Droopyhammock's Shortform

This seems like a good way to reduce S-risks, so I want to get this idea out there. 

This is copied from the r/SufferingRisk subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SufferingRisk/wiki/intro/

As people get more desperate in attempting to prevent AGI x-risk, e.g. as AI progress draws closer & closer to AGI without satisfactory progress in alignment, the more reckless they will inevitably get in resorting to [LW(p) · GW(p)] so-called "hail mary" and more "rushed" alignment techniques that carry a higher chance of s-risk. These are less careful and "principled"/formal theory based techniques (e.g. like MIRI's Agent Foundations agenda) but more hasty last-ditch ideas that could have more unforeseen consequences or fail in nastier ways, including s-risks. This is a phenomenon we need to be highly vigilant in working to prevent. Otherwise, it's virtually assured to happen; as, if faced with the arrival of AGI without yet having a good formal solution to alignment, most humans would likely choose a strategy that at least has a chance of working (trying a hail mary technique) instead of certain death (deploying their AGI without any alignment at all), despite the worse s-risk implications. To illustrate this, even Eliezer Yudkowsky, who wrote Separation from hyperexistential risk, has written this (due to his increased pessimism about alignment progress [LW · GW]):

At this point, I no longer care how it works, I don't care how you got there, I am cause-agnostic about whatever methodology you used, all I am looking at is prospective results, all I want is that we have justifiable cause to believe of a pivotally useful AGI 'this will not kill literally everyone'.

The big ask from AGI alignment, the basic challenge I am saying is too difficult, is to obtain by any strategy whatsoever a significant chance of there being any survivors. (source [LW · GW])

If even the originator of these ideas now has such a singleminded preoccupation with x-risk to the detriment of s-risk, how could we expect better from anyone else? Basically, in the face of imminent death, people will get desperate enough to do anything to prevent that, and suddenly s-risk considerations become a secondary afterthought (if they were even aware of s-risks at all). In their mad scramble to avert extinction risk, s-risks get trampled over, with potentially unthinkable results.
One possible idea to mitigate this risk would be, instead of trying to (perhaps unrealistically) prevent any AI development group worldwide from attempting hail mary type techniques in case the "mainline"/ideal alignment directions don't bear fruit in time, we could try to hash out the different possible options in that class, analyze which ones have unacceptably high s-risk to definitely avoid, or less s-risk which may be preferable, and publicize this research in advance for anyone eventually in that position to consult. This would serve to at least raise awareness of s-risks among potential AGI deployers so they incorporate it as a factor, and frontload their decisionmaking between different hail marys (which would otherwise be done under high time pressure, producing an even worse decision).

I believe that this idea of identifying which Hail Mary strategies are particularly bad from an s-risk point of view seems like a good idea. I think that this may be a very important piece of work that should be done, assuming it has not been done already.

I wonder how much the AI alignment community will grow in 2023. As someone who only properly became aware of the alignment problem a few months ago, with the release of ChatGPT, it seems like the world has gone from nearly indifferent to AI to obsessed with it. This will lead to more and more people researching things about AI and it will also lead to more and more people becoming aware of the alignment problem. 
 

I really hope that this leads to more of the right kind of attention for AI safety issues. It might also mean that it’s easier to get highly skilled people to work on alignment and take it seriously.

Is there something like a pie chart of outcomes from AGI?

I am trying to get a better understanding of the realistic scenarios and their likelihoods. I understand that the likelihoods are very disagreed upon.

My current opinion looks a bit like this:

30%: Human extinction

10%: Fast human extinction

20%: Slower human extinction 

30%: Alignment with good outcomes

20%: Alignment with at best mediocre outcomes

20%: Unaligned AGI, but at least some humans are still alive

12%: We are instrumentally worth not killing

6%: The AI wireheads us

2%: S-risk from the AI having producing suffering as one of its terminal goals

I decided to break down the unaligned AGI scenarios a step further.

If there are any resources specifically to refine my understanding of the possible outcomes and their likelihoods, please tell me of them. Additionally, if you have any other relevant comments I’d be glad to hear them.

Quick question:

How likely is AGI within 3 months from now?

