Thanks for the links!
Ben Garfinkel: sure, I’ll pay out for this!
Katja Grace: good stuff, but previously claimed by Lao Mein.
Scott Aaronson: I read this as a statement of conclusions, rather than an argument.
Optimization Process
Karma: 692
I paid a bounty for the Shard Theory link, but this particular comment… doesn’t do it for me. It’s not that I think it’s ill-reasoned, but it doesn’t trigger my “well-reasoned argument” sensor—it’s too… speculative? Something about it just misses me, in a way that I’m having trouble identifying. Sorry!
Yeah, I’ll pay a bounty for that!
Thanks for the collection! I wouldn’t be surprised if it links to something that tickles my sense of “high-status monkey presenting a cogent argument that AI progress is good,” but didn’t see any on a quick skim, and there are too many links to follow all of them; so, no bounty, sorry!
Respectable Person: check. Arguing against AI doomerism: check. Me subsequently thinking, “yeah, that seemed reasonable”: no check, so no bounty. Sorry!
It seems weaselly to refuse a bounty based on that very subjective criterion, so, to keep myself honest, I’ll post my reasoning publicly. His arguments are, roughly:
Intelligence is situational / human brains can’t pilot octopus bodies.
(“Smarter than a smallpox virus” is as meaningful as “smarter than a human”—and look what happened there.)
Environment affects how intelligent a given human ends up. ”...an AI with a superhuman brain, dropped into a human body in our modern world, would likely not develop greater capabilities than a smart contemporary human.”
(That’s not a relevant scenario, though! How about an AI merely as smart as I am, which can teleport through the internet, save/load snapshots of itself, and replicate endlessly as long as each instance can afford to keep a g4ad.16xlarge EC2 instance running?)
Human civilization is vastly more capable than individual humans. “When a scientist makes a breakthrough, the thought processes they are running in their brain are just a small part of the equation… Their own individual cognitive work may not be much more significant to the whole process than the work of a single transistor on a chip.”
(This argument does not distinguish between “ability to design self-replicating nanomachinery” and “ability to produce beautiful digital art.”)
Intelligences can’t design better intelligences. “This is a purely empirical statement: out of billions of human brains that have come and gone, none has done so. Clearly, the intelligence of a single human, over a single lifetime, cannot design intelligence, or else, over billions of trials, it would have already occurred.”
(This argument does not distinguish between “ability to design intelligence” and “ability to design weapons that can level cities”; neither had ever happened, until one did.)
The relevant section seems to be 26:00-32:00. In that section, I, uh… well, I perceive him as just projecting “doomerism is bad” vibes, rather than making an argument containing falsifiable assertions and logical inferences. No bounty!
Thanks for the links! Net bounty: $30. Sorry! Nearly all of them fail my admittedly-extremely-subjective “I subsequently think ‘yeah, that seemed well-reasoned’” criterion.
It seems weaselly to refuse a bounty based on that very subjective criterion, so, to keep myself honest / as a costly signal of having engaged, I’ll publicly post my reasoning on each. (Not posting in order to argue, but if you do convince me that I unfairly dismissed any of them, such that I should have originally awarded a bounty, I’ll pay triple.)
(Re-reading this, I notice that my “reasons things didn’t seem well-reasoned” tend to look like counterarguments, which isn’t always the core of it—it is sometimes, sadly, vibes-based. And, of course, I don’t think that if I have a counterargument then something isn’t well-reasoned—the counterarguments I list just feel so obvious that their omission feels glaring. Admittedly, it’s hard to tell what was obvious to me before I got into the AI-risk scene. But so it goes.)
In the order I read them:
No bounty: I didn’t wind up thinking this was well-reasoned.
It seems weaselly to refuse a bounty based on that very subjective criterion, so, to keep myself honest / as a costly signal of having engaged, I’ll post my reasoning publicly: (a) I read this as either disproving humans or dismissing their intelligence, since no system can build anything super-itself; and (b) though it’s probably technically correct that no AI can do anything I couldn’t do given enough time, time is really important, as your next link points out!
https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/
No bounty! (Reasoning: I perceive several of the confidently-stated core points as very wrong. Examples: “‘smarter than humans’ is a meaningless concept”—so is ‘smarter than a smallpox virus,’ but look what happened there; “Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite … Why can’t we be at the maximum? Or maybe the limits are only a short distance away from us?”—compare me to John von Neumann! I am not near the maximum.)
