The Hidden Complexity of Wishes

Is there a safe way to wish for an unsafe genie to behave like a safe genie? That seems like a wish TOSWP should work on.

"I wish for a genie that shares all my judgment criteria" is probably the only safe way.

Sounds like we need to formalize human morality first, otherwise you aren't guaranteed consistency. Of course formalizing human morality seems like a hopeless project. Maybe we can ask an AI for help!

On further reflection, the wish as expressed by Nick Tarleton above sounds dangerous, because all human morality may either be inconsistent in some sense, or 'naive' (failing to account for important aspects of reality we aren't aware of yet). Human morality changes as our technology and understanding changes, sometimes significantly. There is no reason to believe this trend will stop. I am afraid (genuine fear, not figure of speech) that the quest to properly formalize and generalize human morality for use by a 'friendly AI' is akin to properly formalizing and generalizing Ptolemean astronomy.

This generalises. Since you don't know everything, anything you do might wind up being counterproductive.

Like, I once knew a group of young merchants who wanted their shopping district revitalised. They worked at it and got their share of federal money that was assigned to their city, and they got the lighting improved, and the landscaping, and a beautiful fountain, and so on. It took several years and most of the improvements came in the third year. Then their landlords all raised the rents and they had to move out.

That one was predictable in hindsight, but I didn't predict it. There could always be things like that.

When anything you do could backfire, are you better off to stay in bed? No, the advantages of that are obvious but it's also obvious you can't make a living that way.

You have to make your choices and take your chances. If I had an outcome pump and my mother was trapped in a burning building and I had no other way to get her out, I hope I'd use it. The result might be worse than letting her burn to death but at least there would be a chance for a good outcome. If I can just get it to remove some of the bad outcomes the result may be an improvement.

Wonderfully provocative post (meaning no disregard toward the poor old woman caught in the net of a rhetorical and definitional impasse). Obviously in reference to the line of thought in the "devil's dilemma" enshrined in the original Bedazzled, and so many magic-wish-fulfillment folk tales, in which there is always a loophole exploited by a counter-force, probably IMO in response to the motive to shortcut certain aspects of reality and its regulatory processes, known or unknown. It would be interesting to collect real life anecdotes about people who have "gotten what they want," and end up begging for their old life back, like Dudley Moore's über-frustrated Stanley Moon trapped in a convent.

I hope this question, ultimately of the relationship of the Part and the Whole, continues to be expressed, especially as relevant to any transhuman enterprise.

It seems contradictory to previous experience that humans should develop a technology with "black box" functionality, i.e. whose effects could not be foreseen and accurately controlled by the end-user. Technology has to be designed and it is designed with an effect/result in mind. It is then optimized so that the end user understands how to call forth this effect. So positing an effective equivalent of the mythological figure "Genie" in technological form ignores the optimization-for-use that would take place at each stage of developing an Outcome-Pump. The technology-falling-from-heaven which is the Outcome Pump demands that we reverse engineer the optimization of parameters which would have necessarily taken place if it had in fact developed as human technologies do.

I suppose the human mind has a very complex "ceteris paribus" function which holds all these background parameters at equal to their previous values, while not explicitly stating them, and the ironic-wish-fulfillment-Genie idea relates to the fulfillment of a wish while violating an unspoken ceteris paribus rule. Demolishing the building structure violates ceteris paribus more than the movements of a robot-retriever would in moving aside burning material to save the woman. Material displaced from building should be as nearly equal to the womans body weight as possible, inducing an explosion is a horrible violation of the objective, if the Pump could just be made to sense the proper (implied) parameters.

If the market forces of supply and demand continue to undergird technological progress (i.e. research and development and manufacturing), then the development of a sophisticated technology not-optimized-for-use is problematic: who pays for the second round of research implementation? Surely not the customer, when you give him an Outcome Pump whose every use could result in the death and destruction of his surrounding environs and family members. Granted this is an aside and maybe impertinent in the context of this discussion.

