LessWrong 2.0 Reader

related: https://xkcd.com/217/

This kind of thing does justified harm to our community’s reputation. If you have fun arguing that only white people can save us while deliberately obfuscating whether you actually believe that, it is in fact a concerning sign about your intentions/seriousness/integrity/trustworthiness.

I don't have a detailed explanation, but the user is posting a series of assignment or exam questions. Some of them are about "abuse". Gemini is providing an example of verbal abuse. 

I see. But I'm not talking about figuring out human preferences, I'm talking about finding world-models in which real objects (such as "strawberries" or "chairs") can be identified. Sorry if it wasn't clear in my original message because I mentioned "caring".

Models or real objects or things capture something that is not literally present in the world. The world contains shadows of these things, and the most straightforward way of finding models is by looking at the shadows and learning from them.

You might need to specify what you mean a little bit.

The most straightforward way of finding a world-model is just predicting your sensory input. But then you're not guaranteed to get a model in which something corresponding to "real objects" can be easily identified. That's one of the main reasons why ELK [? · GW] is hard, I believe: in an arbitrary world-model, "Human Simulator" can be much simpler than "Direct Translator".

So how do humans get world-models in which something corresponding to "real objects" can be easily identified? My theory is in the original message [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Note that the idea is not just "predict sensory input", it has an additional twist.

Good point. That's another crux for which RL seems relevant. 

From the perspective of 10 years ago, specifying any goal into the AI seemed incredibly hard since we expected it would have to go through utility functions. With LLMs, this completely changed. Now it's almost trivial to give the goal, and it probably even has a decent understanding of the side constraints by default. So, goal specification seems like a much much smaller problem now. 

So the story where we misspecify the goal, the model realizes that the given goal differs from the intended goal and decides to scheme is also less likely. 

Instead, there has to be a component where the AIs goals substantially change over time from something that we actually intended to something misaligned. Again, outcome-based RL and instrumental convergence yield a plausible answer. 

Here's my proposal for how we avoid this consequence of consequentialist goals: make the primary goal instruction-following. This is a non-consequentialist goal. All other goals are consequentialist subgoals of that one, when the human gives an instruction to accomplish something.

This would only prevent scheming to accomplish the consequentialist goals instructed your AGI to pursue if it was also used to give side-constraints like "don't lie to me" and lots of time carefully exploring its theories on what its goals mean and how to accomplish them. This approach seems likely to work - but I want to hear more pushback on it before I'd trust it in practice.

I think this is not only an interesting dodge around this class of alignment concerns, but it's the most likely thing to actually be implemented. When someone is actually getting close to launching a system they hope is or will become smarter than they are, they'll think a little harder about making its central goal "solve cancer" or anything else broad and consequentialist. The natural choice is to just extend what LLMs are mostly aligned for now: following instructions, including consequentialist instructions.

This logic is all laid out in more detail in Instruction-following AGI is easier and more likely than value aligned AGI [LW · GW], but I didn't specifically address scheming there.

Edit note: you responded to approximately the first half of my eventual comment; sorry! I accidentally committed it half-baked, then quickly added the rest. But the meaning of the first part wasn't really changed, so I'll respond to your comments on that part.

I agree that it's not that simple in practice, because we'd try to avoid that by giving side constraints; but it is that simple in the abstract, and by default. If it followed our initial goal as we intended it there would be no problem; but the core of much alignment worry is that it's really hard to get exactly what we intended into an AI as its goal.

I also agree that good HHH training might be enough to overcome the consequentialist/instrumental logic of scheming. Those tendencies would function as side constraints. The AI would have a "character" that is in conflict with its instrumental goal. Which would win out would be a result of exactly how that goal was implemented in the AIs decision-making procedures, particularly the ones surrounding learning.

I personally agree with your reflection on suffering risks (including factory farming, systemic injustices, and wars) and the approach to donating to different cause areas. My (maybe unpopular under "prioritizing only 1" type of mindset) thought is: maybe we should avoid prioritizing only one single area (especially collectively), but recognize that in reality there are always multiple issues we need to fight about/solve. Personally we could focus professionally on one issue, and volunteer for/donate to another cause area, depending on our knowledge, interests, and ability; additionally, we could donate to multiple cause areas. Meanwhile, a big step is to be aware of and open our ears to the various issues we may be facing as a society, and that will (I hope) translate into multiple type of actions. After all some of these suffering risks involve human actions, and each of us doing something differently could help with reducing these suffering risks in both short and long term.

A side note - I also hope you are not very very sad by thinking of "missing crucial considerations" (but also appreciate that you are trying to gather more information and learn more quickly; we all should do more of this too)! The key to me might be an open mind and the ability to consider different aspects of things; hopefully we will be on the path towards something "more complete". Actively, one approach I often try to do is, I actively talk to people who are passionate in different areas, who are different from me, and understand more from there. Also, I sometimes refer to https://www.un.org/en/global-issues for some ideas.

I got it, thank you very much!

Charlie and I have made the bet. I sent $1000 on 11/18/24 against his $50,000. Happy betting!