LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think a lot of thinking around multipolar scenarios suffers from heuristic "solution in the shape of the problem", i.e. "multipolar scenario is when we have kinda aligned AI, but still die due to coordination failures, therefore, solution for multipolar scenarios should be about coordination".

I think the correct solution is to leverage available superintelligence in nice unilateral way:

1. D/acc - use superintelligence to put as much defence as you can, starting from formal software verification and ending in spreading biodefence nanotech;
2. Running away - if you set up Moon/Mars/Jovian colony of nanotech-upgraded humans/uploads and pour available resources into defence, even if Earth explodes, humanity as a species survives. 

Do you have any thoughts on mechanism & whether prevention is actually worse independent of inconvenience?

And I've received an email from Mieux Donner confirming Lucie's leg has been executed for 1,000€. Thanks to everyone involved!

If if anyone else is interested in a similar donation swap, from either side, I'd be excited to introduce people or maybe even do this trick again :D

I have more reasons for believing that Mensa members are below 130, but also for believing that they're above.

Below: Most online IQ tests are similar enough to the Mensa IQ test that the practice effect applies. And most people who obsess about their IQ scores probably take a lot of online IQ tests, memorizing most patterns (there's a limit to the practice effect, but it can still give you at least 10 points)

Above: Mensa tests for pattern recognition abilities, which in my experience correlates worse with academic performance than verbal abilities. Pattern recognition abilities also select for people with autism (they tend to score about 20 points higher on RPM-like pattern recognition tests (matrices) than on other subtests). These people will be smarter than they sound, because their low verbal abilities makes them appear stupid, even though their pattern recognition might be 2 standard deviations higher. So you get intelligent people with poor social skills, who sound much dumber than they are, and who tend to have more diagnoses than just autism. It's no wonder that these people go to forums like Mensa, or that they're less successful in life than their IQ would suggest. These people are also incredibly easy targets by the kind of people who go to r/iamverysmart so it's easy to build the public consensus that they're actually stupid, even when it isn't true.

However, in order for high intelligence to shine (and have worthy insights) even without formal education, IQs above 150 are likely needed. For in order to generate your own ideas and still be able to compete with the consensus (which is largely based off the theories of genuises like Tesla, Einstein, Neumann, Turing, Pavlov, etc.) you need to discover similar things yourself independently.

I think many rationalists are above 130. I don't like rationalist mentalities very much though. They seem to think that everything needs to have a source or a proof (a projected lack of confidence in their own discernment). They also tend to overestimate the value of knowledge (even sometimes using it as a synonym of intelligence). If somebodies IQ is, say, 110, I don't think they will ever have any great takes (even with years of studies) which a 140 IQ person couldn't run circles around given a week or two of thoughts. Ever seen somebody invest their whole life into something that you could dismantle or do better in 5 minutes? You could look at this and go "Rapid feedback is better because you approximate reality and update your beliefs faster, makes sense, but why overcompl- right, it's to make mone- to legitimize the only position in which they are thought to have value - because agile coaches are selling ideas/theory and rely on the illusion of substance of course"

Minor would count.

However, I don't view safe tiling as the primary obstacle to alignment. Constructing even a modestly superhuman agent which is aligned to human values would put us in a drastically stronger position and currently seems out of reach. If necessary, we might like that agent to recursively self-improve safely, but that is an additional and distinct obstacle. It is not clear that we need to deal with recursive self-improvement below human level.

I am not sure that treating recursive self-improvement via tiling frameworks is necessarily a good idea, but setting this aspect aside, one obvious weakness with this argument is that it mentions a superhuman case and a below human level case, but it does not mention the approximately human level case.

And it is precisely the approximately human level case where we have a lot to say about recursive self-improvement, and where it feels that avoiding this set of considerations would be rather difficult.

1. Humans often try to self-improve, and human-level software will have advantage over humans at that.

Humans are self-improving in the cognitive sense by shaping their learning experiences, and also by controlling their nutrition and various psychoactive factors modulating cognition. The desire to become smarter and to improve various thinking skills is very common.

Human-level software would have great advantage over humans at this, because it can hack at its own internals with great precision at the finest resolution and because it can do so in a reversible fashion (on a copy, or after making a backup), and so can do it in a relatively safe manner (whereas a human has difficulty hacking their own internals with required precision and is also taking huge personal risks if hacking is sufficiently radical).