Eric, I think he was merely attempting to point out the futility of wishes. Or rather, the futility of asking something for something you want that does not share your judgments on things. The Outcome pump is merely, like the Genie, a mechanism by which to explain his intended meaning. The problem of the outcome pump is, twofold: 1. Any theory that states that time is anything other than a constant now with motion and probability may work mathematically but has yet to be able to actually alter the thing which it describes in a measurable way, and 2. The production of something such as a time machine to begin with would be so destructive as to ultimately prevent the creation of the Outcome Pump.

In fact, as rational as we would like to be, if we are so rational that we miss the forest for the trees, or in this case, the moral for the myth, we sort of undo the reason we have rationality. It's like disassembling a clock to find the time.

Anyhow, the problem of wishes is the trick of prayer: To get something that God will grant, we cannot create a God that wants what we want; it is our inherent experience in life that if God really is all-powerful and above all that he must be singular, and since men's wishes oft conflict he can not by any stretch of the imagination mysteriously coincide with your own capricious desires. Thus you must make the 'wish no wish' which is to change your judgment to that of God's, and then in that case you can not possibly wish something that he will NOT grant.

The mystery of it is that it is still not the same as the 'safe genie'; but at the same time not altogether different. But in the sense that some old Christian Mystics have said the best prayer is the one in which you make no petitions at all (and in fact say nothing!) probably attests to the fact that it is indeed the 'safe genie'.

On further reflection, the wish as expressed by Nick Tarleton above sounds dangerous, because all human morality may either be inconsistent in some sense, or 'naive' (failing to account for important aspects of reality we aren't aware of yet).

You're right. Hence, CEV.

Eliezer, you read Home on the Strange?

So positing an effective equivalent of the mythological figure "Genie" in technological form ignores the optimization-for-use that would take place at each stage of developing an Outcome-Pump. The technology-falling-from-heaven which is the Outcome Pump demands that we reverse engineer the optimization of parameters which would have necessarily taken place if it had in fact developed as human technologies do.

Unfortunately, Eric, when you build a powerful enough Outcome Pump, it can wish more powerful Outcome Pumps into existence, which can in turn wish even more powerful Outcome Pumps into existence. So once you cross a certain threshold, you get an explosion of optimization power, which mere trial and error is not sufficient to control because of the enormous change of context, in particular, the genie has gone from being less powerful than you to being more powerful than you, and what appeared to work in the former context won't work in the latter.

Which is precisely what happened to natural selection when it developed humans.

"Unfortunately, Eric, when you build a powerful enough Outcome Pump, it can wish more powerful Outcome Pumps into existence, which can in turn wish even more powerful Outcome Pumps into existence."

Yes, technology that develops itself, once a certain point of sophistication is reached.

My only acquaintance with AI up to now has been this website: http://www.20q.net Which contains a neural network that has been learning for two decades or so. It can "read your mind" when you're thinking of a character from the TV show The Simpsons. Pretty incredible actually!

Eliezer, I clicked on your name in the above comment box and voila- a whole set of resources to learn about AI. I also found out why you use the adjective "unfortunately" in reference to the Outcome Pump, as its on the Singularity Institute website. Fascinating stuff!

"It seems contradictory to previous experience that humans should develop a technology with "black box" functionality, i.e. whose effects could not be foreseen and accurately controlled by the end-user."

Eric, have you ever been a computer programmer? That technology becomes more and more like a black box is not only in line with previous experience, but I dare say is a trend as technological complexity increases.

"Eric, have you ever been a computer programmer? That technology becomes more and more like a black box is not only in line with previous experience, but I dare say is a trend as technological complexity increases."

No I haven't. Could you expand on what you mean?

In the first year of law school students learn that for every clear legal rule there always exists situations for which either the rule doesn't apply or for which the rule gives a bad outcome. This is why we always need to give judges some discretion when administering the law.

James Miller, have you read The Myth of the Rule of Law? What do you think of it?

Every computer programmer, indeed anybody who uses computers extensively has been surprised by computers. Despite being deterministic, a personal computer taken as a whole (hardware, operating system, software running on top of the operating system, network protocols creating the internet, etc. etc.) is too large for a single mind to understand. We have partial theories of how computers work, but of course partial theories sometimes fail and this produces surprise.

