say that “winning is about not playing dominated strategies”… and the authors agree about avoiding dominated strategies, but point out that this is not too action-guiding, because it is consistent with many policies. Or also, some people say that “rationality is about implementing the heuristics that have worked well in the past, and/or you think will lead to good future performance”… but these utterances hide other philosophical assumptions, like assuming the same mechanisms are at play in the past and future, which are especially tenuous for big problems like x-risk. Thus, vague references to winning aren’t enough to completely pin down and justify behavior. Instead, we fundamentally need additional constraints or principles about normativity, what the authors call non-pragmatic principles. Of course, these principles cannot themselves be justified in terms of past performance (which would lead to circularity), so they instead need to be taken as normative axioms (just like we need ethical axioms, because ought cannot be derived from is).
GEB
Like Andrew, I don’t see strong reasons to believe that near-term loss-of-control accounts for more x-risk than medium-term multi-polar “going out with a whimper”. This is partly due to thinking oversight of near-term AI might be technically easy. I think Andrew also thought along those lines: an intelligence explosion is possible, but relatively easy to prevent if people are scared enough, and they probably will be. Although I do have lower probabilities than him, and some different views on AI conflict. Interested in your take @Daniel Kokotajlo
You know that old thing where people solipsistically optimizing for hedonism are actually less happy? (relative to people who have a more long-term goal related to the external world) You know, “Whoever seeks God always finds happiness, but whoever seeks happiness doesn’t always find God”.
My anecdotal experience says this is very true. But why?
One explanation could be in the direction of what Eliezer says here (inadvertently rewarding your brain for suboptimal behavior will get you depressed):
Someone with a goal has an easier time getting out of local minima, because it is very obvious those local minima are suboptimal for the goal. For example, you get out of bed even when the bed feels nice. Whenever the ocasional micro-breakdown happens (like feeling a bit down), you power through for your goal anyway (micro-dosing suffering as a consequence), so your brain learns that micro-breakdowns only ever lead to bad immediate sensations and fixes them fast.
Someone whose only objective is the satisfaction of their own appetites and desires has a harder time reasoning themselves out of local optima. Sure, getting out of bed allows me to do stuff that I like. But those feel distant now, and the bed now feels comparably nice… You are now comparing apples to apples (unlike someone with an external goal), and sometimes you might choose the local optimum. When the ocasional micro-breakdown happens, you are more willing to try to soften the blow and take care of the present sensation (instead of getting over the bump quickly), which rewards in the wrong direction.
Another possibly related dynamic: When your objective is satisfying your desires, you pay more conscious attention to your desires, and this probably creates more desires, leading to more unsatisfied desires (which is way more important than the amount of satisfied desires?).
hahah yeah but the only point here is: it’s easier to credibly commit to a threat if executing the threat is cheap for you. And this is simply not too interesting a decision-theoretic point, just one more obvious pragmatic consideration to throw into the bag. The story even makes it sound like “Vader will always be in a better position”, or “it’s obvious that Leia shouldn’t give in to Tarkin but should give in to Vader”, and that’s not true. Even though Tarkin loses more from executing the threat than Vader, the only thing that matters for Leia is how credible the threat is. So if Tarkin had any additional way to make his commitment credible (like program the computer to destroy Alderaan if the base location is not revealed), then there would be no difference between Tarkin and Vader. The fact that “Tarkin might constantly reconsider his decision even after claiming to commit” seems like a contingent state of affairs of human brains (or certain human brains in certain situations), not something important in the grander scheme of decision theory.
The Information: OpenAI shows ‘Strawberry’ to feds, races to launch it
The only decision-theoretic points that I could see this story making are pretty boring, at least to me.
That is: in this case at least it seems like there’s concrete reason to believe we can have some cake and eat some too.
I disagree with this framing. Sure, if you have 5 different cakes, you can eat some and have some. But for any particular cake, you can’t do both. Similarly, if you face 5 (or infinitely many) identical decision problems, you can choose to be updateful in some of them (thus obtaining useful Value of Information, that increases your utility in some worlds), and updateless in others (thus obtaining useful strategic coherence, that increases your utility in other worlds). The fundamental dichotomy remains as sharp, and it’s misleading to imply we can surmount it. It’s great to discuss, given this dichotomy, which trade-offs we humans are more comfortable making. But I’ve felt this was obscured in many relevant conversations.
