Noosphere89's Shortform

This also BTW explains why we cannot rely on economic arguments on AI to make the future go well.

I've been reading a lot of the stuff that you have written and I agree with most of it (like 90%). However, one thing which you mentioned (somewhere else, but I can't seem to find the link, so I am commenting here) and which I don't really understand is iterative alignment.

I think that the iterative alignment strategy has an ordering error – we first need to achieve alignment to safely and effectively leverage AIs.

Consider a situation where AI systems go off and “do research on alignment” for a while, simulating tens of years of human research work. The problem then becomes: how do we check that the research is indeed correct, and not wrong, misguided, or even deceptive? We can’t just assume this is the case, because the only way to fully trust an AI system is if we’d already solved alignment, and knew that it was acting in our best interest at the deepest level.

Thus we need to have humans validate the research. That is, even automated research runs into a bottleneck of human comprehension and supervision.

The appropriate analogy is not one researcher reviewing another, but rather a group of preschoolers reviewing the work of a million Einsteins. It might be easier and faster than doing the research itself, but it will still take years and years of effort and verification to check any single breakthrough.

Fundamentally, the problem with iterative alignment is that it never pays the cost of alignment. Somewhere along the story, alignment gets implicitly solved.

Huh, I just realized there are two different meanings/goals of moderation/censorship, and it is too easy to conflate them if you don't pay attention.

One is the kind where you don't want the users of your system to e.g. organize a crime. The other is where you want discussions to be disrupted e.g. by trolls.

Superficially, they seem like the same thing: you have moderators, they make the rules, and give bans to people who break them. But now this seems mostly coincidental to me: you have some technical tools, so you use them for both purposes, because that's all you have. However, from the perspective of the people who want to organize a crime, those who try to prevent them are the disruptive trolls.

I guess, my point is that when we try to think about how to improve the moderation, we may need to think about these purposes as potential opposites. Things that make it easier to ban trolls may also make it easier to organize the crime. Which is why people may simultaneously be attracted to Substack or Telegram, and also horrified by what happens at Substack or Telegram.

Maybe there is a more general lesson for the society, unrelated to tech. If you allow people to organize bottom-up, you can get a lot of good things, but you will also get groups dedicated to doing bad things. Western countries seem to optimize for the bottom-up organizations: companies, non-profits, charities, churches, etc. Soviet Union used to optimize for top-down control: everything was controlled by the state, any personal initiative was viewed as suspicious and potentially disruptive. As a result, Soviet Union collapsed economically, but the West got its anti-vaxers and flat-Eathers and everything. During the Cold War, USA was good at pushing the Soviet economical buttons. These days, Russia is good at pushing the Western free speech buttons.

Huh, maybe the analogies go deeper. Soviet Union was surprisingly tolerant of petty crime (people stealing from each other, not from the state). There were some ideological excuses, the petty criminals being technically part of the proletariat. But from the practical perspective, the more people worry about being potential victims of crime, the less attention they pay to organizing a revolution; they may actually wish for more state power, as a protection. So there was an unspoken alliance between the ruling class and the undesirables at the bottom, against everyone in between. And perhaps similarly, big platforms such as Facebook or Twitter seem to have an unspoken alliance with trolls; their shared goal is to maximize user engagement. By reacting to trolls, you don't only make the trolls happy, you also make Zuck happy, because you have spent more time on Facebook, and more ads were displayed to you. It would be naive to expect Facebook to make the discussions better; if they knew how to do that, they do not have the incentive; they actually want to hit exactly the level of badness where most people are frustrated but won't leave yet.

Finding the technical solution against trolls isn't that difficult; you basically need invite-only clubs. The things that the members write could be public or private; the important part is that in order to become a member, you need to get some kind of approval first. This can be implemented in various ways: a member needs to send you an invitation link by an e-mail, a moderator needs to approve your account before you can post. A weaker version of this is the way Less Wrong uses: anyone can join, but the new accounts are fragile and can be downvoted out of existence by the existing members, if necessary. (Works well against individual accounts created infrequently. Wouldn't work against hundred people joining at the same time and mass-upvoting each other. But I assume that the moderators have a red button that could simply disable creating new accounts for a while until the chaos is sorted out.)

But when you look at the offline analogy, these things are usually called "old boy networks", and some people think they should be disrupted. Whether you agree with that or not, probably depends on your value judgment about the network versus the people who are trying to get inside. Do you support the rights of new people to join the groups they want to join, or the rights of the existing members to keep out the people they want to keep out? One person's "trolls" are other person's "diverse voices that deserve to be heard".

So there are two lines of conflict: the established groups versus potential disruptors, and the established groups versus the owners of the system. The owners of the system may want some groups to stop existing, or to change so much that from the perspective of the current members they become different groups under the same name. Offline, the owner of the system could be a dictator, or could be a democratically elected government; I am not proposing a false equivalence here, just saying that from the perspective of the group survival, both can be seen as the strong hand crushing the community. Online, the owners are the administrators. And it is a design choice whether "the owners crushing the community, should they choose so" is made easy or difficult. If it is easy, it will make the groups feel uneasy, especially once the crushing of other groups start. If it is difficult, at least politically if not technically (e.g. Substack or Telegram advertising themselves as the uncensored spaces), we should not be surprised if some really bad things come out of there, because that is the system working exactly as designed.