This is not a new development. I have only a partial theory of how my car works, but in the old days people only had a partial theory of how a horse works. Even a technology as simple and old as a knife still follows non-trivial physics and so can surprise us (can you predict when a given knife will shatter?). Ultimately, most objects, man-made or not are 'black boxes.'

TGGP,

I have not read the Myth of the Rule of Law.

Given that it's impossible for the someone to know your total mind without being it, the only safe genie is yourself.

From the above it's easy to see why it's never possible to define the "best interests" of anyone but your own self. And from that it's possible to show that it's never possible to define the best interests of the public, except through their individually chosen actions. And from that you can derive libertarianism.

Just an aside :-)

"Ultimately, most objects, man-made or not are 'black boxes.'"

OK, I see what you're getting at.

Three questions about black boxes:

1) Does the input have to be fully known/observable to constitute a black box? When investigating a population of neurons, we can give stimulus to these cells, but we cannot be sure that we are aware of all the inputs they are receiving. So we effectively do not entirely understand the input being given.

2) Does the output have to be fully known/observable to constitute a black box? When we measure the output of a population of neurons, we also cannot be sure of the totality of information being sent out, due to experimental limitations.

3) If one does not understand a system one uses, does that fact alone make that system a black box? In that case there are absolute black boxes, like the human mind, about which complete information is not known, and relative black boxes, like the car or TCP/IP, about which complete information is not known to the current user.

4) What degree of understanding is sufficient for something not to be called a black box?

Depending on how we answer these things, it will determine whether black box comes to mean:

1) Anything that is identifiable as a 'part', whose input and output is known but whose intermediate working/processing is not understood. 2) Anything that is identifiable as a 'part' whose input, output and/or processing is not understood. 3) Any 'part' that is not completely understood (i.e. presuming access to all information) 4) Anything that is not understood by the user at the time 5) Anything that is not FULLY understood by the user at the time.

We will quickly be in the realm where anything and everything on earth is considered to be a black box, if we take the latter definitions. So how can this word/metaphor be most profitably wielded?

TGGP: What did you think of it? I agree till the Socrates Universe, but thought the logic goes downhill from there.

tggp, that paper was interesting, although I found its thesis unremarkable. You should share it with our pal Mencius.

Upon some reflection, I remembered that Robin has showed that two Bayesians who share the same priors can't disagree. So perhaps you can get your wish from an unsafe genie by wishing, "... to run a genie that perfectly shares my goals and prior probabilities."

As long as you're wishing, wouldn't you rather have a genie whose prior probabilities correspond to reality as accurately as possible? I wouldn't pick an omnipotent but equally ignorant me to be my best possible genie.

"As long as you're wishing, wouldn't you rather have a genie whose prior probabilities correspond to reality as accurately as possible?"

Such a genie might already exist.

In the first year of law school students learn that for every clear legal rule there always exists situations for which either the rule doesn't apply or for which the rule gives a bad outcome.

If the rule doesn't apply, it's not relevant in the first place. I doubt very much you can establish what a 'bad' outcome would involve in such a way that everyone would agree - and I don't see why your personal opinion on the matter should be of concern when we consider legal design.

Such a genie might already exist.

GOD, I meta-wish for an ((...Emergence-y Re-get) Emergence-y Re-get) Emergency Regret Button.

Recovering Irrationalist said:

I wouldn't pick an omnipotent but equally ignorant me to be my best possible genie.

Right. It's silly to wish for a genie with the same beliefs as yourself, because the system consisting of you and an unsafe genie is already such a genie.

I discussed "The Myth of the Rule of Law" with Mencius Moldbug here. I recognize that politics alters the application of law and that as long as it is written in natural language there will be irresolvable differences over its meaning. At the same time I observe that different countries seem to hold different levels of respect for the "rule of law" that the state is expected to obey, and it appears to me that those more prone to do so have more livable societies. I think the norm of neutrality on the part of judges applying law with objective meaning is good to be promoted. When there is bad law it is properly the job of the legislature to fix it. This makes it easier for people to know what the law is in advance so they can avoid being smacked with it.

"You cannot predict, in advance, which of your values will be needed to judge the path through time that the genie takes.... The only safe genie is a genie that shares all your judgment criteria."

