Quick takes on "AI is easy to control"

I want to see a dialogue happen between someone with Nate's beliefs and someone with Nora's beliefs. The career decisions of hundreds of people, including myself, depend on clearly thinking through the arguments behind various threat models. I find it pretty embarrassing for the field that there is mutual contempt between people who disagree the most, when such a severe disagreement means the greatest opportunity to understand basic dynamics behind AGI.

Sure, communication is hard sometimes so maybe the dialogue is infeasible, and in fact I can't think of any particular people I'd want to do this. It still makes me sad.

(Didn't consult Nora on this; I speak for myself)

I only briefly skimmed this response, and will respond even more briefly.

Re "Re: "AIs are white boxes""

You apparently completely misunderstood the point we were making with the white box thing. It has ~nothing to do with mech interp. It's entirely about whitebox optimization being better at controlling stuff than blackbox optimization. This is true even if the person using the optimizers has no idea how the system functions internally. 

Re: "Re: "Black box methods are sufficient"" (and the other stuff about evolution)

Evolution analogies are bad. There are many specific differences between ML optimization processes and biological evolution that predictably result in very different high level dynamics. You should not rely on one to predict the other, as I have argued extensively [LW · GW] elsewhere [LW · GW]. 
 

Trying to draw inferences about ML from bio evolution is only slightly less absurd than trying to draw inferences about cheesy humor from actual dairy products. Regardless of the fact they can both be called "optmization processes", they're completely different things, with different causal structures responsible for their different outcomes, and crucially, those differences in causal structure explain their different outcomes. There's thus no valid inference from "X happened in biological evolution" to "X will eventually happen in ML", because X happening in biological evolution is explained by evolution-specific details that don't appear in ML (at least for most alignment-relevant Xs that I see MIRI people reference often, like the sharp left turn).

Re: "Re: Values are easy to learn, this mostly seems to me like it makes the incredibly-common conflation between "AI will be able to figure out what humans want" (yes; obviously; this was never under dispute) and "AI will care""

This wasn't the point we were making in that section at all. We were arguing about concept learning order and the ease of internalizing human values versus other features for basing decisions on. We were arguing that human values are easy features to learn / internalize / hook up to decision making, so on any natural progression up the learning capacity ladder, you end up with an AI that's aligned before you end up with one that's so capable it can destroy the entirety of human civilization by itself. 
 

Re "Even though this was just a quick take, it seemed worth posting in the absence of a more polished response from me, so, here we are."

I think you badly misunderstood the post (e.g., multiple times assuming we're making an argument we're not, based on shallow pattern matching of the words used: interpreting "whitebox" as meaning mech interp and "values are easy to learn" as "it will know human values"), and I wish you'd either take the time to actually read / engage with the post in sufficient depth to not make these sorts of mistakes, or not engage at all (or at least not be so rude when you do it). 
 

(Note that this next paragraph is speculation, but a possibility worth bringing up, IMO): 

As it is, your response feels like you skimmed just long enough to pattern match our content to arguments you've previously dismissed, then regurgitated your cached responses to those arguments. Without further commenting on the merits of our specific arguments, I'll just note that this is a very bad habit to have if you want to actually change your mind in response to new evidence/arguments about the feasibility of alignment.

Re: "Overall take: unimpressed."

I'm more frustrated and annoyed than "unimpressed". But I also did not find this response impressive. 

Re: Values are easy to learn, this mostly seems to me like it makes the incredibly-common conflation between "AI will be able to figure out what humans want" (yes; obviously; this was never under dispute) and "AI will care" (nope; not by default; that's the hard bit).

I think it's worth reflecting on what type of evidence would be sufficient to convince you that we're actually making progress on the "caring" bit of alignment and not merely the "understanding" bit. Because I currently don't see what type of evidence you'd accept beyond near-perfect mechanistic interpretability.

I think current LLMs demonstrate a lot more than mere understanding of human values; they seem to actually 'want' to do things for you, in a rudimentary behavioral sense. When I ask GPT-4 to do some task for me, it's not just demonstrating an understanding of the task: it's actually performing actions in the real world that result in the task being completed. I think it's totally reasonable, prima facie, to admit this as evidence that we are making some success at getting AIs to "care" about doing tasks for users.

It's not extremely strong evidence, because future AIs could be way harder to align, maybe there's ultimately no coherent sense in which GPT-4 "cares" about things, and perhaps GPT-4 is somehow just "playing the training game" despite seemingly having limited situational awareness. 

But I think it's valid evidence nonetheless, and I think it's wrong to round this datum off to a mere demonstration of "understanding". 

We typically would not place such a high standard on other humans. For example, if a stranger helped you in your time of need, you might reasonably infer that the stranger cares about you to some extent, not merely that they "understand" how to care about you, or that they are merely helping people out of a desire to appear benevolent as part of a long-term strategy to obtain power. You may not be fully convinced they really care about you because of a single incident, but surely it should move your credence somewhat. And further observations could move your credence further still.

Alternative explanations of aligned behavior we see are always logically possible, and it's good to try to get a more mechanistic understanding of what's going on before we confidently declare that alignment has been solved. But behavioral evidence is still meaningful evidence for AI alignment, just as it is for humans.

Overall take: unimpressed.

Very simple gears in a subculture's worldview can keep being systematically misperceived if it's not considered worthy of curious attention. On the local llama subreddit, I keep seeing assumptions that AI safety people call for never developing AGI, or claim that the current models can contribute to destroying the world. Almost never is there anyone who would bother to contradict such claims or assumptions. This doesn't happen because it's difficult to figure out, this happens because the AI safety subculture is seen as unworthy of engagement, and so people don't learn what it's actually saying, and don't correct each other on errors about what it's actually saying.

This gets far worse with more subtle details, the standard of willingness to engage is raised higher to actually study what the others are saying, when it would be difficult to figure out even with curious attention. Rewarding engagement is important.

I wish this post was never written at all, because as it is, I find it far too unnuanced, and your reasoning for not reading it over fully isn't all that great, as it's I think only 3000 words in the document.

In general, I think this is one of those cases where you need to slow down, and actually read over the document you plan to criticize, and this would be a better post if it did that.

“AI will be able to figure out what humans want” (yes; obviously; this was never under dispute)

I think the problem is that how existing systems figure out what humans want doesn't seem to do anything with your theory of why it supposed to be relatively easy. Therefore the theory's prediction of alignment being relatively hard is also doesn't have anything to do with reality.

I think a very simple and general pessimistic take is "AI will make human thinking irrelevant". It almost doesn't matter if it happens by subversion or just normal economic activity. One way or another, we'll end up with a world where human thinking is irrelevant, and nobody has described a good world like that.

The only good scenarios are where human thinking somehow avoids "habitat destruction". Maybe by uplifting, or explicit "habitat preservation", or something else. But AI companies are currently doing the opposite, reallocating more and more tasks to AI outright, so it's hard to be an optimist.

I appreciate you making an unambiguously bad post so that your unfinished thoughts can be critiqued. I look forward to the good post made from updating on comments.

Edit: this is not sarcasm and I mean it to be an actual statement of approval. Please actually do this more. This comes from a philosophy that one should post often enough to be heavily downvoted sometimes, to <?avoid confirmation bias?>