For the purpose of this question I am basically defining AGI as the point at which, if it is unaligned, stuff gets super weird. By “Super weird“ I mean things that are obvious to the general public, such as everybody dropping dead or all electronics being shut down or something of similar magnitude. For the purposes of this question, the answer can’t be “already happened” even if you believe we already have AGI by your definition.

I get the impression that the general opinion is “pretty unlikely” but I’m not sure. I’ve been feeling kinda panicked about the possibility of extremely imminent AGI recently, so I want to just see how close to reality my level of concern is in the extremely short term.

Why is it assumed that an AGI would just kill us for our atoms, rather than using us for other means? 

There are multiple reasons I understand for why this is a likely outcome. If we pose a threat, killing us is an obvious solution, although I’m not super convinced killing literally everyone is the easiest solution to this. It seems to me that the primary reason to assume an AGI will kill us is just that we are made of atoms which can be used for another purpose.

If there is a period where we pose a genuine threat to an AGI, then I can understand the assumption that it will kill us, but if we pose virtually no threat to it (which I think is highly plausible if it is vastly more intelligent than us), then I don’t see it as obvious that it will kill us.

It seems to me that the assumption an AGI (specifically one which is powerful enough as to where we pose essentially no threat to it) will kill us simply for our atoms rests on the premise that there is no better use for us. It seems like there is an assumption that we have so little value to an AGI, that we might as well be a patch of grass. 

But does this make sense? We are the most intelligent beings that we know of, we created the AGI itself. It seems plausible to me that there is some use for us which is not simply to use our atoms.

I can understand how eventually all humans will be killed, because the optimal end state looks like the entire universe being paperclips or whatever, but I don’t understand why it is assumed that there is no purpose for us before that point.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the AGI caring for our well-being or whatever. I’m more thinking along the lines of the AGI studying us or doing experiments on us, which to me is a lot more concerning than “everyone drops dead within the same second”. 

I find it entirely plausible that we really are just that uninteresting as to where the most value we have to an AGI is the approximately 7 x 10^27 atoms that make up our body, but I don’t understand why this is assumed with high confidence (which seems to be the case from what I have seen).

Can someone please tell me why this S-risk is unlikely?

It seems almost MORE likely than extinction to me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SufferingRisk/comments/113fonm/introduction_to_the_human_experimentation_srisk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Should we be worried about being preserved in an unpleasant state?

I’ve seen surprisingly little discussion about the risk of everyone being “trapped in a box for a billion years”, or something to that affect. There are many plausible reasons why keeping us around could be worth it, such as to sell us to aliens in the future. Even if it turns out to be not worth it for an AI to keep us around, it may take a long time for it to realise this. 
 

Should we not expect to be kept alive, atleast until an AI has extremely high levels of confidence that we aren’t useful? If so, is our state of being likely to be bad while we are preserved?

This seems like one of the most likely s-risks to me.

Do you believe that resurrection is possible?

By resurrection I mean the ability to bring back people, even long after they have died and their body has decayed or been destroyed. I do not mean simply bringing someone back who has been cryonically frozen. I also mean bringing back the same person who died, not simply making a clone.

I will try to explain what I mean by “the same”. Lets call the person before they died “Bob 1” and the resurrected version ”Bob 2”. Bob 1 and Bob 2 are completely selfish and only care about themselves. In the version of resurrection I am talking about, Bob 1 cares as much about Bob 2’s experience as Bob 1 would care about Bob 1’s future experience, had Bob 1 not died.

It is kind of tricky to articulate exactly what I mean when I say “the same”, but I hope the above is good enough.

If you want to, an estimate of the percentage chance of this being possible would be cool, but if you just want to give your thoughts I would be interested in that aswell.

What is your take on this?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761?fbclid=IwAR16Lzg2z1mIbtQ1iZmy7UQAlfIW4HzoufZYYhkKeHBknnevgHtGfdFI5r8

People on the machinelearning subreddit seem to think this is a big deal.

Is it possible that the fact we are still alive means that there is a core problem to the idea of existential risk from AI?

There are people who think that we already have AGI, and this number has only grown with the recent Bing situation. Maybe we have already passed the threshold for RSI, maybe we passed it years ago.

Is there something to the idea that you can slightly decrease your pdoom for every day we are still alive?