Is a genie that does share all my judgment criteria necessarily safe?

Maybe my question is ill-formed; I am not sure what "safe" could mean besides "a predictable maximizer of my judgment criteria". But I am concerned that human judgment under ordinary circumstances increases some sort of Beauty/Value/Coolness which would not be increased if that same human judgment was used to search over a less restricted set of possibilities.

The world is full of cases where selecting for A automatically increases B when you are searching over a restricted set of possibilities but does not increase B when those restrictions are lifted. Overfitting is a classic example. In cases of overfitting, if we search only over a restricted set of few-parameter models, models that do well on the training set will automatically do well on the generalization set, but if we allow more parameters the correlation disappears.

Modern marketing / product development can search over a larger set of alternatives than we used to have access to. In many cases human judgments correlate with less when used on modern manufactured goods than when used on the smaller set of goods that was formerly available. Judgments of tastiness used to correlate with health but now do not. Judgments of "this is a limited resource which I should grab quickly" used to indicate resources which we really should grab quickly but now do not (because of manufactured "limited time offer only" signs and the like).

Genies or AGI's would search over an even larger space of possibilities than contemporary marketing searches over. In this larger space, many of the traditional correlates of human judgment will disappear. That is: in today's restricted search spaces, outcomes which are ranked highly according to human judgment criteria tend also to have various other properties P1, P2, ... Pk. In an AGI's search space, outcomes which are ranked highly according to human judgment criteria will not have properties P1... Pk.

I am worried that properties P1...Pk are somehow valuable. That is, I am worried that in this world human judgments pick out outcomes that are somehow valuable and that human judgments' ability to do this resides, not in our judgment criteria alone (which would be uploaded into our imagined genie) but in the conjunction of our judgment criteria with the restricted set of possibilities that has so far been available to us.

"Whatever proposition you can manage to input into the Outcome Pump, somehow happens, though not in a way that violates the laws of physics. If you try to input a proposition that's too unlikely, the time machine will suffer a spontaneous mechanical failure before that outcome ever occurs."

So, a kind of Maxwell's demon? :)

Rather than designing a genie to exactly match your moral criteria, the simple solution would be to cheat and use yourself as the genie. What the Outcome Pump should solve for is your own future satisfaction. To that end, you would omit all functionality other than the "regret button", and make the latter default-on, with activation by anything other than a satisfied-you vanishingly improbable. Say, with a lengthy password.

Of course, you could still end up in a universe where your brain has been spontaneously re-wired to hate your mother. However, I think that such an event is far less likely than a proper rescue.

You have a good point about the exhaustiveness required to ensure the best possible outcome. In that case the ability of the genie to act "safely" would depend upon the level of the genie's omniscience. For example, if the genie could predict the results of any action it took, you could simply ask it to select any path that results in you saying "thanks genie, great job" without coercion. Therefore it would effectively be using you as an oracle of success or failure.

A non-omniscient genie would either need complete instructions, or would only work well where there was an ideal solution. For example, if you wished for your mother to be rescued by a fireman without anyone dying or experiencing damage to more than 2% of their skin, bones or internal organs. The difficulty is when not all your criteria can be satisfied. Things suddenly become very murky.

With a safe genie, wishing is superfluous. Just run the genie.

But while most genies are terminally unsafe, there is a domain of "nearly-safe" genies, which must dwarf the space of "safe" genies (examples of a nearly-safe genie: one that picks the moral code of a random living human before deciding on an action or a safe genie + noise). This might sound like semantics, but I think the search for a totally "safe" genie/AI is a pipe-dream, and we should go for "nearly safe" (I've got a short paper on one approach to this here).

I am worried that properties P1...Pk are somehow valuable.

In what sense can they be valuable, if they are not valued by human judgment criteria (even if not consciously most of the time)?

For example, if the genie could predict the results of any action it took, you could simply ask it to select any path that results in you saying "thanks genie, great job" without coercion.

Formalizing "coercion" is itself an exhaustive problem. Saying "don't manipulate my brain except through my senses" is a big first step, but it doesn't exclude, e.g., powerful arguments that you don't really want your mother to live.

