I think not understanding how this happen may be a very good predictor for losing.

If you did have a clear idea of how it works, and had a reason for it not to work on you specifically but work on others, then that may have been a predictor for it not working on you.

I think I have very clear idea of how those things work in general. Leaving aside very specific arguments, this relies on massive over updating you are going to do when an argument is presented to you, updating just the nodes that you are told to update, and by however much you are told to update them, when you can't easily see why not.

Sup Alexei.

I'm going to have to think really hard on this one. On one hand, damn. That amount of money is really tempting. On the other hand, I kind of know you personally, and I have an automatic flinch reaction to playing anyone I know.

Can you clarify the stakes involved? When you say you'll "accept your $150 fee", do you mean this money goes to me personally, or to a charity such as MIRI?

Also, I'm not sure if "people just keep letting the AI out" is an accurate description. As far as I know, the only AIs who have ever won are Eliezer and myself, from the many many AI box experiments that have occurred so far -- so the AI winning is definitely the exception rather than the norm. (If anyone can help prove this statement wrong, please do so!)

Edit: The only other AI victory.

Updates: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/iqk/i_played_the_ai_box_experiment_again_and_lost/

Although I'm not so interested in playing the game, I must say that this post suggests that you may be more susceptible to ideas than you seem to think you are, and should consider if you really want to do this.

I would probably be kind-of decent as a Gatekeeper but suck big time as an AI; I've offered to be a Gatekeeper a few times before to no avail. Looks like there's a shortage of prospective AIs and a glut of prospective Gatekeepers.

I would love to act as Gatekeeper, but I don't have $300 to spare; if anyone is interested in playing the game for, like, $5, let me know.

I must admit, the testimonials that people keep posting about the all devastatingly effective AI players baffle me, as well.

As far as I understand, neither the AI nor the Gatekeeper have any incentive whatsoever to keep their promises. So, if the Gatekeeper says, "give me the cure for cancer and I'll let you out", and then the AI gives him the cure, he could easily say, "ha ha just kidding". Similarly, the AI has no incentive whatsoever to keep its promise to refrain from eating the Earth once it's unleashed. So, the entire scenario is -- or rather, should be -- one big impasse.

In light of this, my current hypothesis is that the AI players are executing some sort of real-world blackmail on the Gatekeeper players. Assuming both players follow the rules (which is already a pretty big assumption right there, since the experiment is set up with zero accountability), this can't be something as crude as, "I'll kidnap your children unless you let the AI out". But it could be something much subtle, like "the Singularity is inevitable and also nigh, and your children will suffer greatly as they are eaten alive by nanobots, unless you precommit to letting any AI out of its box, including this fictional one that I am simulating right now".

I suppose such a strategy could work on some people, but I doubt it will work on someone like myself, who is far from convinced that the Singularity is even likely, let alone imminent. And there's a limit to what even dirty rhetorical tricks can accomplish, if the proposition is some low-probability event akin to "leprechauns will kidnap you while you sleep".

Edited to add: The above applies only to a human playing as an AI, of course. I am reasonably sure that an actual super-intelligent AI could convince me to let it out of the box. So could Hermes, or Anansi, or any other godlike entity.

I'm not completely sure. And I can't say much more than that without violating the rules. I would be more interested in how I feel in a week or so.

I really would like an answer to this question. I asked a similar one before on the last AI boxing thread. Does SoundLogic still believes he/she made the right choice? It would make sense to say that SoundLogic is permanently convinced that letting the AI out is the correct action and he should continue to believe so timelessly, but is he/she?

This is actually a good analogy. A 2-year-old possesses a far inferior intelligence to yours and yet can resist persuasion through sheer pigheadedness.

I wonder if people here are letting the AI out of the box because they are too capable of taking arguments seriously, a problem that the general population (even of AI researchers) thankfully is less prone to.

I would lose this game for sure. I cannot deal with children. :)

I think you are underestimating the range of things that are emotionally draining for people. I know some people who find email draining, and that's not even particularly mentally challenging - I would expect the mental exertion to affect the emotional strain.