This content-work seems primarily aimed at discovering and navigating actual problems similar to the decision-theoretic examples I’m using in my arguments. I’m more interested in gaining insights about what sorts of AI designs humans should implement. IE, the specific decision problem I’m interested in doing work to help navigate is the tiling problem.
My point is that the theoretical work you are shooting for is so general that it’s closer to “what sorts of AI designs (priors and decision theories) should always be implemented”, rather than “what sorts of AI designs should humans in particular, in this particular environment, implement”.
And I think we won’t gain insights on the former, because there are no general solutions, due to fundamental trade-offs (“no-free-lunchs”).
I think we could gain many insights on the former, but that the methods better fit for that are less formal/theoretical and way messier/”eye-balling”/iterating.
Excellent explanation, congratulations! Sad I’ll have to miss the discussion.
Interlocutor: Neither option is plausible. If you update, you’re not dynamically consistent, and you face an incentive to modify into updatelessness. If you bound cross-branch entanglements in the prior, you need to explain why reality itself also bounds such entanglements, or else you’re simply advising people to be delusional.
You found yourself a very nice interlocutor. I think we truly cannot have our cake and eat it: either you update, making you susceptible to infohazards=traps (if they exist, and they might exist), or you don’t, making you entrenched forever. I think we need to stop dancing around this fact, recognize that a fully-general solution in the formalism is not possible, and instead look into the details of our particular case. Sure, our environment might be adversarially bad, traps might be everywhere. But under this uncertainty, which ways do we think are best to recognize and prevent traps (while updating on other things). This is kind of studying and predicting generalization: given my past observations, where do I think I will suddenly fall out of distribution (into a trap)?
Me: I’m not sure if that’s exactly the condition, but at least it motivates the idea that there’s some condition differentiating when we should be updateful vs updateless. I think uncertainty about “our own beliefs” is subtly wrong; it seems more like uncertainty about which beliefs we endorse.
This was very though-provoking, but unfortunately I still think this crashes head-on with the realization that, a priori and in full generality, we can’t differentiate between safe and unsafe updates. Indeed, why would we expect that no one will punish us by updating on “our own beliefs” or “which beliefs I endorse”? After all, that’s just one more part of reality (without a clear boundary separating it).
It sounds like you are correctly explaining that our choice of prior will be, in some important sense, arbitrary: we can’t know the correct one in advance, we always have to rely on extrapolating contingent past observations.
But then, it seems like your reaction is still hoping that we can have our cake and eat it: “I will remain uncertain about which beliefs I endorse, and only later will I update on the fact that I am in this or that reality. If I’m in the Infinite Counterlogical Mugging… then I will just eventually change my prior because I noticed I’m in the bad world!”. But then again, why would we think this update is safe? That’s just not being updateless, and losing out on the strategic gains from not updating.Since a solution doesn’t exist in full generality, I think we should pivot to more concrete work related to the “content” (our particular human priors and our particular environment) instead of the “formalism”. For example:
Conceptual or empirical work on which are the robust and safe ways to extract information from humans (Suddenly LLM pre-training becomes safety work)
Conceptual or empirical work on which actions or reasoning are more likely to unearth traps under different assumptions (although this work could unearth traps)
Compilation or observation of properties of our environment (our physical reality) that could have some weak signal on which kinds of moves are safe
Unavoidably, this will involve some philosophical / almost-ethical reflection about which worlds we care about and which ones we are willing to give up.
I think Nesov had some similar idea about “agents deferring to a (logically) far-away algorithm-contract Z to avoid miscoordination”, although I never understood it completely, nor think that idea can solve miscoordination in the abstract (only, possibly, be a nice pragmatic way to bootstrap coordination from agents who are already sufficiently nice).
EDIT 2: UDT is usually prone to commitment races because it thinks of each agent in a conflict as separately making commitments earlier in logical time. But focusing on symmetric commitments gets rid of this problem.
Hate to always be that guy, but if you are assuming all agents will only engage in symmetric commitments, then you are assuming commitment races away. In actuality, it is possible for a (meta-) commitment race to happen about “whether I only engage in symmetric commitments”.
I don’t understand your point here, explain?
Say there are 5 different veils of ignorance (priors) that most minds consider Schelling (you could try to argue there will be exactly one, but I don’t see why).
If everyone simply accepted exactly the same one, then yes, lots of nice things would happen and you wouldn’t get catastrophically inefficient conflict.
