Is AI Alignment a pseudoscience?

Rather than Popper, we're probably more likely to go with Kuhn and call this "pre-paradigmatic." Studying something without doing science experiments isn't the real problem (history departments do fine, as does math, as do engineers designing something new), the problem is that we don't have a convenient and successful way of packaging the problems and expected solutions (a paradigm).

That said, it's not like people aren't trying. Some papers that I think represent good (totally non-sciency) work are Quantilizers, Logical Induction, and Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning. These are all from a while ago, but that's because I picked things that have stood the test of time.

If you only want more "empirical" work (even though it's still in simulation) you might be interested in Deep RL From Human Preferences, An Introduction to Circuits, or the MineRL Challenges (which now have winners).

The objects in question (super-intelligent AIs) don't currently exist, so we don't have access to real examples of them to study. One might still want to study them because it seems like there's a high chance they will exist. So indirect access seems necessary, e.g. conceptual analysis, mathematics, hand-wavy reasoning (specifically, reasoning that's hand-wavy about some things but tries to be non-hand-wavy about at least some other things), reasoning by analogy with non-super-intelligent things like humans, animals, evolution, or contemporary machine learning (on which we can do more rigorous reasoning and experiments). This is unfortunate but seems unavoidable. Do you see a way to study super-intelligent AI more rigorously or scientifically?

The field of AI alignment is definitely not a rigorous scientific field, but nor is it anything like a fictional-world-building exercise. It is a crash program to address an existential risk that appears to have a decent chance of happening, and soon in the timescale of civilization, let alone species.

By its very nature it should not be a scientific field in the Popperian sense. By the time we have any experimental data on how any artificial general superintelligence behaves, the field is irrelevant. If we could be sure that it wasn't possible to happen soon, we could take more time to probe out the field and start the likely centuries-long process to make it more rigorous.

So I answer your question by rejecting it. You have presented a false dichotomy.

There are multiple questions here: is AGI an existential threat?, and if so, how can we safely make and use AGI? Or if that is not possible, how can we prevent it being made?

There are strong arguments that the answer to the first question is yes. See, for example, everything that Eliezer has said on the subject. Many others agree; some disagree. Read and judge.

What can be done to avoid catastrophe? The recent dialogues with Eliezer posted here indicate that he has no confidence in most of the work that has been done on this. The people who are doing it presumably disagree. Since AGI has not yet been created, the work is necessarily theoretical. Evidence here consists of mathematical frameworks, arguments, and counterexamples.

I'd rather call it proto- not pseudo- science. Currently it's alchemy before chemistry was a thing.

There is a real field somewhere adjacent to the discussions lead here and people are actively searching for it. AGI is coming , you can argue the timeline, but not the event (well, unless humanity destroys itself with something else first). And artificial systems we now have often shows unexpected and difficult to predict properties. So the task "how can we increase difficulty and capabilities of AI systems, possibly to the point of AGI, while simultaneously decreasing unpredictable and unexpected side effects" is perfectly reasonable.

The problem is that current understanding of the systems and entire framework is on the level of Ptolemy astronomy. A lot of things discussed at this moment will be discarded, but some grains of gold will become new science.

TBH I have a lot of MAJOR questions to the current discourse, it's plagued by misunderstanding of what and how is possible in artificial intelligence systems, but I don't think it should stop. The only way we can find the solution is by working on it, even if 99% of the work will be meaningless in the end.

There is a huge diversity in posts on AI alignment on this forum. I'd agree that some of them are pseudo-scientific, but many more posts fall in one of the following categories:

1. authors follow the scientific method of some discipline, or use multidisciplinary methods,

2. authors admit outright that they are in a somewhat pre-scientific state, i.e. they do not have a method/paradigm yet that they have any confidence in, or

3. authors are talking about their gut feelings of what might be true, and again freely admit this

Arguably, posts of type 2 and 3 above are not scientific, but as they do not pretend to be, we can hardly call them pseudo-scientific.

That being said, this forum is arguably a community, but its participants do not cohere into anything as self-consistent as a single scientific or even pseudo-scientific field.

In a scientific or pseudo-scientific field, the participants would at least agree somewhat on what the basic questions and methods are, and would agree somewhat on which main questions are open and which have been closed. On this forum, there is no such agreement. Notably, there are plenty of people here who make a big deal out of distrusting not just their own paradigms, but also those used by everybody else, including of course those used by 'mainstream' AI research.

If there is any internally coherent field this forum resembles, it is the field of philosophy, where you can score points by claiming to have a superior lack of knowledge, compared to all these other deep thinkers.

It's a mixed bag. A lot of near term work is scientific, in that theories are proposed and experiments run to test them, but from what I can tell that work is also incredibly myopic and specific to the details of present day algorithms and whether any of it will generalize to systems further down the road is exceedingly unclear. 

The early writings of Bostom and Yudkowsky I would classify as a mix of scientifically informed futurology and philosophy. As with science fiction, they are laying out what might happen. There is no science of psychohistory and while there are better and worse ways of forecasting the future (see "Superforecasting") when it comes to forecasting how future technology will play out it's especially impossible because future technology depends on knowledge we by definition don't have right now. Still, the work has value even if it is not scientific, by alerting us to what might happen. It is scientifically informed because at the very least the futures they describe don't violate any laws of physics. That sort of futurology work I think is very valubale because it explores the landscape of possible futures so we can identify the futures we don't want so we we can takes steps to avoid those futures, even if the probability of any given future scenario is not clear. 

A lot of the other work is pre-paradigmatic, as others have mentioned, but that doesn't make it pseudoscience. Falsifiability is the key to demarcation. The work that borders on pseudoscience revolves heavily around the construction of what I call "free floating" systems. These are theoretical systems that are not tied into existing scientific theory (examples: laws of physics, theory of evolution, theories of cognition, etc) and also not grounded in enough detail that we can test whether the ideas / theories are useful/correct right now. They aren't easily falsifiable. These free-floating sets of ideas tend to be hard for outsiders to learn since they involve a lot of specialized jargon and because sorting wheat from chaffe is hard because they don't bother to subject their work to the rigors of peer review and publication in conferences / journals, which provide valuable signals to outsiders as to what is good or bad (instead we end up with a huge lists of Alignment Forum posts and other blog posts and PDFs with no easy way of figuring out what is worth reading). Some of this type of work blends into abstract mathematics. Safety frameworks like iterated distillation & debate, iterated amplification, and a lot of the MIRI work on self-modifying agents seem pretty free-floating to me (some of these ideas may be testable in some sort of absurdly simple toy environment today, but what these toy models tell us about more general scenarios is hard to say without a more general theory). A lot of the futurology stuff is also free floating (a hallmark of free floating stuff is zany large concept maps like here [? · GW]). These free floating things are not worthless but they also aren't scientific.  

Finally, there's much that is philosophy. First, of course, there's debates about ethics. Secondly there's debates about how to define basic terms that are heavily used like intelligence, general vs narrow intelligence, information, explanation, knowledge, and understanding. 

Reasoning about AGI is similar to reasoning about black holes: both of these do not necessarily lead to pseudo-science, though both also attract a lot of fringe thinkers, and not all of them think robustly all of the time

For the two to be similar, there needs to be an equivalent to the laws of physics. Then the cranks would be the people who are ignoring them. But, despite the expenditure of a lot of effort, no specific laws of AGI have been found .

(Of course, AGI is subject to the same general laws as any form of computation).

I agree, I wouldn't consider AI alignment to be scientific either. How is it a "problem" though?