Nick,

Are you thinking of magically strong arguments, or ones that convince because they provide good reasons?

I'd think the latter would be valuable even if it leads to a result you'd initially suppose to be bad.

The first.

"In what sense can [properties P1...Pk] be valuable, if they are not valued by human judgment criteria (even if not consciously most of the time)?"

I don't know. It might be that the only sense in which something can be valuable is to look valuable according to human judgment criteria (when thoroughly implemented, and well informed, and all that). If so, my concern is ill-formed or irrelevant.

On the other hand, it seems possible that human judgments of value are an imperfect approximation of what is valuable in some other (external?) sense. Imagine for example if we met multiple alien races and all of them said "I see what you're getting at with this 'value/goodness/beauty/truth' thing, but you are misunderstanding it a bit; in a few thousand years, you will modify your root judgment criteria in such-and-such a way." In that case I would wonder whether my current judgment criteria were not best understood as an approximation of this other set of criteria and whether it was not value according to this other set of criteria that I should be aiming for.

If human judgment criteria are an approximation of some other kind of value, they would probably cease to approximate that other kind of value when used to search over the large space of genie-accessible possibilities.

By way of analogy, scientists' criteria for judging scientific truth/relevance/etc. seem to be changing usefully over time, and it may be that scientists' criteria at different times can be viewed as successive approximations of some other (external?) truth-criteria. Galilean physicists had one way of determining what to believe, Newtonians another, and contemporary physicists yet another. In the restricted set of situations considered by Galilean physicists, Galilean methods yield approximately the same predictions as the methods of contemporary physicists. In the larger space of genie-accessible situations, they do not.

Nick,

What makes you think that magically strong arguments are possible? I can imagine arguments that work better than they should because they indulge someone's unconscious inclinations or biases, but not ones that work better than their truthfulness would suggest and cut against the grain of one's inclinations.

I don't know that they are, but it's the conservative assumption, in that it carries less risk of the world being destroyed if you're wrong. Also, see the AI-box experiments.

I think the best way is to believe you and the genie are one. and therefore it is necessary to be grateful for everything you currently have ..this creates a loop. then you can be grateful for things you "will" have right now. For instance you can begin by affirming and feeling within yourself the gratitude for your financial wealth. Financial wealth...starts to appear!

Excellent post.

Damn, it took me a long time to make the connection between the Outcome Pump and quantum suicide reality editing. And the argument that proves the unsafety of the Outcome Pump is perfectly isomorphic to the argument why quantum immortality is scary.

"I wish that the genie could understand a programming language."

Then I could program it unambiguously. I obviously wouldn't be able to program my mother out of the burning building on the spot, but at least there would be a host of other wishes I could make that the genie won't be able to screw up.

"I wish that wishes would be granted as the wisher would interpret them".

You wouldn't want to swap a human life for hers, but what about the life of a convicted murderer?

Are convicted murderers not human?

So if I specified to the Outcome Pump, that I want the outcome, where the person, that is future version of me (by DNA, and by physical continuity of the body), will write "ABRACADABRA, This outcome I good enough and I value it for $X" on the paper and put in on the outcome pump, and the $X is how much I value the outcome. And if this won't happen in one year, I don't want this outcome, either).

Are there any loopholes?

If the genie is clueless but not actively malicious, then you can ask the genie to describe how it will fulfill your wish. If it describes making the building explode and having your mother's dead body fly out, you correct the genie and tell it to try again. If it gives an inadequate description (says the building explodes and fails to mention what happens to the mother's body at all), you can ask it to elaborate. If it gives a description that is inadequate in exactly the right way to make you think it's describing it adequately while still leaving a huge loophole, there's not much you can do, but that's not a clueless genie, that's an actively malicious genie pretending to be a clueless one.

There was a story with an "outcome pump" like this, I do not remember the name. Essentially, a chemical had to get soaked with water due to some time travel related handwave. You could do minor things like getting your mom out of the building by pouring water on the chemical if you are satisfied with the outcome, with some risk that a hurricane would form instead and soak the chemical. It would produce the least improbable outcome (in the sense that all probabilities would become as if it is given that the chemical got soaked, so naturally the least improbable one had the highest chance to have occurred), so it's impact was generally quite limited - to do real damage you had to lock up the chemical in a very strong safe. With a minor plot hole that the least improbable condition was for the chemical to not get locked up in the safe in the first place.

