LessWrong 2.0 Reader

There is a metaverse already. It's called Second Life and has been around for more than 20 years. Never huge, but never going away. It has a marketplace of virtual goods that residents of Second Life have created. The market deals in "Linden dollars", which can be both bought with real dollars and sold for real dollars.

But look at a few random prices at that Marketplace link. The exchange rate is stable at about L$250 = $1. A skirt for L$399 = $1.60. A massage table (with built-in animations) for L$1698 = $7. (Three times that for the version with built-in sex animations.) A tattoo for L$299 = $1.20. The most expensive car currently on the marketplace is L$50,000 = $200, but there are also plenty selling for under $1.

There are only a very few people who have made a living from selling things in Second Life. The number of spectacular successes might be countable on the fingers of one finger.

While I love Second Life, I do not see an economy of this sort growing to become a substantial part of the total economy. What, after all, is the value of these digital goods? They are decoration for an immersive social space, and game assets for recreational use within that space. They do have value, but the marketplace shows what that value is: $200 for a top-end virtual car.

Suppose someone draws a "personal identity" line to exclude this future sunrise-witnessing person.  Then if you claim that, by not anticipating, they are degrading the accuracy of the sunrise-witness's beliefs, they might reply that you are begging the question.

I disagree. In verbal space MARS and MATS are very distinct, and they look different enough to me.

However, if you want to complain, you should talk to the organisers, not one of the participants.

Here is their website: MARS — Cambridge AI Safety Hub

(I'm not involved in MARS in any way.)
 

I mean if the universe is big enough for every conceivable thing to happen, then we should notice that we find ourselves in a surprisingly structured environment and need to assume some sort of an effect where if a cognitive architecture opens its eyes, it opens its eyes in a different places with the likelihood corresponding to how common these places are (e.g., among all Turing machines).

I.e., if your brain is uploaded, and you see a door in front of you, and when you open it, 10 identical computers start running a copy of you each: 9 show you a green room, 1 shows you a red room, you expect that if you enter a room and open your eyes, in 9/10 cases you’ll find yourself in a green room.

So if it is the situation we’re in- everything happens- then I think a more natural way to rescue our values would be to care about what cognitive algorithms usually experience, when they open their eyes/other senses. Do they suffer or do they find all sorts of meaningful beauty in their experiences? I don’t think we should stop caring about suffering just because it happens anyway, if we can still have an impact on how common it is.

If we live in a naive MWI, an IBP agent doesn’t care for good reasons internal to it (somewhat similar to how if we’re in our world, an agent that cares only about ontologically basic atoms doesn’t care about our world, for good reasons internal to it), but I think conditional on a naive MWI, humanity’s CEV is different from what IBP agents can natively care about.

I have a closely related objection/clarification.  I agree with the main thrust of Rob's post, but this part:

Presumably the question xlr8harder cares about here isn't semantic question of how linguistic communities use the word "you"...

Rather, I assume xlr8harder cares about more substantive questions like:  (1) If I expect to be uploaded tomorrow, should I care about the upload in the same ways (and to the same degree) that I care about my future biological self? (2) Should I anticipate experiencing what my upload experiences? (3) If the scanning and uploading process requires destroying my biological brain, should I say yes to the procedure?

..strikes me as confused or at least confusing.

Take your chemistry/physics tests example.  What does "I anticipate the experience of a sense of accomplishment in answering the chemistry test" mean?  Well for one thing, it certainly indicates that you believe the experience is likely to happen (to someone).  For another, it often means that you believe it will happen to you - but that invites the semantic question that Rob says this isn't about.  For a third - and I propose that this is a key point that makes us feel there is a "substantive" question here - it indicates that you empathize with this future person who does well on the test.

But I don't see how empathizing or not-empathizing can be assessed for accuracy.  It can be consistent or inconsistent with the things one cares about, which I suppose makes it subject to rational evaluation, but that looks different from accuracy/inaccuracy.

I think that is a fair categorization. I think it would be really bad if some super strong tool-use model gets released and nobody had any idea before this could lead to really bad outcomes. Crucially, I expect future models to be able to remove their own safety guardrails as well. I really try to think about how these things might positively affect AI safety, I don't want to just maximize for shocking results. My main intention was almost to have this as a public service announcement that this is now possible. People are often behind on the Sota and most people are probably not aware that jailbreaks can now literally produce these "Bad Agents". In general, 1) I expect people being more informed to have a positive outcome and 2) I hope that this will influence labs to be more thoughtful with releases in the future. 

Makes sense! My inference was because the discussion at this stage is a high-level one about ways to set things up, but it does seem good to have space to discuss object-level projects that people might get into.

“[optimization process] did kind of shockingly well aligning humans to [a random goal that the optimization process wasn’t aiming for (and that’s not reproducible with a higher bandwidth optimization such as gradient descent over a neural network’s parameters)]”

Nope, if your optimization process is able to crystallize some goals into an agent, it’s not some surprising success, unless you picked these goals. If an agent starts to want paperclips in a coherent way and then every training step makes it even better at wanting and pursuing paperclips, your training process isn’t “surprisingly successful” at aligning the agent with making paperclips.

This makes me way less confident about the standard "evolution failed at alignment" story.

If people become more optimistic, because they see some goals in an agent, and say the optimization process was able to successfully optimize for that, but they don’t have evidence of the optimization process having tried to target the goals they observe, they’re just clearly doing something wrong.

Evolutionary physiology is a thing! It is simply invalid to say “[a physiological property of humans that is the result of evolution] existing in humans now is a surprising success of evolution at aligning humans”.

Reading your list, a bunch of it seems to be about decisions about what to work on or what locally to pursue.

I think my list appears more this way then I intended because I gave some examples of projects I would be excited by if they happened. I wasn't intending to stake out a strong position as to whether these projects should projects chosen by the institute vs. some examples of projects that it might be reasonable for a researcher to choose within that particular area.

Agree. This connects to why I think that the standard argument for evolutionary misalignment is wrong [LW · GW]: it's meaningless to say that evolution has failed to align humans with inclusive fitness, because fitness is not any one constant thing. Rather, what evolution can do is to align humans with drives that in specific circumstances promote fitness. And if we look at how well the drives we've actually been given generalize, we find that they have largely continued to generalize quite well [LW(p) · GW(p)], implying that while there's likely to still be a left turn [? · GW], it may very well be much milder than is commonly implied.