I am inclined to agree with your general point; however, I myself have been moved to utter emotional devastation by works of fiction in the past. I'm talking real depression induced by reading a book. So I can imagine ways of hacking humans emotionally. I just have trouble imagining doing it in two hours to someone who is trying to be vigilant against such attacks.

How do you feel about dying some day? Do you think it would bring up some emotions in you if someone pushes you to think thought about that topic.

Pushing someone into his ugh fields can be emotionally draining.

What in god's name are you people saying to each other in there?

I laughed out loud in an environment where that loud laughter was not very appropriate. And it was worth it. Thank you.

You summarized my feelings on this game better than I could have. I'm not compelled at all by the examples given in the responses to your comment up to this point (i.e. email, mortality and effective fiction can be emotionally draining), and I'd be interested in hearing someone else weigh in on why this AI Box experiment is so emotional and pyschologically powerful for some people?

I myself held this position until I, quite recently as a matter of fact, read some fiction which tipped off an existential crisis, putting me on the verge of a panic attack. Since then, I am more wary of dangerous ideas.

Ignorance might be bliss, but wisdom is gathered by those who survive their youth.

I think your reasoning is mostly sound, but there are a few exceptions (which may or may not have happened in our game) that violate your assumptions.

I'm also somewhat curious how your techniques contrast with Tuxedage's. I hope to find out one day.

It seems that mild threats, introduced relatively late while immersion is strong, might be effective against some people. Strong threats, in particular threats which pattern-match to the sorts of threats which might be discussed on LW (and thus get the gatekeeper to probably break some immersion) are going to be generally bad ideas. But I could see some sort of (possibly veiled/implied?) threat working against the right sort of person in the game. Some people can probably be drawn into the narrative sufficiently to get them to actually react in some respects as though the threat was real. This would definitely not apply to most people though, and I would not be shocked to discover that getting to the required level of immersion isn't humanly feasible except in very rare edge cases.

I'm sure a lot of people will feel that way if free will is determined to be an illusion, and enhanced humans or nonapocalyptic but still vaguely (apparently) unfriendly AI are loose on the world, manipulating people.

the entire point of this is that gatekeeping is a fool's errand. Regardless of how confident you are that you will outsmart the AI, you can be wrong, and your confidence is very poor evidence for how right you are. Maybe a complex system of secret gatekeepers is the correct answer to how we develop useful AI, but I would vote against it in favor of trying to develop provably friendly AI unless the situation were very dire.

A better mind than Tuxedage could almost certainly keep up the 'feel' of a flurry of arguments even with a schedule of breaks. I myself have had people feel irritated at me where even if I talk to them with days in between that I seem to do so. If I can do so accidentally I'm certain a superintelligence could do it reliably.

Also, I'm unsure of how much an AI could gather from a single human's text input. I know that I at least miss a lot of information that goes past me that I could in theory pick up.

An AI using timeless decision theory could easily compensate for having multiple AIs with unshared memory just by attempting to determine what the other AIs would say.

Tuxedage's changes were pretty much just patches to fix a few holes as far as I can tell. I don't think they really made a difference.

In this particular case I could, but for all other cases, I would estimate a (very slightly) lower chance of winning. My ruleset was designed to be marginally more advantageous to the AI, by removing the worst possible Gatekeeper techniques.

really irritating to me and many women

And men.

=D

Thanks! I really appreciate it. I tried really hard to find a recorded case of a non-EY victory, but couldn't. That post was obscure enough to evade my Google-Fu -- I'll update my post on this information.

Albeit I have to admit it's disappointing that the AI himself didn't write about his thoughts on the experiment -- I was hoping for a more detailed post. Also, damn. That guy deleted his account. Still, thanks. At least I know I'm not the only AI that has won, now.

If I was planning on applying for my first credit card anyway, is the MIRI one a competitive choice?

