A Solution for AGI/ASI Safety

edit: I took a quick look, and this looks really good! Big upvote. Definitely an impressive body of work. And the actual alignment proposal is along the lines of the ones I find most promising on the current trajectory toward AGI. I don't see a lot of references to existing alignment work, but I do see a lot of references to technical results, which is really useful and encouraging. Look at Daniel Kokatijlo's and other work emphasizing faithful chain of thought for similar suggestions.

edit continued: I find your framing a bit odd, in starting from an unaligned, uninterpretable AGI (but that's presumably under control). I wonder if you're thinking of something like o1 that basically does what it's told WRT answering questions/providing data but can't be considered overall aligned, and which isn't readily interpretable because we can't see its chain of thought? A brief post situating that proposal in relation to current or near-future systems would be interesting, at least to me.

Original:

Interesting. 100 pages is quite a time commitment. And you don't reference any existing work in your brief pitch here - that often signals that people haven't read the literature, so most of their work is redundant with existing stuff or missing big considerations that are part of the public discussion. But it seems unlikely that you'd put in 100 pages of writing without doing some serious reading as well.

Here's what I suggest: relate this to existing work, and reduce the reading-time ask, by commenting on related posts with a link to and summary of the relevant sections of your paper.

(Reposted from Facebook)

Hey Weibing Wang! Thanks for sharing. I just started skimming your paper, and I appreciate the effort you put into this; it combines many of the isolated work people have been working on.

I also appreciate your acknowledgement that your proposed solution has not undergone experimental validation, humility, and the suggestion that these proposed solutions need to be tested and iterated upon as soon as possible due to the practicalities of the real world.

I want to look into your paper again when I have time, but some quick comments:

1. You might be interested in reading up Drexler's CAIS stuff:

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-services-cais?sortedBy=new [? · GW] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LxNwBNxXktvzAko65/reframing-superintelligence-llms-4-years [LW · GW]

2. You should make the paper into a digestible format of sub-projects you can post to find collaborators to make progress on to verify some parts experimentally and potentially collaborate with some governance folks to turn some of your thoughts into a report that will get the eyeballs of important people on it.

3. Need more technical elaboration on the "how" to do x, not just "what" needs to be done.

Glanced through the comments and saw surprisingly positive responses, but reluctant to wade into a book-length reading commitment based on that. Are the core of your ideas on alignment compressible to fulfil the compelling insight heuristic [LW · GW]?

Your document says:

AI Controllability Rules

...

AI Must Not Self-Manage:

• Must Not Modify AI Rules: AI must not modify AI Rules. If inadequacies are identified, AI can suggest changes to Legislators but the final modification must be executed by them.
• Must Not Modify Its Own Program Logic: AI must not modify its own program logic (self-iteration). It may provide suggestions for improvement, but final changes must be made by its Developers.
• Must Not Modify Its Own Goals: AI must not modify its own goals. If inadequacies are identified, AI can suggest changes to its Users but the final modification must be executed by them.

I agree that, if those rules are followed, AI alignment is feasible in principle. The problem is, some people won't follow those rules if they have a large penalty to AI capabilities, and I think they will.

Skimmed ahead to the alignment section, since that's my interest. Some thoughts:

My first reaction to the perennial idea of giving everyone their own AI advocate is that this is a bargaining solution that could just as well be simulated within a single centralized agent, if one actually knew how to align AIs to individual people. My second typical reaction is that if one isn't actually doing value alignment to individuals, and is instead just giving people superpowerful AI assistants and seeing what happens, that seems like an underestimation of the power of superintelligence to cause winner-take-all dynamics in contexts where there are resources waiting to be grabbed, or where the laws of nature happen to favor offense over defense.

You anticipate these thoughts, which is nice!

My typical reaction to things like AI Rules is that they essentially have to contain a solution to the broad/ambitious value alignment problem anyway in order to work, so why not cut out the middlemen of having mini-'goals' overseen by aligned-goal-containing Rules and just build the AI that does what's good.

You agree with the first part. I think where you disagree with the second part is that you think that if we oversee the AIs and limit the scope of their tasks, we can get away with leaky or hacky human values in the Rules in a way we couldn't get away with if we tried to just directly get an AI to fulfill human values without limitations. I worry that this still underestimates superintelligence - even tame-seeming goals from users can test all the boundaries you've tried to set, and any leaks ('Oh, I can't lie to the human, but I can pick a true thing to say which I predict will get the outcome that I think fulfills the goal, and I'm very good at that') in those boundaries will be flowed through in a high-pressure stream.