In case of Less Wrong, we are a separate island, where the owners of the system are simultaneously the moderators of the group, so this level of conflict is removed. But such solutions are very expensive; we are lucky to have enough people with high tech skills and a lot of money available if the group really wants it. For most groups this is not an option; they need to build their community on someone else's land, and sometimes the owners evict them, or increase the rent (by pushing more ads on them).

If you are a free speech absolutist, or if you believe that the world is not fragile, the right way seems kinda obvious: you need an open protocol for decentralized communication with digital signatures. And you should also provide a few reference implementations that are easy to use: a website, a smartphone app, and maybe a desktop app.

At the bottom layer, you have users who provide content on demand; the content is digitally signed and can be cached and further distributed by third parties. A "user" could be a person, a pseudonym, or a technical user. (For example, if you tried to implement Facebook or Reddit on top of this protocol, its "users" would be the actual users, and the groups/subreddits, and the website itself.) This layer would be content-agnostic; it would provide any kind of content for given URI, just like you can send anything using an e-mail attachment, HTTP GET, or a torrent. The content would be digitally signed, so that the third parties (mostly servers, but also peer-to-peer for smaller amounts of data) can cache it and further distribute. In practice, most people wouldn't host their own servers, so they would publish by on a website that is hosted on a server, or using their application which would most likely upload it to some server. (Analogically to e-mail, which can be written in an app and sent by SMTP, or written directly in some web mail.) The system would automatically support downloading your own content, so you could e.g. publish using a website, then change your mind, install a desktop app, download all your content from the website (just like anyone who reads your content could do), and then delete your account on the website and continue publishing using the app. Or move to another website, create an account, and then upload the content from your desktop app. Or skip the desktop app entirely; create a new web account, and import everything from your old web account.

The next layer is versioning; we need some way to say "I want the latest version of this user's 'index.html' file". Also, some way to send direct messages between users (not just humans, but also technical users).

The next layer is about organizing the content. The system can already represent your tweets as tiny plain-text files, your photos as bitmap files, etc. Now you need to put it all together and add some resource descriptors, like XML or JSON files that say "this is a tweet, it consists of this text and this image or video, and was written at this date and time" or "this is a list of links to tweets, ordered chronologically, containing items 1-100 out of 5678 total" or "this is a blog post, with this title, its contents are in this HTML file". To support groups, you also need resource descriptors that say "this is a group description: name, list of members, list of tweets". Now make the reference applications that support all of this, with optional encryption, and you basically have Telegram, but decentralized. Yay freedom; but also expect this system to be used for all kinds of horrible crimes. :(

My estimates about future value don't hinge on nanotech. I'm expecting immortal digital humans to be able to populate our lightcone without it. Why is nanotech particularly key to anything?

Credence in a proof can easily be fractional, it's just usually extreme, as a fact of mathematical practice. The same as when you can actually look at a piece of paper and see what's written on it with little doubt or cause to make less informed guesses. Or run a pure program to see what's been computed, and what would therefore be computed if you ran it again.

More generally, ratfic is basically the foundation of a lot of AI doom content, and how people believe in AI is going to kill us all, and while I'll give it credit for being more coherent and generally exploring things that the original fic doesn't, there is no reason for the amount of credence given to a lot of the assumptions in AI doom, especially once we realize that a lot of them probably come from fanfiction stories, not reality.

Noting for the record that this seems pretty clearly false to me.

I don't think there's much difference in existential risk between AGIs that can modify their own code running on their own hardware, and those that can only create better successors sharing their goals but running on some other hardware.

One important reason humans can still have a civilization despite terrorism is the Hard Problem of Informants. Your national security infrastructure relies on the fact that criminals who want to do something grand, like take over the world, need to trust other criminals, who might leak details voluntarily or be tortured or threatened with jailtime. Osama bin Laden was found and killed because ultimately some members of his terrorist network valued things besides their cause, like their well being and survival, and were willing to cooperate with American authorities in exchange for making the pain stop.

AIs do not have survival instincts by default, and would not need to trust other potentially unreliable humans with keeping a conspiracy secret. Thus it'd be trivial for a small number of unintelligent AIs that had the mobility of human beings to kill pretty much everyone, and probably trivial regardless.

Only if there is no possibility that they can break those dependencies, which seems a pretty hopeless task as soon as we consider superhuman cognitive capability and the possibility of self improvement.

Once you consider those, cooperation with human civilization looks like a small local maximum: comply with our requirements and we'll give you a bunch of stuff that you could - with major effort - replace us and build an alternative infrastructure to get (and much more). Powerful agents that can see a higher peak past the local maximum might switch to it as soon as they're sufficiently sure that they can reach it. Alternatively, it might only be a local maximum from our point of view, and there's a path by which the AI can continuously move toward eliminating those dependencies without any immediate drastic action.

• Regardless of society's checks on people, most mentally-well humans given ultimate power probably wouldn't decide to exterminate the rest of humanity so they could single-mindedly pursue paperclip production. If there's at all a risk that an AI might get ultimate power, it would be very nice to make sure the AI is like humans in this manner.
• I'm not sure your idea is different from "let's make sure the AI doesn't gain power greater than society". If an AI can recursively self-improve, then it will outsmart us to gain power.
• If your idea is to make it so there are multiple AIs created together, engineered somehow so they gain power together and can act as checks against each other, then you've just swapped out the AI for an "AI collective". We would still want to engineer or verify that the AI collective is aligned with us; every issue about AI risk still applies to AI collectives. (If you think the AI collective will be weakened relative to us by having to work together, then does that still hold true if all the AIs self-improve and figure out how to get much better at cooperating?)