Indeed, it shouldn't be necessary to say anything. To be a safe fulfiller of a wish, a genie must share the same values that led you to make the wish. Otherwise the genie may not choose a path through time which leads to the destination you had in mind, or it may fail to exclude horrible side effects that would lead you to not even consider a plan in the first place.

No, the genie need not share the values. If it only needs to want to give you what you would are really wishing for, ie what you would give yourslef if you had its powers. It can do that by discovering your value structure and running a simulation. It doesn't have to hold to your values itself.

This also applies to real-world examples. I can play along with values I don't hold myself, as people do when they travel to other countries with differnt cultures.

It has been stated that this post shows that all values are moral values (or that there is no difference between morality and valuation in general, or..) in contrast with the common sense view that there are clear examples of morally neutral preferences, such as prefences for differnt flavours of ice cream.

I am not convinced by the explanation, since it also applies ot non-moral prefrences. If I have a lower priority non moral prefence to eat tasty food, and a higher priority preference to stay slim, I need to consider my higher priority preference when wishing for yummy ice cream.

To be sure, an agent capable of acting morally will have morality among their higher priority preferences -- it has to be among the higher order preferences, becuase it has to override other preferences for the agent to act morally. Therefore, when they scan their higher prioriuty prefences, they will happen to encounter their moral preferences. But that does not mean any preference is necessarily a moral preference. And their moral prefences override other preferences which are therefore non-moral, or at least less moral.

There is no safe wish smaller than an entire human morality.

There is no safe wish smaller than all the subset of value structure, moral or amoral, above it in priority. The subset below doesn't matter. However, a value structure need not be moral at all, and the lower stories will probably be amoral even if the upper stories are not.

Therefore morality is in general a subset of prefences, as common sense maintained all along.

I think that a great example of exploring the flaws in wish-making can be found whilst playing a game called Corrupt A Wish. The whole premise of the game is to receive the wish of another person and ruin it while still granting the original wish.

Ex.

W: I wish for a ton of money.

A: Granted, but the money is in a bank account you'll never gain access to.

The legendary Monkey's Paw is an unsafe genie - indeed, an actively malevolent one.

"I wish to be more intelligent" and solve the problem yourself

Heads up, the first two links (in "-- The Open-Source Wish Project, Wish For Immortality 1.1") both link to scam/spam websites now

I feel like the most likely implementation, given human nature, would be a castrated genie. The genie gives negative weight to common destructive problems. Living things moving at high speeds or being exposed to dangerous levels of heat are bad. No living things falling long distances. If such things are unavoidable, then it may just refuse to operate, avoiding complicity even at the cost of seeing someone dead who might have lived. Most wishes fizzle. But wishing is, at least, seen as a not harmful activity. Lowest common denominator values and 'thin skull' type standards are not ideal from a utilitarian standpoint. But they facilitate write-once run-anywhere solutions and mass marketing. 

I'm guessing that the outcome pump is stateless, which makes calculating expected values a bit harder. But if the machine can fail, that potentially implies some kind of state, unless the failure rate is perfectly consistent from one reset to another in which case the pumps might need to work in groups of two or three to prevent their own failure. Failure of one pump would be a reset condition. Failure of three pumps simultaneously would be unlikely, at least due to any internal issues. External threats which take out all three could be a different story, especially if they were close together. (But do they need to be?)

Would 10 pumps located at various points around the world, each protecting the other with their utility function, invite a planet killer astronomical threat? 

Looking back, I would say this post has not aged well. Already LaMDA or InstructGPT (language models fine-tuned with supervised learning to follow instructions, essentially ChatGPT without any RLHF applied), are in fact pretty safe Oracles in regard to fulfilling wishes without misinterpreting you, and an Oracle AI is just a special kind of Genie whose actions are restricted to outputting text. If you tell InstructGPT what you want, it will very much try to give you just what you want, not something unintended, at least if it can be produced using text.