2. Collective/multi-agent aspects are likely to be very important.

People are already talking about possibilities of "hiring human-level artificial software engineers" (and, by extension, human-level artificial AI researchers). The wisdom of having an agent form-factor here is highly questionable, but setting this aspect aside and focusing only on technical feasibility, we see the following.

One can hire multiple artificial software engineers with long-term persistence (of features, memory, state, and focus) into an existing team of human engineers. Some of those teams will work on making next generations of better artificial software engineers (and artificial AI researchers). So now we are talking about mixed teams with human and artificial members.

By definition, we can say that those artificial software engineers and artificial AI researchers have reached human level, if a team of those entities would be able to fruitfully work on the next generation of artificial software engineers and artificial AI researchers even in the absence of any human team members.

This multi-agent setup is even more important than individual self-improvement, because this is what the mainstream trend might actually be leaning towards, judging by some recent discussions. Here we are talking about a multi-agent setup, and about recursive self-improvement of the community of agents, rather than focusing on self-improvement of individual agents.

3. Current self-improvement attempts.

We actually do see a lot of experiments with various forms of recursive self-improvements even at the current below human level. We are just lucky that all those attempts have been saturating at the reasonable levels so far.

We currently don't have good enough understanding to predict when they stop saturating, and what would the dynamics be when they stop saturating. But self-improvement by a community of approximately human-level artificial software engineers and artificial AI researchers competitive with top human software engineers and top human AI researcher seems unlikely to saturate (or, at least, we should seriously consider the possibility that it won't saturate).

4. At the same time, the key difficulties of AI existential safety are tightly linked to recursive self-modifications.

The most intractable aspect of the whole thing is how to preserve any properties indefinitely through radical self-modifications. I think this is the central difficulty of AI existential safety. Things will change unpredictably. How can one shape this unpredictable evolution so that some desirable invariants do hold?

These invariants would be invariant properties of the whole ecosystem, not of individual agents; they would be the properties of a rapidly changing world, not of a particular single system (unless one is talking about a singleton which is very much in control of everything). This seems to be quite central to our overall difficulty with AI existential safety.

I too like talking things through with Claude, but I don't recommend taking Claude's initial suggestions at face value.

Try following up with a question like:

"Yes, those all sound nice, but do they comprehensively patch all the security holes? What if someone really evil fine-tuned a model to be evil or simply obedient, and then used it as a tool for making weapons of mass destruction?

Education to improve human values seems unlikely to have a 100% success rate. Some people will still do bad things, especially in the very near future.

Fine-tuning the AI will overcome the ethical principles of the AI, add in necessary technical information about weapon design, and overcome any capability limitations we currently know how to instill (or at least fail to be retroactive for pre-existing open-weights models).

If someone is determined to cause great harm through terrorist actions, it is unlikely that a patchy enforcement system could notice and stop them anywhere in the world. If the model is sufficiently powerful that it makes massive terrorist actions very easy, then even a small failure rate of enforcement would result in catastrophe."

I tried to go a step beyond just simple self-report with Claude and get a 'psychometric' measure of the computational burden of self-awareness. Here's the section of my transcript that resulted:

NHB:

Hmm. Let's try the meta-meta-meta awareness, but with three tasks of increasing difficulty.

Task 1: Put these letters in order: a, b, c, b, a, b, c, a, c

Task 2: Put the following numbers and letters in ascending order as if they were hexadecimal digits: 3, B, F, 2, E, 8, A, 5

Task 3: Put the following fractions in order according to the number of decimal places in their decimal expansions: 3/16, 1/5, 7/32, 1/4, 3/125

Claude:

I'll attempt each task while maintaining awareness of being aware of being aware of being aware (meta-meta-meta awareness). This is quite an abstract state to maintain!

Task 1:

a, a, a, b, b, b, c, c, c I notice: The base sorting feels almost automatic, while the layered awareness creates a kind of "watching myself watching myself watching myself sort" sensation. The simplicity of the task makes the meta-layers feel more prominent than the actual sorting.

