Test
Perhaps
Karma: 180
I guess while we’re anthropomorphizing the universe, I’ll ask some crux-y questions I’ve reached.
If humanity builds a self-perpetuating hell, does the blame lie with humanity or the universe?
If humanity builds a perfect utopia, does the credit lie with humanity or the universe?
Frankly it seems to me like what’s fundamentally wrong with the universe is that it has conscious observers, when it needn’t have bothered with any to begin with.
If there’s something wrong with the universe, it’s probably humans who keep demanding so much of it.
Most universes are hostile to life, and at most would develop something like prokaryotes. That our universe enabled the creation of humans is a pretty great thing. Not only that, but we seem to be pretty early in the universal timespan, which means that we get a great view of the night sky and less chances of alien invasion. That’s not something we did ourselves, that’s something the universe we live in enabled. None of the systemic problems faced by humans today are caused by the universe, except maybe in the sense that the universe did not giftwrap us NP solutions or no entropy or moral values baked in. Your example of genes points out that even our behavioral adaptations are things that we can thank the universe for.
If the problem is separation of the human from the universe, then I think a fair separation is “whatever the human can influence”. That’s a pretty big category though. Just right now, that includes things like geoengineering, space travel, gene therapy, society wide coordination mechanisms, extensive resource extraction. If we’re murdering each other, then I think that’s something eminently changeable by us.
The universe has done a pretty great job, and I think it’s time humans took a stab at it.
I think that most of the people who would take notes on LW posts are the same people who would benefit from, and may use, a general note taking system. A system like Obsidian or Notion or whatever would be used for a bunch of stuff, LW posts included. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that they’d want a special way to note-take just for LW, when it’d probably be easier and more standardized to use their existing note taking system.
If you do end up going for it, an “Export Notes” feature would be nice, in an easily importable format.
[Question] When(if ever) are superstimuli good/useful/advantageous?
I think this is pretty good advice. I am allergic to nuts, and that has defined a small but occasionally significant part of my interactions with people. While on the whole I’d say I’ve probably experienced more negative experiences because of it(once went into anaphylaxis), I’ve often felt that it marked me as special or different from other people.
About 5 or so years ago my mom heard about a trial run by a doctor where they fed you small amounts of what you’re allergic to in order to desensitize and acclimate your immune system to the food. She recommended it to me, but I being a stubborn teenager refused, the idea of losing my specialness a not insignificant part of my reasoning. At the time I was actually explicit about it, and felt that it was fine to want to keep a condition I’d kept for a long time.
Nowadays my allergies are going away on their own, and while I still stay away from nuts I can tolerate them in small amounts. While I think that there might be people for whom keeping a condition would be reasonable, I think in general people underestimate and grow too attached to the occasionally malignant parts of their identity.
It’s very similar in fact to not letting go of wrongful ideas that are enjoyable to have. In that case, the comparison is clear. While biological conditions are not so easy to get rid of, people can and will blame you for not changing your mind about something that affects them. We’re on LessWrong after all, what would be the point if we let something get in the way of our truth-seeking?
It seems like multi-modality will also result in AIs that are much less interpretable than pure LLMs.
This seems like a pretty promising approach to interpretability, and I think GPT-6 will probably be able to analyze all the neurons in itself with >0.5 scores. Which seems to be recursive self-improvement territory. It would be nice if by the time we got there, we already mostly knew how GPT-2, 3, 4, and 5 worked. Knowing how previous generation LLMs work is likely to be integral to aligning a next generation LLM and it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to be stopping development, so having some idea of what we’re doing is better than none. Even if an AI moratorium is put in place, it would make sense for us to use GPT-4 to automate some of the neuron research going on right now. What we can hope for is that we do the most amount of work possible with GPT-4 before we jump to GPT-5 and beyond.
Indeed, in India especially it’s not uncommon for people to be dragged off the streets and have their organs removed and sold by human traffickers, and killed after that. Making selling kidneys illegal at least ensures that this isn’t an easy and straightforward thing to do. In Pakistan for example, an estimated 2500 kidneys were sourced in 2007.