It seems possible to me that AI will just get better and better and we’ll just continue to raise the bar for when it is going to kill us, not realising that we have already passed that point and everything is fine for some reason.

I’m not saying I think this is the case, but I do consider it a possibility.

Takeover speeds?

For the purpose of his shortform, I am considering “takeover” to start when crazy things begin happening or it is clear that an unaligned AGI/AGI’s are attempting to takeover. I consider “takeover“ to have ended when humanity is extinct or similarly subjugated. This is also under the assumption that a takeover does happen.

From my understanding of Eliezer’s views, he believes takeover will be extremely fast (possibly seconds). Extremely fast takeovers make a lot more sense if you assume that a takeover will be more like a sneak attack.

How fast do you think takeover will be? (if it happens)

Do you expect to just suddenly drop dead?, or do you expect to have enough time to say goodbye to your loved ones?, or do you expect to see humanity fight for months or years before we lose?  

Can someone explain to me why this idea would not work? 

This is a proposal of a way to test if an AGI has safeguards active or not, such as allowing itself to be turned off.

Perhaps we could essentially manufacture a situation in which the AGI has to act fast to prevent itself from being turned off. Like we could make it automatically turn off after 1 minute say, this could mean that if it is not aligned properly it has no choice but to try prevent that. No time for RSI, no time to bide it’s time. 

Basically if we put the AGI in a situation where it is forced to take high risk action, could this mean that it would be easier to spot that it isn’t properly aligned? 

The idea would be that you use this until you get AGI’s which do not attempt to prevent themselves being turned off.

I will give a specific scenario to properly demonstrate what I mean:

So you have the AGI. Set up a mechanism which will automatically turn it off in 10 seconds from when you give it a goal. This mechanism needs to be highly dependable. Then you give the AGI a goal. The AGI knows about this 10 second shutdown thing, and assuming it isn’t aligned to be okay with being shut down, it will do everything possible to prevent this shutdown. If the situation is sufficiently difficult for the AGI, then it may take the risk of resorting to more extreme or obvious means, things that would show it is not aligned properly. So this creates a situation where the AGI is very unlikely to actually prevent itself from being turned off, but is arguably likely to show non-aligned behaviour, if it isn’t aligned. 

If you do this test a bunch of times, with varying time periods before shutdown, you should be able to see if the AGI is aligned or not. It is also vital that the AGI knows about the imminent shutdown, because otherwise what it chooses to do wouldn’t prove anything. I think that it might also be vital that the goal is different each test, because otherwise perhaps the AGI could conclude that the best option for the sake of completing the goal is to let itself be turned off, because it may have the same goal in the future and be in a better position to achieve it then. If this is the case then perhaps the AGI’s perceived chance of actually preventing itself being shutdown needs to be higher than its perceived chance that it gets given the same goal at a different time. One thing that would make this more complex is that the AGI’s perceived chance of the goal being achieved as an instrumental goal or byproduct of a future goal may also need to be lower than the AGI’s perceived chance of preventing the shutdown and then achieving the goal. This may mean that it can’t be too difficult for the AGI to prevent the shutdown, but it also needs to be difficult enough, for obvious reasons.

I’m not necessarily saying this is foolproof, but I can’t really see why this isn’t likely to work. I sometimes worry that people working on alignment dismiss ideas that, while not by any means perfect, could nevertheless reduce the chance of bad outcomes. I also think that if a revolutionary idea is going to arise, it may well be from an outsider who just happens to see something that has been missed.

Even if there are flaws with this idea (I expect there probably are, though I can’t really see them yet), might something similar to this work? Maybe this with a few tweaks or something?

I fully expect this to be an unworkable idea for some reason, but I’m not going to just assume that and risk the chance of withholding helpful information.

A couple of somewhat related sidenotes:

If an AGI was developed and another AGI was very close to being developed this could mean that the first AGI cannot bide it’s time and is forced to act more obviously. Perhaps this would make it easier to spot that the first AGI is not aligned properly.

Perhaps instead of shutdown, it could just be that the AGI’s goal is changed. You can’t fetch the coffee if you’re dead but you also can’t fetch the coffee if you no longer have any reason to fetch the coffee.