But every one of these 5 priors will have different outcomes when it is implemented by everyone. For example, maybe in prior 3 agent A is slightly better off and agent B is slightly worse off.
So you need to give me a reason why a commitment race doesn’t recur in the level of “choosing which of the 5 priors everyone should implement”. That is, maybe A will make a very early commitment to only every implement prior 3. As always, this is rational if A thinks the others will react a certain way (give in to the threat and implement 3). And I don’t have a reason to expect agents not to have such priors (although I agree they are slightly less likely than more common-sensical priors).
That is, as always, the commitment races problem doesn’t have a general solution on paper. You need to get into the details of our multi-verse and our agents to argue that they won’t have these crazy priors and will coordinate well.
This seems to be claiming that in some multiverses, the gains to powerful agents from being hawkish outweigh the losses to weak agents. But then why is this a problem? It just seems like the optimal outcome.
It seems likely that in our universe there are some agents with arbitrarily high gains-from-being-hawkish, that don’t have correspondingly arbitrarily low measure. (This is related to Pascalian reasoning, see Daniel’s sequence.) For example, someone whose utility is exponential on number of paperclips. I don’t agree that the optimal outcome (according to my ethics) is for me (who’s utility is at most linear on happy people) to turn all my resources into paperclips.
Maybe if I was a preference utilitarian biting enough bullets, this would be the case. But I just want happy people.
Nice!
Proposal 4: same as proposal 3 but each agent also obeys commitments that they would have made from behind a veil of ignorance where they didn’t yet know who they were or what their values were. From that position, they wouldn’t have wanted to do future destructive commitment races.
I don’t think this solves Commitment Races in general, because of two different considerations:
Trivially, I can say that you still have the problem when everyone needs to bootstrap a Schelling veil of ignorance.
Less trivially, even behind the most simple/Schelling veils of ignorance, I find it likely that hawkish commitments are incentivized. For example, the veil might say that you might be Powerful agent A, or Weak agent B, and if some Powerful agents have weird enough utilities (and this seems likely in a big pool of agents), hawkishly committing in case you are A will be a net-positive bet.
This might still mostly solve Commitment Races in our particular multi-verse. I have intuitions both for and against this bootstrapping being possible. I’d be interested to hear yours.
I have no idea whether Turing’s original motivation was this one (not that it matters much). But I agree that if we take time and judge expertise to the extreme we get what you say, and that current LLMs don’t pass that. Heck, even a trick as simple as asking for a positional / visual task (something like ARC AGI, even if completely text-based) would suffice. But I still would expect academics to be able to produce a pretty interesting paper on weaker versions of the test.
Why isn’t there yet a paper in Nature or Science called simply “LLMs pass the Turing Test”?
I know we’re kind of past that, and now we understand LLMs can be good at some things while bad at others. And the Turing Test is mainly interesting for its historical significance, not as the most informative test to run on AI. And I’m not even completely sure how much current LLMs pass the Turing Test (it will depend massively on the details of your Turing Test).
But my model of academia predicts that, by now, some senior ML academics would have paired up with some senior “running-experiments-on-humans-and-doing-science-on-the-results” academics (and possibly some labs), and put out an extremely exhaustive and high quality paper actually running a good Turing Test. If anything so that the community can coordinate around it, and make recent advancements more scientifically legible.
It’s not either like the sole value of the paper would be publicity and legibility. There are many important questions around how good LLMs are at passing as humans for deployment. And I’m not thinking either of something as shallow as “prompt GPT4 in a certain way”, but rather “work with the labs to actually optimize models for passing the test” (but of course don’t release them), which could be interesting for LLM science.
The only thing I’ve found is this lower quality paper.
My best guess is that this project does already exist, but it took >1 year, and is now undergoing ~2 years of slow revisions or whatever (although I’d still be surprised they haven’t been able to put something out sooner?).
It’s also possible that labs don’t want this kind of research/publicity (regardless of whether they are running similar experiments internally). Or deem it too risky to create such human-looking models, even if they wouldn’t release them. But I don’t think either of those is the case. And even if it was, the academics could still do some semblance of it through prompting alone, and probably it would already pass some versions of the Turing Test. (Now they have open-source models capable enough to do it, but that’s more recent.)
Thanks Jonas!
A way to combine the two worlds might be to run it in video games or similar where you already have players
Oh my, we have converged back on Critch’s original idea for Encultured AI (not anymore, now it’s health-tech).
The need for multi-agent experiments
You’re right! I had mistaken the derivative for the original function.