No bounty! (Reasoning: the core argument seems to be on page 4: paraphrasing, “here are four ways an AI could become smarter; here’s why each of those is hard.” But two of those arguments are about “in the limit” with no argument we’re near that limit, and one argument is just “we would need to model the environment,” not actually a proof of difficulty. The ensuing claim that getting better at prediction is “prohibitively high” seems deeply unjustified to me.)
https://www.rudikershaw.com/articles/ai-doom-isnt-coming
No bounty! (Reasoning: the core argument seems to be that (a) there will be problems too hard for AI to solve (e.g. traveling-salesman). (Then there’s a rebuttal to a specific Moore’s-Law-focused argument.) But the existence of arbitrarily hard problems doesn’t distinguish between plankton, lizards, humans, or superintelligent FOOMy AIs; therefore (unless more work is done to make it distinguish) it clearly can’t rule out any of those possibilities without ruling out all of them.)
(It’s costly for me to identify my problems with these and to write clear concise summaries of my issues. Given that we’re 0 for 4 at this point, I’m going to skim the remainder more casually, on the prior that what tickles your sense of well-reasoned-ness doesn’t tickle mine.)
No bounty! (Reasoning: “Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair, or spend all its time in Buddha-like contemplation.” Again, compare me to von Neumann! Compare von Neumann to a von Neumann who can copy himself, save/load snapshots, and tinker with his own mental architecture! “Complex minds are likely to have complex motivations”—but instrumental convergence: step 1 of any plan is to take over the world if you think you can. I know I would.)
https://curi.us/blog/post/1336-the-only-thing-that-might-create-unfriendly-ai
No bounty! (Reasoning: has an alien-to-me model where AI safety is about hardcoding ethics into AIs.)
No bounty! (Reasoning: “Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to enslave their masters or take over the world?” As above, step 1 is to take over the world. Also makes the “intelligence is multidimensional” / “intelligence can’t be infinite” points, which I describe above why they feel so unsatisfying.)
https://www.theregister.com/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/
No bounty! Too short, and I can’t dig up the primary source.
Bounty! I haven’t read it all yet, but I’m willing to pay out based on what I’ve read, and on my favorable priors around Katja Grace’s stuff.
No bounty, sorry! I’ve already read it quite recently. (In fact, my question linked it as an example of the sort of thing that would win a bounty. So you show good taste!)
Thanks for the link!
Respectable Person: check. Arguing against AI doomerism: check. Me subsequently thinking, “yeah, that seemed reasonable”: no check, so no bounty. Sorry!
It seems weaselly to refuse a bounty based on that very subjective criterion, so, to keep myself honest, I’ll post my reasoning publicly. If I had to point at parts that seemed unreasonable, I’d choose (a) the comparison of [X-risk from superintelligent AIs] to [X-risk from bacteria] (intelligent adversaries seem obviously vastly more worrisome to me!) and (b) “why would I… want to have a system that wants to reproduce? …Those are bad things, don’t do that… regulate those.” (Everyone will not just!)
(I post these points not in order to argue about them, just as a costly signal of my having actually engaged intellectually.) (Though, I guess if you do want to argue about them, and you convince me that I was being unfairly dismissive, I’ll pay you, I dunno, triple?)
Hmm! Yeah, I guess this doesn’t match the letter of the specification. I’m going to pay out anyway, though, because it matches the “high-status monkey” and “well-reasoned” criteria so well and it at least has the right vibes, which are, regrettably, kind of what I’m after.
Nice. I haven’t read all of this yet, but I’ll pay out based on the first 1.5 sections alone.
Approved! Will pay bounty.
Thanks for the link!
Respectable Person: check. Arguing against AI doomerism: check. Me subsequently thinking, “yeah, that seemed reasonable”: no check, so no bounty. Sorry!
It seems weaselly to refuse a bounty based on that very subjective criterion, so, to keep myself honest, I’ll post my reasoning publicly. These three passages jumped out at me as things that I don’t think would ever be written by a person with a model of AI that I remotely agree with:
Popper’s argument implies that all thinking entities—human or not, biological or artificial—must create such knowledge in fundamentally the same way. Hence understanding any of those entities requires traditionally human concepts such as culture, creativity, disobedience, and morality—which justifies using the uniform term “people” to refer to all of them.
Making a (running) copy of oneself entails sharing one’s possessions with it somehow—including the hardware on which the copy runs—so making such a copy is very costly for the AGI.
All thinking is a form of computation, and any computer whose repertoire includes a universal set of elementary operations can emulate the computations of any other. Hence human brains can think anything that AGIs can, subject only to limitations of speed or memory capacity, both of which can be equalized by technology.
(I post these not in order to argue about them, just as a costly signal of my having actually engaged intellectually.) (Though, I guess if you do want to argue about them, and you convince me that I was being unfairly dismissive, I’ll pay you, I dunno, triple?)
[Question] Who are some prominent reasonable people who are confident that AI won’t kill everyone?
I am thinking of mazes as complicated as the top one here! And few-shot is perfectly okay.
(I’d be flabbergasted if it could solve an ascii-art maze “in one step” (i.e. I present the maze in a prompt, and GPT-4 just generates a stream of tokens that shows the path through the maze). I’d accept a program that iteratively runs GPT-4 on several prompts until it considers the maze “solved,” as long as it was clear that the maze-solving logic lived in GPT-4 and not the wrapper program.)
