LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Just discovered an absolute gem. Thank you so much.

Similar here: calendar notifications, special place on the table (phone, keys, etc.).

Also, "inbox" for important documents that need to be filed, which I process once in a few months.

First some points of agreement:

• I like that you're focusing on neglected approaches. Not much on the technical side seems promising to me, so I like to see exploration.
  • Skimming through your suggestions, I think I'm most keen on human augmentation related approaches - hopefully the kind that focuses on higher quality decision-making and direction finding, rather than simply faster throughput.
• I think outreach to Republicans / conservatives, and working across political lines is important, and I'm glad that people are actively thinking about this.
• I do buy the [Trump's high variance is helpful here] argument. It's far from a principled analysis, but I can more easily imagine [Trump does correct thing] than [Harris does correct thing]. (mainly since I expect the bar on "correct thing" to be high so that it needs variance)
  • I'm certainly making no implicit "...but the Democrats would have been great..." claim below.

That said, various of the ideas you outline above seem to be founded on likely-to-be-false assumptions.
Insofar as you're aiming for a strategy that provides broadly correct information to policymakers, this seems undesirable - particularly where you may be setting up unrealistic expectations.
 

Highlights of the below:

1. Telling policymakers that we don't need to slow down seems negative.
   1. I don't think you've made any valid argument that not needing to slow down is likely. (of course it'd be convenient)
2. A negative [alignment-in-the-required-sense tax] seems implausible. (see below)
   1. (I don't think it even makes sense in the sense that "alignment tax" was originally meant^[1], but if "negative tax" gets conservatives listening, I'm all for it!)
3. I think it's great for people to consider convenient possibilities (e.g. those where economic incentives work for us) in some detail, even where they're highly unlikely. Whether they're actually 0.25% or 25% likely isn't too important here.
   1. Once we're talking about policy advocacy, their probability is important.

More details:

A conservative approach to AI alignment doesn’t require slowing progress, avoiding open sourcing etc. Alignment and innovation are mutually necessary, not mutually exclusive: if alignment R&D indeed makes systems more useful and capable, then investing in alignment is investing in US tech leadership.

Here and in the case for a negative alignment tax [LW · GW], I think you're:

1. Using a too-low-resolution picture of "alignment" and "alignment research".
   1. This makes it too easy to slip between ideas like:
      1. Some alignment research has property x
      2. All alignment research has property x
      3. A [sufficient for scalable alignment solution] subset of alignment research has property x
      4. A [sufficient for scalable alignment solution] subset of alignment research that we're likely to complete has property x
   2. An argument that requires (iv) but only justifies (i) doesn't accomplish much. (we need something like (iv) for alignment tax arguments)
2. Failing to distinguish between:
   1. Alignment := Behaves acceptably for now, as far as we can see.
   2. Alignment := [some mildly stronger version of 'alignment']
   3. Alignment := notkilleveryoneism

In particular, there'll naturally be some crossover between [set of research that's helpful for alignment] and [set of research that leads to innovation and capability advances] - but alone this says very little.

What we'd need is something like:

• Optimizing efficiently for innovation in a way that incorporates various alignment-flavored lines of research gets us sufficient notkilleveryoneism progress before any unrecoverable catastrophe with high probability.

It'd be lovely if something like this were true - it'd be great if we could leverage economic incentives to push towards sufficient-for-long-term-safety research progress. However, the above statement seems near-certainly false to me. I'd be (genuinely!) interested in a version of that statement you'd endorse at >5% probability.

The rest of that paragraph seems broadly reasonable, but I don't see how you get to "doesn't require slowing progress".

On "negative alignment taxes":

First, a point that relates to the 'alignment' disambiguation above.
In the case for a negative alignment tax [LW · GW], you offer the following quote as support for alignment/capability synergy:

...Behaving in an aligned fashion is just another capability... (Anthropic quote from Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

However, the capability is [ability to behave in an aligned fashion], and not [tendency to actually behave in an aligned fashion] (granted, Anthropic didn't word things precisely here). The latter is a propensity, not a capability.

What we need for scalable alignment is the propensity part: no-one sensible is suggesting that superintelligences wouldn't have the ability to behave in an aligned fashion. The [behavior-consistent-with-alignment]-capability synergy exists while a major challenge is for systems to be able to behave desirably.

Once capabilities are autonomous-x-risk-level, the major challenge will be to get them to actually exhibit robustly aligned behavior. At that point there'll be no reason to expect the synergy - and so no basis to expect a negative or low alignment tax where it matters.

On things like "Cooperative/prosocial AI systems [LW · GW]", I'd note that hits-based exploration is great - but please don't expect it to work (and that "if implemented into AI systems in the right ways" is almost all of the problem). 
 

On this basis, it seems to me that the conservative-friendly case you've presented doesn't stand up at all (to be clear, I'm not critiquing the broader claim that outreach and cooperation are desirable):

• We don't have a basis to expect negative (or even low) alignment tax.
  • (unclear so far that we'll achieve non-infinite alignment tax for autonomous x-risk relevant cases)
• It's highly likely that we do need to slow advancement, and will need serious regulation.