Probably this slip happened because I was also thinking of the following:
Embedded learning can’t ever be modelled as taking such an (origin-agnostic) derivative.
When in ML we take the gradient in the loss landscape, we are literally taking (or approximating) a counterfactual: “If my algorithm was a bit more like this, would I have performed better in this environment? (For example, would my prediction have been closer to the real next token)”
But in embedded reality there’s no way to take this counterfactual: You just have your past and present observations, and you don’t necessarily know whether you’d have obtained more or less reward had you moved your hand a bit more like this (taking the fruit to your mouth) or like that (moving it away).Of course, one way to solve this is to learn a reward model inside your brain, which can learn without any counterfactuals (just considering whether the prediction was correct, or how “close” it was for some definition of close). And then another part of the brain is trained to approximate argmaxing the reward model.
But another effect, that I’d also expect to happen, is that (either through this reward model or other means) the brain learns a “baseline of reward” (the “origin”) based on past levels of dopamine or whatever, and then reinforces things that go over that baseline, and disincentivizes those that go below (also proportionally to how far they are from the baseline). Basically the hedonic treadmill. I also think there’s some a priori argument for this helping with computational frugality, in case you change environments (and start receiving much more or much less reward).
The default explanation I’d heard for “the human brain naturally focusing on negative considerations”, or “the human body experiencing more pain than pleasure”, was that, in the ancestral environment, there were many catastrophic events to run away from, but not many incredibly positive events to run towards: having sex once is not as good as dying is bad (for inclusive genetic fitness).
But maybe there’s another, more general factor, that doesn’t rely on these environment details but rather deeper mathematical properties:
Say you are an algorithm being constantly tweaked by a learning process.
Say on input X you produce output (action) Y, leading to a good outcome (meaning, one of the outcomes the learning process likes, whatever that means). Sure, the learning process can tweak your algorithm in some way to ensure that X → Y is even more likely in the future. But even if it doesn’t, by default, next time you receive input X you will still produce Y (since the learning algorithm hasn’t changed you, and ignoring noise). You are, in some sense, already taking the correct action (or at least, an acceptably correct one).
Say on input X’ you produce output Y’, leading instead to a bad outcome. If the learning process changes nothing, next time you find X’ you’ll do the same. So the process really needs to change your algorithm right now, and can’t fall back on your existing default behavior.Of course, many other factors make it the case that such a naive story isn’t the full picture:
Maybe there’s noise, so it’s not guaranteed you behave the same on every input.
Maybe the negative tweaks make the positive behavior (on other inputs) slowly wither away (like circuit rewriting in neural networks), so you need to reinforce positive behavior for it to stick.
Maybe the learning algorithm doesn’t have a clear notion of “positive and negative”, and instead just provides in a same direction (but with different intensities) for different intensities in a scale without origin. (But this seems
very different from the current paradigm,and fundamentally wasteful.)
Still, I think I’m pointing at something real, like “on average across environments punishing failures is more valuable than reinforcing successes”.
Very cool! But I think there’s a crisper way to communicate the central point of this piece (or at least, a way that would have been more immediately transparent to me). Here it is:
Say you are going to use Process X to obtain a new Model. Process X can be as simple as “pre-train on this dataset”, or as complex as “use a bureaucracy of Model A to train a new LLM, then have Model B test it, then have Model C scaffold it into a control protocol, then have Model D produce some written arguments for the scaffold being safe, have a human read them, and if they reject delete everything”. Whatever Process X is, you have only two ways to obtain evidence that Process X has a particular property (like “safety”): looking a priori at the spec of Process X (without running it), or running (parts of) Process X and observing its outputs a posteriori. In the former case, you clearly need an argument for why this particular spec has the property. But in the latter case, you also need an argument for why observing those particular outputs ensures the property for this particular spec. (Pedantically speaking, this is just Kuhn’s theory-ladenness of observations.)
Of course, the above reasoning doesn’t rule out the possibility that the required arguments are pretty trivial to make. That’s why you summarize some well-known complications of automation, showing that the argument will not be trivial when Process X contains a lot of automation, and in fact it’d be simpler if we could do away with the automation.
It is also the case that the outputs observed from Process X might themselves be human-readable arguments. While this could indeed alleviate the burden of human argument-generation, we still need a previous (possibly simpler) argument for why “a human accepting those output arguments” actually ensures the property (especially given those arguments could be highly out-of-distribution for the human).