Retired software engineer with a love of knowledge and disinterest in dead philosophers.
NickH
Karma: 40
There’s a difference between being unable to express your reasons and expressing incoherent reasons. The former is legitimate debate, whereas the latter is not. You can’t, in good conscience, fall back on “that’s what the gods want”.
The physical simulation will not actively resist you changing the parameters/properties. AGI will.
So if I can get a protected group, G, to support some view, X, that I support, then any attack on X supporters will magically become a hate crime against G? Surely this is problematic.
I think most people have positive views about some/most humans (and consequently about alignment) because they are implicitly factoring in their mortality. Would you feel safe picking a human that you thought was good and giving them a pill that gave them superintelligence? Maybe. Would you feel safe giving that same person a pill that made them both superintelligent AND immortal? I know I wouldn’t trust me with that. An AGI/SGI would be potentially immortal and would know it. For that reason alone I would never trust it no matter how well I thought it seemed aligned in the short term (and compared to an immortal, any human timescale is short term).
I would respond to that question with: “How are you coping with the certainty that you, and everyone you ever knew or cared about or who cares about you, will be dead in a hundred years or so”? (And before many peoples estimate of AI doom). The simple answer is that we did not evolve to be able to truly feel that kind of thing and for good reason.
It’s good to see that this does at least mention the problem with influencing the world over long time periods but it still misses the key human blind spot: Humans are not really capable of thinking of humanity over long time periods. Humans think 100 years or 1,000 years is an eternity when, for a potentially immortal entity, 1,000,000 years is almost indistinguishable from 100. A good thought experiment is to imagine that aliens come down and give us a single pill that will make a single human super intelligent AND immortal. Suppose we set up a special training facility to train a group of children, from birth, to be the recipient of the pill. Would you ever feel certain that giving one of those children the pill was safe? I wouldn’t. I certainly think that you’d be foolish to give it to me. Why is there no discussion about restricting the time frame that AGIs are allowed to consider?
I saw an, apparently relevant, video about AI generated music that claimed to be able to detect it by splitting it into its constituent tracks—It turns out that the tools for doing this (which use AI) work well with human music that was actually created from mixing individual tracks but badly for AI generated music (when you listen to the individual tracks they are obviously “wrong”). This is clearly because the AI does not (currently) create music by building it up from individual tracks (although clearly it could be made to do this). Instead it somehow synthesises the whole thing at once—It appears that AI images are similar in that they are not built up from individual components, like fingers. This does suggest that a way to better identify AI images is to have s/w identify the location of the skeletal joints in an image and check whether they can be mapped onto a model of an actual skeleton without distortion.
In a general discussion of ethics your replies are very sensible. When discussing AI safety, and, in particular P(doom), they are not. Your analogy does not work. It is effectively saying trying to prevent AI from killing us all by blocking its access to the internet with a password is better than not using a password, but an AI that is a threat to us will not be stopped by a password and neither will it be stopped by an imperfect heuristic. If we don’t have 100% certainty, we should not build it.
You are arguing that it is tractable to have predictable positive long term effects using something that is known to be imperfect (heuristic ethics). For that to make sense you would have to justify why small imperfections cannot possibly grow into large problems. It’s like saying that because you believe that you only have a small flaw in your computer security nobody could ever break in and steal all of your data. This wouldn’t be true even if you knew what the flaw was and, with heuristic ethics, you don’t even know that.
This is totally misguided. If heuristics worked 100% of the time they wouldn’t be rules of thumb, they’d be rules of nature. We only have to be wrong once for AI to kill us.
I invest in US assets myself but not because of any faith in the US, in fact the opposite—Firstly it’s like a fund manager investing into a known bubble—You know it’s going to burst but, if it doesn’t burst in the next year or so you cannot afford the short/medium term loss relative to your competitors and, secondly, If the US crashes it takes down the rest of the world with it and is probably the first to recover so you might as well stick with it. None of this translates to faith in US, AI, governance. Your mention of positive-sum deals is particularly strange since, if the world has learned one thing about Trump, it is that he sees the world, almost exclusively, in zero sum terms.