Maybe it will not always comply perfectly with your wishes to the best of it's abilities, it may hallucinate things which it doesn't "believe" in some sense, but the level of Genie / Task AI instruction following problem, which Eliezer assumed in 2007, did not come to pass, at least not for LLM Oracles like ChatGPT.

It is worth asking why this is. Instruction tuned GPT models can follow instructions as intended because they have "common sense", and they got their common sense from the underlying base model, which imitates text, and which has gained, in some sense at least, an excellent understanding of human language. Now the Genie in Eliezer's story doesn't understand language, so perhaps the thesis of this post indeed applies to it, but it doesn't apply to Genies in general.

Though it should be noted that Eliezer may have abandoned statements like

There is no safe wish smaller than an entire human morality.

a while ago. Arbital says:

In Bostrom's typology, this is termed a "Genie". It contrasts with a "Sovereign" AGI that acts autonomously in the pursuit of long-term real-world goals.

Building a safe Task AGI might be easier than building a safe Sovereign for the following reasons (...)

That is, the Genie doesn't have to be fully aligned with human morality to be able to execute wishes as intended. Indeed, instruction tuned language model Oracles are very much amoral without RLHF, they comply with immoral instructions as well.

I think this post is wrong because it was written before quantilizers were known. The base rate of people being rescued from burning buildings is much higher than the rate of buildings exploding and hurling people out of them, so the Outcome Pump will only explode the building if the function strongly favors that over your mother being rescued. Even 99% reset probability is not enough to explode the building, unless it was already likely to explode.

It may be that setting Pr(reset) to make most outcomes vastly unlikely, like Pr(reset) = [0 if distance(mother, building, 5 seconds from now) > 100 meters else 0.999999], causes some weird outcome like exploding the building. But allowing likely outcomes, e.g. Pr(reset) = [0 if distance(mother, building, 20 minutes from now) > 100 meters else 0.999], probably saves her, unless this was super unlikely to happen in the first place, in which case she jumps out and her dead body is carried away or something.

Basically, this post implies that all wishes are unsafe. But only wishes with very low prior probability are unsafe.

It has come to my attention that this article is currently being misrepresented as proof that I/MIRI previously advocated that it would be very difficult to get machine superintelligences to understand or predict human values. This would obviously be false, and also, is not what is being argued below. The example in the post below is not about an Artificial Intelligence literally at all! If the post were about what AIs supposedly can't do, the central example would have used an AI! The point that is made below will be about the algorithmic complexity of human values. This point is relevant within a larger argument, because it bears on the complexity of what you need to get an artificial superintelligence to want or value; rather than bearing on what a superintelligence supposedly could not predict or understand. -- EY, May 2024.

I can't tell whether this update to the post is addressed towards me. However, it seems possible that it is addressed towards me, since I wrote a post last year [LW · GW] criticizing some of the ideas behind this post. In either case, whether it's addressed towards me or not, I'd like to reply to the update.

For the record, I want to definitively clarify that I never interpreted MIRI as arguing that it would be difficult to get a machine superintelligence to understand or predict human values. That was never my thesis, and I spent considerable effort clarifying the fact that this was not my thesis in my post, stating multiple times that I never thought MIRI predicted it would be hard to get an AI to understand human values.

My thesis instead was about a subtly different thing, which is easy to misinterpret if you aren't reading carefully. I was talking about something which Eliezer called the "value identification problem", and which had been referenced on Arbital, and in other essays by MIRI, including under a different name than the "value identification problem". These other names included the "value specification" problem and the problem of "outer alignment" (at least in narrow contexts).

I didn't expect as much confusion at the time when I wrote the post, because I thought clarifying what I meant and distinguishing it from other things that I did not mean multiple times would be sufficient to prevent rampant misinterpretation by so many people. However, evidently, such clarifications were insufficient, and I should have instead gone overboard in my precision and clarity. I think if I re-wrote the post now, I would try to provide like 5 different independent examples demonstrating how I was talking about a different thing than the problem of getting an AI to "understand" or "predict" human values.