Given our lack of precise understanding of the risks, we'll likely have to choose between [overly restrictive regulation] and [dangerously lax regulation] - we don't have the understanding to draw the line in precisely the right place. (completely agree that for non-frontier systems, it's best to go with little regulation)

I'd prefer a strategy that includes [policymakers are made aware of hard truths] somewhere.
I don't think we're in a world where sufficient measures are convenient.

It's unsurprising that conservatives are receptive to quite a bit "when coupled with ideas around negative alignment taxes and increased economic competitiveness" - but this just seems like wishful thinking and poor expectation management to me.
 

Similarly, I don't see a compelling case for:

that is, where alignment techniques are discovered that render systems more capable by virtue of their alignment properties. It seems quite safe to bet that significant positive alignment taxes simply will not be tolerated by the incoming federal Republican-led government—the attractor state of more capable AI will simply be too strong. 

Of course this is true by default - in worlds where decision-makers continue not to appreciate the scale of the problem, they'll stick to their standard approaches. However, conditional on their understanding the situation, and understanding that at least so far we have not discovered techniques through which some alignment/capability synergy keeps us safe, this is much less obvious.

I have to imagine that there is some level of perceived x-risk that snaps politicians out of their default mode.
I'd bet on [Republicans tolerate significant positive alignment taxes] over [alignment research leads to a negative alignment tax on autonomous-x-risk-capable systems] at at least ten to one odds (though I'm not clear how to operationalize the latter).
Republicans are more flexible than reality :).

1. ^{^}

   As I understand the term, alignment tax compares [lowest cost for us to train a system with some capability level] against [lowest cost for us to train an aligned system with some capability level]. Systems in the second category are also in the first category, so zero tax is the lower bound.
   
   This seems a better definition, since it focuses on the outputs, and there's no need to handwave about what counts as an alignment-flavored training technique: it's just [...any system...] vs [...aligned system...].
   
   Separately, I'm not crazy about the term: it can suggests to new people that we know how to scalably align systems at all. Talking about "lowering the alignment tax" from infinity strikes me as an odd picture.

Yes, I agree that there is this difference in few examples I gave, but I don't agree that this difference is crucial.

Even if the agent puts max effort to keep its utility function stable over time, there is no guarantee it will not change. Future is unpredictable. There are unknown unknowns. And effect of this fact is both:

1. it is true that instrumental goals can mutate
2. it is true that terminal goal can mutate

It seems you agree with 1st. I don't see the reason you don't agree with 2nd.

It's predictably censored on CCP-sensitive topics.

(In a different chat.) After the second question, it typed two lines (something like "There have been several attempts to compare Winnie the Pooh to a public individual...") and then overwrote it with "Sorry...".

My biggest concern with intent alignment of AGI is that we might run into the issue of AGI being used for something like a totalitarian control over everyone who doesn't control AGI. It becomes a source of nearly unlimited power. The first company to create intent-aligned AGI (probably ASI at that point) can use it to stop all other attempts at building AGI. At that point, we'd have a handful of people wielding incredible power. It seems unlikely that they'd just decide to give it up. I think your "big if" is a really, really big if.

But other than that, your plan definitely seems workable. It avoids the problem of value drift, but unfortunately it incurs the cost dealing with power-hungry humans.

For the sake of clarity, let's discuss expected utility functions, which I mentioned above (or "pragmatism functions", say) from strategies to numbers, as opposed to utility functions from world-states to numbers, in order to make it clear that the actual utility function of an agent doesn't change.

That's another one of the reasons that I wasn't persuaded by your new example; in your new example, the agent believes that its future self will still be trying to create paperclips (same terminal goal) and will be better at that thanks to its greater knowledge (different instrumental goals although it doesn't know what), but in your old example, the agent believes that its future self will be trying to destroy paperclips (opposite terminal goal). There's a difference between having the rule-of-thumb "my current list of incidental goals might be incomplete, I should keep an eye out for things that are incidentally good" and having the rule-of-thumb "I shouldn't try to protect my terminal goal from changes". The whole point of those rules of thumb is to fulfill the terminal goal, but the second rule of thumb is actively harmful to that.

I do think that the first rule of thumb would be prudent for an agent to have, to one extent or another, to be clear.

I just think that - stepping back from the new example, and revisiting the old example, which seems much more clear-cut - the agent wouldn't tolerate a change in its utility function, because that's bad according to its current utility function. This doesn't apply to the new example because the pragmatism function is a different thing that the agent is trying to improve (and thus change).
(I find myself again emphasizing the difference between terminal and instrumental. I think it's important to keep in mind that difference.)

It could be really interesting how the employemnt looks before and after the camp. 

Okay, but you're not comparing like with like. Terminator 2 is an action movie, and I agree that action movies have gotten better since the 1960s. But in terms of sci-fi concepts introduced per second, I would suspect 2001 has more. Some movies from the 1990s that are more straight sci-fi would be Gattaca or Contact, but I don't think many people would consider these categorically better than 2001.

One thing I’d be bearish on is visibility into the latest methods being used for frontier AI methods, which would downstream reduce the relevance of alignment research except for the research within the manhattan-like project itself. This is already somewhat true of the big labs eg. methods used for o1 like models. However, there is still some visibility in the form of system cards and reports which hint at the methods. When the primary intention is racing ahead of China, I doubt there will be reports discussing methods used for frontier systems.