Stating the obvious here but Trump has ensured that the USG cannot credibly guarantee anything at all and hence this is a non-starter for foreign governments.
Evangelicals either hate people or don’t actually believe that their god is loving and compassionate. Proof:
If god DOES NOT love people who have never heard about him or only heard about him from people who did a bad job of “explaining” him then he is NOT loving or compassionate, but, in this case it would be caring and compassionate for evangelicals to evangelise in order to try to get people onto gods good side because the consequences of being on his bad side are BAD.
If god DOES love people who have never heard about him or only heard about him from people who did a bad job of “explaining” him then evangelicals who also love people and are compassionate and caring should actively AVOID spreading the word of god as this will necessarily deprive some people of the “get out of jail free” card (see 1)
I think it does. Certainly the way that I would do it would be to create a world map from memory, then overlay the coordinate grid, then just answer by looking it up. You answers will be as good as your map is. I believe that the LLMs most likely work from wikipedia articles—There are a lot of location pages with coordinates in wikipedia
Humans would draw a map of the world from memory, overlay the grid and look up the reference. I doubt that the LLMs do this. It would be interesting to see whether they can actually relate the images to the coordinates—I suspect not i.e. I expect that they could draw a good map, with gridlines from training data but would be unable to relate the visual to the question. I expect that they are working from coordinates in wikipedia articles and the CIA website. Another suggestion would be to ask the LLM to draw a map of the world with non-standard grid lines e.g. every 7 degrees
This is interesting but, in some ways, it should have been obvious—Everything we say, says something about who we are and what we say is influenced by what we know in ways that we are not conscious of. Magicians use subconscious forcing all the time along the lines of “Think of a number between 1 and 10”
It’s worse than that, (1) is just the big problem for philosophy hiding behind circular definitions and multiple undefined words to obscure the big issue. We have “progress” and “values” and “good” used as if they are independent when, even a cursory examination, shows that they are not and they are, in fact, “defined” using circular reasoning—We have made progress because our values are better (more good) now than they were in the past. How do we know that our values are better now than in the past? Because we have made progress. We believe that we are better now than we were in the past because, for example, we do not discriminate against homsexuals. But the people in the past would argue that they were better than us for exactly the same reason. I believe that the root cause of the illusion of moral progress is no more, and no less, than the the obvious observation that winners always get to write the history and always paint themselves in the best light. We are the winners. We defeated the “us” of the past and now “we” get to say that we are morally superior because the people of the past are not here to argue with us and, even if they were, we would destroy them with our superior technology.
Complacency! Try visiting a country that hasn’t had generations of peaceful democracy—They take these issues much more seriously. The optics of this are heavily skewed by the US, who had, essentialy, the same religion and politics for centuries and so they believe that none of the serious stuff consequences could ever happen to them.
People have very different ideas about when “the future” is, but everyone is really thinking extreme short term on an evolutionary scale. Once upon a time our ancestors were Trilobites (or something just as unlike us). If you could have asked one of those trilobites what they thought of a future in which all trilobites were gone and had evolved into us, I don’t think they would have been happy with that. Our future light cone is not going to be dominated by creatures we would recognise as human. It may be dominated by creatures “evolved” from us or maybe from our uploaded consciousness, or maybe by “inhuman” AI, but it’s not going to be Star Trek or any other Sci-Fi series you have seen. Given that future, the argument for minimising P(doom) at the cost of reducing P(good stuff for me and mine in my lifetime) looks pretty weak. If I am old and have no children, it looks terrible. Roll the dice.
Morale is a group thing. Humans are a social animal. Low morale implies that there is either something wrong with the group or something wrong with me. Either would be an existential threat in the ancestral environment. If there’s something wrong with me then low morale should incentivise me to change just as pain incentivises me to stop doing whatever I am are doing that causes me pain. If there’s something wrong with the group then, in the ancestral environment, I’m in deep s**t and there’s not much I can do about it apart from leave the group and set out on my own, which is almost certainly fatal. This may well be the cause of people sinking into low morale apathy—the equivalent of a sick animal wandering off to die.