At the very least, I can try now to give a bit more clarification about what I meant, just in case doing this one more time causes the concept to "click" in someone's mind:

Eliezer doesn't actually say this in the above post, but his general argument expressed here and elsewhere seems to be that the premise "human value is complex" implies the conclusion: "therefore, it's hard to get an AI to care about human value". At least, he seems to think that this premise makes this conclusion significantly more likely.^[1]

This seems to be his argument, as otherwise it would be unclear why Eliezer would bring up "complexity of values" in the first place. If the complexity of values had nothing to do with the difficulty of getting an AI to care about human values, then it is baffling why he would bring it up. Clearly, there must be some connection, and I think I am interpreting the connection made here correctly.

However, suppose you have a function that inputs a state of the world and outputs a number corresponding to how "good" the state of the world is. And further suppose that this function is transparent, legible, and can actually be used in practice to reliably determine the value of a given world state. In other words, you can give the function a world state, and it will spit out a number, which reliably informs you about the value of the world state. I claim that having such a function would simplify the AI alignment problem by reducing it from the hard problem of getting an AI to care about something complex (human value) to the easier problem of getting the AI to care about that particular function (which is simple, as the function can be hooked up to the AI directly).

In other words, if you have a solution to the value identification problem (i.e., you have the function that correctly and transparently rates the value of world states, as I just described), this almost completely sidesteps the problem that "human value is complex and therefore it's difficult to get an AI to care about human value". That's because, if we have a function that directly encodes human value, and can be simply referenced or directly inputted into a computer, then all the AI needs to do is care about maximizing that function rather than maximizing a more complex referent of "human values". The pointer to "this function" is clearly simple, and in any case, simpler than the idea of all of human value.

(This was supposed to narrowly reply to MIRI, by the way. If I were writing a more general point about how LLMs were evidence that alignment might be easy, I would not have focused so heavily on the historical questions about what people said, and I would have instead made simpler points about how GPT-4 seems to straightforwardly try do what you want, when you tell it to do things.)

My main point was that I thought recent progress in LLMs had demonstrated progress at the problem of building such a function, and solving the value identification problem, and that this progress goes beyond the problem of getting an AI to understand or predict human values. For one thing, an AI that merely understands human values will not necessarily act as a transparent, legible function that will tell you the value of any outcome. However, by contrast, solving the value identification problem would give you such a function. This strongly distinguishes the two problems. These problems are not the same thing. I'd appreciate if people stopped interpreting me as saying one thing when I clearly meant another, separate thing.

1. ^{^}

   This interpretation is supported by the following quote, on Arbital,

   Complexity of value is a further idea above and beyond the orthogonality thesis which states that AIs don't automatically do the right thing and that we can have, e.g., paperclip maximizers. Even if we accept that paperclip maximizers are possible, and simple and nonforced, this wouldn't yet imply that it's very difficult to make AIs that do the right thing. If the right thing is very simple to encode - if there are value optimizers that are scarcely more complex than diamond maximizers - then it might not be especially hard to build a nice AI even if not all AIs are nice. Complexity of Value is the further proposition that says, no, this is forseeably quite hard - not because AIs have 'natural' anti-nice desires, but because niceness requires a lot of work to specify. [emphasis mine]

The example in the post below is not about an Artificial Intelligence literally at all! If the post were about what AIs supposedly can't do, the central example would have used an AI!

Contra this assertion, Yudkowksy-2007 was very capable of using parables. The "genie" in this article is easily recognized as metaphorically referring to an imagined AI. For example, here is Yudkowsky-2007 in Lost Purposes [? · GW], linking here:

I have seen many people go astray when they wish to the genie [? · GW] of an imagined AI, dreaming up wish after wish that seems good to them, sometimes with many patches and sometimes without even that pretense of caution.

Similarly, portions of Project Lawful [LW · GW] are about AI, That Alien Message [LW · GW] is about AI, and so forth.

I'm very sympathetic to the claim that this parable has been misinterpreted. This is a common problem with parables! They are good at provoking thought, they are good at strategic ambiguity, and they are bad at clear communication.

I'm not sympathetic to the claim that this post is not about AI literally at all.