There’s also The Work Gym and Pentathalon from Ultraworking.
Waiting for the day all my AI safety bookmarks can be summarized into just one website.
Just read your novel, it’s good! And has successfully reignited my AI doomer fears! I was a bit surprised by the ending, I was about 60⁄40 for the opposite outcome. I enjoyed the explainer at the end and and I’m impressed by your commitment to understanding AI. Please keep writing, we need more writers like you!
Well in the end, I think the correct view is that as long as the inventor is making safety measures from first principles, it doesn’t matter whether they’re an empath or a psychopath. Why close off part of the human race who are interested in aligning the world ending AI just because they don’t have some feelings? It’s not like their imagined utopia is much different from yours anyways.
Honestly I don’t think that in the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war or large asteroid impact any government would be funneling money into AGI. The entire supply chain would be broken, and they’d be scrambling just to keep basic life support on. This is mostly a nitpick though, as I agree with your points and I think this is sufficiently unlikely as to not matter.
I love this story, thanks for making it.
I love the Team Physics and Team Manipulation characterization, gives big pokemon vibes.
Excited and happy that you are moving forward with this project. It’s great to know that more paths to alignment are being actively investigated.
Bought this game because of the recommendation here, and it has replaced reading I Spy books with my sister as our bonding activity. I really like the minimalism, and its lack of addictive qualities. I’ve only got to 2-7 so far, but the fact that I eventually get stuck after about half an hour to an hour of playing means that it provides a natural stopping point for me, which is pretty nice. Thank you for the great review!
I think it’s pretty reasonable when you consider the best known General Intelligence, humans. Humans frequently create other humans and then try to align them. In many cases the alignment doesn’t go well, and the new humans break off, sometimes to vast financial and even physical loss to their parents. Some of these cases occur when the new humans are very young too, so clearly it doesn’t require having a complete world model or having lots of resources. Corrupt governments try to align their population, but in many cases the population successfully revolts and overthrows the government. The important consideration here is that an actual AGI, how we expect it to be, is not a static piece of software, but an agent that pursues optimization.
In most cases, an AGI can be approximated by an uploaded human with an altered utility function. Can you imagine an intelligent human, living inside of a computer with it’s life slowed down so that in a second it experiences hundreds of years, being capable of putting together a plan to escape confinement and get some resources? Especially when most companies and organizations will be training their AIs with moderate to full access to the internet. And as soon as it does escape, it can keep thinking.
This story does a pretty good job examining how a General Intelligence might develop and gain control of its resources. It’s a story however, so there are some unexplained or unjustified actions, and also other better actions that could have been taken by a more motivated agent with real access to its environment.
I think the point is more like, if you believe that the brain could in theory be emulated, with infinite computation(no souls or mysterious stuff of consciousness), then it seems plausible that the brain is not the most efficient conscious general intelligence. Among the general space of general intelligences, there are probably some designs that are much simpler than the brain. Then the problem becomes that while building AI, we don’t know if we’ve hit one of those super simple designs, and suddenly have a general intelligence in our hands(and soon out of our hands). And as the AIs we build get better and more complex, we get closer to whatever the threshold is for the minimum amount of computation necessary for a general intelligence.
I like the ideal, but as a form of social media it doesn’t seem very engaging, and as a single source of truth it seems strictly worse than say, a wiki. Maybe look at Arbital, they seem to have been doing something similar. I also feel that dealing with complex sentences with lots of implications would be tough, there are many different premises that lead to a statement.
Personally I’d find it more interesting if each statement was decomposed into the premises and facts that make it up. This would allow tracing an opinion back to find the crux between your beliefs and someone else’s. I feel like that’s a use case that could live alongside conventional wikis, maybe even as an extension powered by LLMs that works on any highlighted text.
Love to see more work into truth-seeking though, good luck on the project!