LessWrong 2.0 Reader

While I'm not a believer in the scaling has died meme yet, I'm glad you do have a plan for what happens if AI scaling does stop.

But your story lacks any mechanism for accountability if the King is behaving badly. It is important to design systems of power that do not rely on the people in power being good and right, but instead make it so that if they behave badly, they are held to account. I don't think I have to explain why incentives and accountability matter for how the powerful wield their powers. The central thing I am talking about is basic measures for accountability, of which I consider very high up to be engaging with criticism, dialogue, and argument (as is somewhat natural given my background philosophy from growing up on LessWrong).

As far as I recall as I write this, I do not believe that the CEOs of the companies building potentially omnicidal machines are committed to any particular plan that public intellectuals are debating and defending, nor have they any commitment mechanism to any such plan that has been put out publicly. The plan is something of their own choosing, the details of which are almost entirely inaccessible by those whose lives are being risked. If you believe otherwise I request you provide links, I would welcome specifics.

I don't think that's a valid inference.

On the topic of ffmpeg - additional shoutout to Handbrake, which is essentially ffmpeg with a GUI on top. 

One needs only to read 4 or so papers on category theory applied to AI to understand the problem. None of them share a common foundation on what type of constructions to use or formalize in category theory. The core issue is that category theory is a general language for all of mathematics, and as commonly used just exponentially increase the search space for useful mathematical ideas.

I want to be wrong about this, but I have yet to find category theory uniquely useful outside of some subdomains of pure math.

One and a half years later it seems like AI tools are able to sort of help humans with very rote programming work (e.g. changing or writing code to accomplish a simple goal, implementing versions of things that are well-known to the AI like a textbook algorithm or a browser form to enter data, answering documentation-like questions about a system) but aren't much help yet on the more skilled labor parts of software engineering.

I was expecting earlier choices of foraging location to have a much stronger impact, and mistook some of the randomness for affects of earlier choices. In retrospect it would have been better to spend longer exploreing various possibilites rather than settling on an exploit strategy so soon. Adding an explicit target was a big improvement as it gave some idea of "how good a strategy" we should be searching for.

Some other examples:

1. Agency and embeddedness are fundamentally at odds with each other. Decision theory and physics are incompatible approaches to world-modeling, with each making assumptions that are inconsistent with the other. Attempting to build mathematical models of embedding agency will fail as an attempt to understand advanced AI behavior.
2. Reductionism is false. If modeling a large-scale system in terms of the exact behavior of its small-scale components would take longer than the age of the universe, or would require a universe-sized computer, the large-scale system isn't explicable in terms of small-scale interactions even in principle. The Sequences are incorrect to describe non-reductionism as ontological realism about large-scale entities [LW · GW] -- the former doesn't inherently imply the latter.
3. Relatedly, nothing is ontologically primitive. Not even elementary particles: if, for example, you took away the mass of an electron, it would cease to be an electron and become something else. The properties of those particles, as well, depend on having fields to interact with. And if a field couldn't interact with anything, could it still be said to exist?
4. Ontology creates axiology and axiology creates ontology. We aren't born with fully formed utility functions in our heads telling us what we do and don't value. Instead, we have to explore and model the world over time, forming opinions along the way about what things and properties we prefer. And in turn, our preferences guide our exploration of the world and the models we form of what we experience. Classical game theory, with its predefined sets of choices and payoffs, only has narrow applicability, since such contrived setups are only rarely close approximations to the scenarios we find ourselves in.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to put editor's notes after likely typos, like:

but we want [editor's note: Elon likely meant “won’t” here] do any contract or agree to “evangelize”.

Yes, it sounds that he put too much stock into Andrej's paper-counting argument, and then even left the board because he didn't want to be associated with a failing company?