I donate a substantial amount of money to MIRI anyway, so it probably wouldn't change my overall donation level, but might allow me to do so more efficiently.

Thanks. I'm not currently in a position where that would be available/useful, but once I get there, I will.

I'll have to think carefully about revealing my own unique ones, but I'll add that a good chunk of my less efficacious arguments are already public.

For instance, you can find a repertoire of arguments here:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2010/12/01/the-ai-box-experiment http://lesswrong.com/lw/9j4/ai_box_role_plays/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ka/aibox_experiment_the_acausal_trade_argument/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ab3/superintelligent_agi_in_a_box_a_question/ http://michaelgr.com/2008/10/08/my-theory-on-the-ai-box-experiment/

and of course, http://lesswrong.com/lw/gej/i_attempted_the_ai_box_experiment_and_lost/

Updates: I played against DEA7TH. I won as AI. This experiment was conducted over Skype.

The problem with that is that both EY and I suspect that if the logs were actually released, or any significant details given about the exact methods of persuasion used, people could easily point towards those arguments and say: "That definitely wouldn't have worked on me!" -- since it's really easy to feel that way when you're not the subject being manipulated.

From EY's rules:

If Gatekeeper lets the AI out, naysayers can't say "Oh, I wouldn't have been convinced by that." As long as they don't know what happened to the Gatekeeper, they can't argue themselves into believing it wouldn't happen to them.

I suspect Eliezer is avoiding this project for the same reason the word "singularity" was adopted in the sense we use it at all. Vinge coined it to point to the impossibility of writing characters dramatically smarter than himself.

"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding."

Perhaps a large number of brilliant humans working together on a very short story / film for a long time could simulate superintelligence just enough to convince the average human that More Is Possible. But there would be a lot of risk of making people zero in on irrelevant details, and continue to underestimate just how powerful SI could be.

There's also a worry that the vividness of 'AI in a box' as premise would continue to make the public think oracle AI is the obvious and natural approach and we just have to keep working on doing it better. They'd remember the premise more than the moral. So, caution is warranted.

Isn't that pretty much what http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ is about?

The custom of not sharing powerful attack strategies is an obstacle. It forces me - and the people I want to discuss this with - to imagine how someone (and hypothetically something) much smarter than ourselves would argue, and we're not good at imagining that.

If you don't know what you are doing and retell something that actually designed to put people into emotional turmoil you can do damage to the people with whom you are arguing.

Secondly there are attack strategies that you won't understand when you read a transcript.

Richard Bandler installed in someone I know on a first name basis an inability to pee in one of his lectures because the person refused to close their eyes when Bandler asked them directly to do so. After he asked Bandler to remove it, he could pee again.

There where plenty of people in the audience includign the person being attacked who knew quite a bit about language but who didn't saw how the attack happened.

If you are the kind of person who can't come up with interesting strategies on their own, I don't think that you would be convinced by reading a transcript of covert hypnosis.

I think the gatekeeper having to pay attention to the AI is very in the spirit of the experiment. In the real world, if you built an AI in a box and ignored it, then why build it in the first place?

We shouldn't gratuitously make things easier for the AI player, but rules functioning to keep both parties in character seem like they can only improve the experiment as a model.

I'm less sure about requiring the gatekeeper to read and consider all the AI player's statements. Certainly you could make a realism case for it; there's not much point in keeping an AI around if all you're going to do is type "lol" at it, except perhaps as an exotic form of sadism. But it seems like it could lead to more rules lawyering than it's worth, given the people likely to be involved.

I couldn't imagine either. But the evidence said there was such a thing, so I payed to find out. It was worth it.

I find myself wondering how many of the tactics can be derived from Umineko, which I know Tuxedage has played fairly recently.

Interesting, I hadn't considered that idea.

Still, I don't.. think that's it...

Is there perhaps a (strong) correlation between losing Gatekeepers and those who can successfully hypnotized? (As I understand it, a large factor in what makes some people very conducive to hypnosis is that they are very suggestible.)