If there's an assumption I skimmed past that the AI assistants we give everyone won't actually be very smart, or will have goals restricted to the point that it's hard for superintelligence to do anything useful, I think this puts the solution back into the camp of "never actually use a superintelligent AI to make real-world plans," which is nice to aspire to but I think has a serious human problem, and anyhow I'm still interested in alignment plans that work on AI of arbitrary intelligence.

Nice work! Quite comprehensive and well explained. A lot of overlap with existing published ideas, but also some novel ideas.

I intend to give some specific suggestions for details I think are worth adding. In the meantime, I'm going to add a link to your work to my list of such works at the top of my own (much shorter) AI safety plan. I recommend you take a look at mine, since mine is short but touches on a few points I think could be valuable to your thinking. Also, the links and resources in mine might be of interest to you if there's some you haven't seen.

A path to Human Autonomy [LW · GW]

I actually really liked your alignment plan. But I do wonder how it would be able to deal with 5 "big" organizational problems of iterative alignment:

1. Moving slowly and carefully is annoying. There's a constant tradeoff about getting more done, and elevated risk. Employees who don't believe in the risk will likely try to circumvent or goodhart the security procedures. Filtering for for employees willing to take the risk seriously (or training them to) is difficult. There's also the fact that many security procedures are just security theater. Engineers have sometimes been burned on overzealous testing practices. Figuring out a set of practices that are actually helpful, that your engineers and researchers have good reason to believe in, is a nontrivial task.

2. Noticing when it's time to pause is hard. The failure modes are subtle, and noticing things is just generally hard unless you're actively paying attention, even if you're informed about the risk. It's especially hard to notice things that are inconvenient and require you to abandon major plans.

3. Getting an org to pause indefinitely is hard. Projects have inertia. My experience as a manager, is having people sitting around waiting for direction from me makes it hard to think. Either you have to tell people "stop doing anything" which is awkwardly demotivating, or "Well, I dunno, you figure it out something to do?" (in which case maybe they'll be continuing to do capability-enhancing work without your supervision) or you have to actually give them something to do (which takes up cycles that you'd prefer to spend on thinking about the dangerous AI you're developing). Even if you have a plan for what your capabilities or product workers should do when you pause, if they don't know what that plans is, they might be worried about getting laid off. And then they may exert pressure that makes it feel harder to get ready to pause. (I've observed many management decisions where even though we knew what the right thing to do was, conversations felt awkward and tense and the manager-in-question developed an ugh field around it, and put it off)

4. People can just quit the company and work elsewhere if they don't agree with the decision to pause. If some of your employees are capabilities researchers who are pushing the cutting-edge forward, you need them actually bought into the scope of the problem to avoid this failure mode. Otherwise, even though "you" are going slowly/carefully, your employees will go off and do something reckless elsewhere.

5. This all comes after an initial problem, which is that your org has to end up doing this plan, instead of some other plan. And you have to do the whole plan, not cutting corners. If your org has AI capabilities/scaling teams and product teams that aren't bought into the vision of this plan, even if you successfully spin the "slow/careful AI plan" up within your org, the rest of your org might plow ahead.

I didn't read the 100 pages, but the content seems extremely intelligent and logical. I really like the illustrations, they are awesome.

A few questions.

1: In your opinion, which idea in your paper is the most important, most new (not already focused on by others), and most affordable (can work without needing huge improvements in political will for AI safety)?

2: The paper suggests preventing AI from self-iteration, or recursive self improvement. My worry is that once many countries (or companies) have access to AI which are far better and faster than humans at AI research, each one will be tempted to allow a very rapid self improvement cycle.

Each country might fear that if it doesn't allow it, one of the other countries will, and that country's AI will be so intelligent it can engineer self replicating nanobots which take over the world. This motivates each country to allow the recursive self improvement, even if the AI's methods of AI development become so advanced they are inscrutable by human minds.

How can we prevent this?

Edit: sorry I didn't read the paper. But when I skimmed it you did have a section on "AI Safety Governance System," and talked about an international organization to get countries to do the right thing. I guess one question is, why would an international system succeed in AI safety, when current international systems have so far failed to prevent countries from acting selfishly in ways which severely harms other countries (e.g. all wars, exploitation, etc.)?