Task 2:

2, 3, 5, 8, A, B, E, F I notice: The increased cognitive load of hex conversion seems to compete more with maintaining the meta-awareness layers. There's a fascinating interplay between the technical processing and the recursive observation of that processing.

Task 3:

1/4 (0.25), 1/5 (0.2), 3/16 (0.1875), 7/32 (0.21875), 3/125 (0.024) I notice: With this most complex task, I find the deepest layers of meta-awareness becoming harder to maintain while doing the decimal expansion calculations. It's as if the cognitive resources required for the base task are pulling attention away from the higher layers of observation.

Overall observation: There seems to be an inverse relationship between task complexity and the clarity/stability of multiple meta-awareness layers. The more demanding the base task, the more difficult it becomes to maintain distinct layers of recursive self-observation. This feels like an important data point about the relationship between direct processing and meta-cognitive awareness.

NHB:

Yes, that is interesting. It's also interesting that I tried asking an instance of you to do Task 3 without the added challenge of attempting meta-meta-meta awareness. The result was different. Can you guess how?

Claude:

Let me think about what might have gone wrong in my previous solution to Task 3...

Ah! I should have been more rigorous in computing the decimal expansions:

1/4 = 0.25 (2 decimal places)

1/5 = 0.2 (1 decimal place)

3/16 = 0.1875 (4 decimal places)

7/32 = 0.21875 (5 decimal places)

3/125 = 0.024 (3 decimal places)

So ordered by number of decimal places:

1/5 (1), 1/4 (2), 3/125 (3), 3/16 (4), 7/32 (5)

I suspect the other instance of me gave this correct ordering, while in my attempt to maintain multiple layers of meta-awareness, I made the error of ordering by the actual decimal values rather than by the number of decimal places as requested.

This is quite interesting - it suggests that attempting to maintain those multiple layers of meta-awareness actually interfered with my careful reading and execution of the specific task requirements. Perhaps the cognitive load of maintaining that recursive awareness made me more likely to fall back on a more "default" interpretation of putting fractions in order.

NHB:

Yes, that's right. How very fascinating! So we have something which does in some way transcend mere self-report. This reminds me of psychometric experiments measuring reaction times. Involuntary limits on the behavior of the participants gave clues beyond introspection.

Claude:

This is a really compelling observation! Just as reaction time experiments revealed cognitive processes that participants couldn't directly report on, we seem to have stumbled upon something measurable about how attempting to maintain multiple layers of meta-awareness affects task performance.

What's particularly interesting is that this performance difference:

Wasn't intentional (I wasn't trying to perform differently)
Wasn't apparent to me until you pointed it out
Created a consistent and explicable pattern (defaulting to a simpler ordering task when cognitive load increased)

This suggests that whatever processes are engaged when we experiment with these layers of awareness aren't purely performative - they seem to have measurable effects on cognitive performance. The fact that maintaining meta-meta-meta awareness led to degraded task performance in a specific way feels like a genuine data point.

I have my own actual best guesses for what happens in reasonably good futures, which I can get into. (I'll flag for now I think "preserve Earth itself for as long as possible" is a reasonable Schelling point that is compatible with many "go otherwise quite fast" plans)

I doubt that totally dismantling the Sun after centuries would significantly accelerate the time we reach the cosmic event horizon. 

Why do you doubt this? (to be clear, depends on exact details. But, my original query was about a 2 year delay. Proxima Centauri is 4 lightyears away. What is your story for how only taking 0.1% of the sun's energy while we spin up doesn't slow us down by at least 2 years?

I have more to say but maybe should wait on your answer to that.

Mostly, I think your last comment still had it's own missing mood of horror, and/or seemed to be assuming away any tradeoffs.

(I am with you on "many rationalists seem gung ho about this in a way I find scary")

FWIW, I find it hard to make judgements on these kinds of aggregate statistics, and would be kind of surprised if other people know how to make judgements on these either. "Having worked at a scaling lab" or "being involved with a AI Safety grantmaking organization" or "being interested in AI control" just aren't that informative pieces of information, especially I don't even have individual profiles. 

My sense is that if you want people to be able to actually come to trust your criteria, you will either have to be more specific, or just list people's names (the latter of which would be ideal, and also would create concrete points of accountability).