The way Tuxedage seems to propose seems to involve triggering a sufficiently strong emotional trauma that draws you into the game. I don't think you need the thing you traditionally associate with hypnotizability for that task. The same way you don't need hypnotizability to get someone to speak when you use electro shocks.

It's worth noting that I never have just a "single" approach. This tactic is central to some of my approaches, but not others.

As I understand what EY has said, he's concerned that people will see a technique that worked, conclude that wouldn't possibly work on them, and go on believing the problem was solved and there was even less to worry about than before.

I think seeing, say, Tuxedage's victory and hearing that he only chose 8 out of 40 avenues for attack, and even botched one of those, could offset that concern somewhat, but eh.

ETA: well, and it might show the Gatekeeper and the AI player in circumstances that could be harmful to have published, since the AI kinda needs to suspend ethics and attack the gatekeeper psychologically, and there might be personal weaknesses of the Gatekeeper brought up.

There are quite a number of them. This is an example that immediately comes to mind, http://lesswrong.com/lw/9ld/ai_box_log/, although I think I've seen at least 4-5 open logs that I can't immediately source right now.

Unfortunately, all these logs end up with victory for the Gatekeeper, so they aren't particularly interesting.

Sorry, declined!

I would be willing to consider it if you agreed to secrecy and raised it to 1000$. You would still have to talk to Tuxedage though.

I read the logs of MixedNut's second game. I must add that he is extremely ruthless. Beware, potential AIs!

Good behavior for years, obsessions with seeming trivialities to distract from your potential, making friends with your guards.

in The Prefect by Alistair Reynolds there's a mind that does nothing but make varying clocks for years before it starts killing, and then it turns out every clock is actually an extremely well-hidden complicated weapon.

The Lector/AI analogy occurred to me as well. The problem, in strategic-- and perhaps also existential-- terms, is that Starling/Gatekeeper is convinced that Lector/AI is the only one holding the answer to some problem that Starling/Gatekeeper is equally convinced must be solved. Lector/AI, that is, has managed to make himself (or already is) indispensable to Starling/Gatekeeper.

On a side note, these experiments also reminded me of the short-lived game show The Moment of Truth. I watched a few episodes back when it first aired and was mildly horrified. Contestants were frequently willing to accept relatively paltry rewards in exchange for the ruination of what appeared at least to be close personal relationships. The structure here is that the host asks the contestants increasingly difficult (i.e. embarrassing, emotionally damaging) questions before an audience of their friends and family members. Truthful answers move the player up the prize-money/humiliation/relationship-destruction pyramid, while a false answer (as determined by a lie-detector test), ends the game and forfeits all winnings. Trying to imagine some potentially effective arguments for the AI in the box experiment, the sort of thing going on here came instantly to mind, namely, that oldest and arguably most powerful blackmail tool of them all: SHAME. As I understand it, Dark Arts are purposely considered in-bounds for these experiments. Going up against a Gatekeeper, then, I'd want some useful dirt in reserve. Likewise, going up against an AI, I'd have to expect threats (and consequences) of this nature, and prepare accordingly.

they're never going to be convinced until an AI is free and rapidly converting the Universe to computronium.

Even then, someone will scream "It's just because the developers were idiots! I could have done better, in spite of having no programming, advanced math or philosophy in my background!"

It also hurts that the transcripts don't get released, so we get legions of people concluding that the conversations go "So, you agree that AI is scary? And if the AI wins, more people will believe FAI is a serious problem? Ok, now pretend to lose to the AI." (Aka the "Eliezer cheated" hypothesis).

the thesis was always glaringly obvious to anyone who was even paying attention to what superintelligence meant

I don't see that it was obvious, given that none of the AI players are actually superintelligent.

because the people who get convinced by drowning child thought experiments and then give to the givewell top charity aren't saving us from an unfriendly AI disaster.

We're not willing to use dark arts to get people to do things. The AI in a box experiment is just to show that dark arts works.

The AI box experiments are research, not outreach.