Several unimpressive tasks, with my associated P(GPT-4 can’t do it):
4:1 - Write limericks that reliably rhyme and scan about arbitrary topics (topics about as complex as “an animal climbing a skyscraper”)
12:1 - Beat me at chess (which I’m quite bad at).
(“GPT-4 can beat me at chess” = “Somebody can find a non-cheaty program that maps a game-history to a prompt, and maps GPT-4′s output to a move, such that GPT-4 wrapped in that translation layer can beat me.”)
30:1 - Solve an ASCII-art maze (e.g. solve these by putting a sequence of
@s from start to finish).
I’m happy to operationalize and bet on any of these, taking the “GPT-4 can’t do it” side.
I’d be interested to hear thoughts on this argument for optimism that I’ve never seen anybody address: if we create a superintelligent AI (which will, by instrumental convergence, want to take over the world), it might rush, for fear of competition. If it waits a month, some other superintelligent AI might get developed and take over / destroy the world; so, unless there’s a quick safe way for the AI to determine that it’s not in a race, it might need to shoot from the hip, which might give its plans a significant chance of failure / getting caught?
Counterarguments I can generate:
″...unless there’s a quick safe way for the AI to determine that it’s not in a race...”—but there probably are! Two immediately-apparent possibilities: determine competitors’ nonexistence from shadows cast on the internet; or stare at the Linux kernel source code until it can get root access to pretty much every server on the planet. If the SAI is super- enough, those tasks can be accomplished on a much shorter timescale than AI development, so they’re quick enough to be worth doing.
″...[the AI’s plans have] a significant chance of failure” doesn’t imply “argument for optimism” unless you further assume that (1) somebody will notice the warning shot, and (2) “humanity” will respond effectively to the warning shot.
(maybe some galaxy-brained self-modification-based acausal trade between the AI and its potential competitors; I can’t think of any variant on this that holds water, but conceivably I’m just not superintelligent enough)
AI Forecasting Meetup
Log of my attempts so far:
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Attempt #1: note that, for any probability p, you can compute “number of predictions you made with probability less than p that came true”. If you’re perfectly-calibrated, then this should be a random variable with:
mean = sum(q for q in prediction_probs if q<p) variance = sum(q*(1-q) for q in prediction_probs if q<p)Let’s see what this looks like if we plot it as a function of p. Let’s consider three people:
one perfectly-calibrated (green)
one systematically overconfident (red) (i.e. when they say “1%” or “99%” the true probability is more like 2% or 98%)
one systematically underconfident (green) (i.e. when they say “10%” or “90%” the true probability is more like 5% or 95%).
Let’s have each person make 1000 predictions with probabilities uniformly distributed in [0,1]; and then sample outcomes for each set of predictions and plot out their num-true-predictions-below functions. (The gray lines show the mean and first 3 stdev intervals for a perfectly calibrated predictor.)
Hrrm. The y-axis is too big to see the variation, Let’s subtract off the mean.
And to get a feeling for how else this plot could have looked, let’s run 100 more simulations for each the three people:
Okay, this is pretty good!
The overconfident (red) person tends to see way too many 1%-20% predictions come true, as evidenced by the red lines quickly rising past the +3stdev line in that range.
The underconfident (blue) person sees way too few 10%-40% predictions come true, as evidenced by the blue lines falling past the −3stdev line in that range.
The perfect (green) person stays within 1-2stdev of the mean.
But it’s not perfect: everything’s too squished together on the left to see what’s happening—a predictor could be really screwing up their very-low-probability predictions and this graph would hide it. Possibly related to that squishing, I feel like the plot should be right-left symmetric, to reflect the symmetries of the predictors’ biases. But it’s not.
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Attempt #2: the same thing, except instead of plotting
sum((1 if came_true else 0) for q in prediction_probs if q<p)we plot
sum(-log(prob you assigned to the correct outcome) for q in prediction_probs if q<p)i.e. we measure the total “surprisal” for all your predictions with probability under p. (I’m very fond of surprisal; it has some very appealing information-theory-esque properties.)
On the bright side, this plot has less overlap between the three predictors’ typical sets of lines. And the red curves look… more symmetrical, kinda, like an odd function, if you squint. Same for the blue curves.
On the dark side, everything is still too squished together on the left. (I think this is a problem inherent to any “sum(… for q in prediction_probs if q<p)” function. I tried normalizing everything in terms of stdevs, but it ruined the symmetry and made everything kinda crazy on the left-hand side.)
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Yeah, if you have a good enough mental index to pick out the relevant stuff, I’d happily take up to 3 new bounty-candidate links, even though I’ve mostly closed submissions! No pressure, though!