Bandgaps, Brains, and Bioweapons: The limitations of computational science and what it means for AGI

If you believe this, and you have not studied quantum chemistry, I invite you to consider as to how you could possibly be sure about this. This is a mathematical question. There is a hard, mathematical limit to the accuracy that can be achieved in finite time. 

Doesn't the existence of AlphaFold basically invalidate this? The exact same problems you describe for band-gap computation exist for protein folding: the underlying true equations that need to be solved are monstrously complicated in both cases, and previous approximate models made by humans aren't that accurate in both cases... yet this didn't prevent AlphaFold from destroying previous attempts made by humans by just using a lot of protein structure data and the magic generalisation power of deep networks. This tells me that there's a lot of performance to be gained in clever approximations to quantum mechanical problems.

Given reasonable computational time (say, a month), can the AI, using my chatlog alone, guess my password right on the first guess? 

"using my chatlog alone" appears to be doing a lot of work in this example. Human-built computer systems are notoriously bug-filled and exploitable, even by other humans. Why would an AI not also be capable of exploiting such vulnerabilities?^[1]

Explorations of and arguments about limits of physical possibility based on computational physics and other scientific domains can lead to valuable research and interesting discussion, and I'm with you up until point (4) in your summary. But for forecasting the capabilities and actions of a truly smarter-than-you adversarial agent, it's important to confront the problem under the widest possible threat model, in the least convenient possible world and under the highest degree of difficulty. 

This post is a great example of the kind of object-level argument I gesture at in this recently-published post [LW · GW].  My point there is mainly: I think concrete, science-backed explorations of the limits of what is possible and tractable are great tools for world model building. But I find them pretty uncompelling when used as forecasts about how AGI takeover is likely to go, or as arguments for why such takeover is unlikely. I think an analogy to computer security is a good way of explaining this intuition. From another recent post [LW · GW] of mine:

Side-channels are ubiquitous attack vectors in the field of computer security and cryptography. Timing attacks and other side-effect based attacks can render cryptographic algorithms which are provably secure under certain threat models, completely insecure when implemented on real hardware, because the vulnerabilities are at lower levels of abstraction than those considered in the threat model.
 

Proving that something is computationally intractable under a certain restricted model only means that the AI must find a way to step outside of your model, or do something else you didn't think of.

1. ^{^}

    Many vulnerabilities are only discoverable by humans when those humans have access to source code or at least binaries of the system under target. But this also doesn't seem like a fatal problem for the AI: even if the exact source code for the system the AI is running on, and / or the code for the system protecting the password, does not appear in the AI's training data, source code for many similar systems likely does.

Shorter title: Stop confusing intelligence for mana points!
! 🧙‍♀️

The main problem here is:

I guess that step 4 is probably incomputable. The human body is far, far too complex to model exactly, and you have to consider the effect of your weapon on every single variation on the human body, including their environment, etc, ensuring 100% success rate on everyone. I would guess that this is too much variation to effectively search through from first principles. 

You don't need to do any fancy computations to kill everyone, if you come so far that you have nanotech. You just use your nanotech to emulate good old biology and synthetize well-known botulotoxin in bloodstream, death rate 100%.

I agree that the extreme one-shot plan outlined by Yud and discussed here isn't likely. 

However its likely that we make thing a lot easier for an AI, for example with autonomous weapons in a wartime situation. If the AI is already responsible for controlling the weapons systems (drones with guns etc are far superior to soldiers) and making sure the factories are running at max efficiency then far less calculation and creativity is needed for AI takeover. 

IMO as I think a slow takeoff is most likely, robots, autonomous weapons systems, increase takeover risk a lot. For this reason now I am much less convinced a pause in AI capabilities is a good thing. I would rather have a superintelligence in a world without these things, i.e. now than later.

To put this plainly if we were offered a possible future where over the course of the next 1-2 years we learned (and deployed) everything there was to know about intelligence and mind algorithms to exploit our hardware to the max efficiency but there was no hardware improvements I would be tempted to take it over the alternative. A plausible alternative is of course it takes 5-10 years to get such algorithms right and this happens with a large overhang and sudden capability gains into a world with neuromorphic chips, robots everywhere and perhaps an autonomous weapons system war ongoing.

Seems related to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qpgkttrxkvGrH9BRr/superintelligence-is-not-omniscience, [LW · GW] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epgCXiv3Yy3qgcsys/you-can-t-predict-a-game-of-pinball, [LW · GW] and similar objections might be applicable.

Do you think that human theorists are near the limit of what kind of approximations we should use to calculate the band structure of diamond (and therefore a superintelligent AI couldn't outsmart human theorists by doing their job better)? Like if you left physics to stew for a century and came back, we'd still be using the GW approximation?

This seems unlikely to me, but I don't really know much about DFT (I was an experimentalist). Maybe there are so few dials to turn that picking the best approximation for diamond is an easy game. Intuitively I'd expect that if a clever theorist knew that they were trying to just predict the band structure of diamond (but didn't know the answer ahead of time), there are bespoke things they could do to try to get a better answer (abstract reasoning about what factors are important, trying to integrate DFT and a tight binding model, something something electron phonon interactions), and that is effectively equivalent to an efficient approximation that beats DFT+GWA.

Definitely we're still making progress for more interesting materials (e.g. cuprates) - or at least people are still arguing. So even if we really can't do better than what we have now for diamond, we should still expect a superintelligent AI to be better at numerical modeling for lots of cases of interest.

Arguments like yours are the reason why I do not think that Yudkowskys scenario is overwhelmingly likely ( P > 50%). However, this does not mean that existintial risk from AGI is low. Since smart people like Terence Tao exist, you cannot prove with complexity theory that no AGI with the intelligence of Terence Tao can be build. Imagine a world where everyone has one or several AI assistants whose capabilities are the same as the best human experts. If the AI assistants are deceptive and are able to coordinate, something like slow disempowerment of humankind followed by extinction is possible. Since there is a huge economic incentive to use AI assistants, it is hard for humans to take coordinated action unless it is very obvious that the AIs are dangerous. On the other hand, it may be easy for the AIs to coordinate since many of them are copies of each other.    

"But make no mistake, this is the math that the universe is doing."

"There is no law of the universe that states that tasks must be computable in practical time."

Don't these sentences contradict each other?

Do you think that human theorists are near the limit of what kind of approximations we should use to calculate the band structure of diamond (and therefore a superintelligent AI couldn't outsmart human theorists by doing their job better)? Like if you left physics to stew for a century and came back, we'd still be using the GW approximation?

This seems unlikely to me, but I don't really know much about DFT (I was an experimentalist). Maybe there are so few dials to turn that picking the best approximation for diamond is an easy game. Intuitively I'd expect that if a clever theorist knew that they were trying to just predict the band structure of diamond (but didn't know the answer ahead of time), there are bespoke things they could do to try to get a better answer (abstract reasoning about what factors are important, trying to integrate DFT and a tight binding model, something something electron phonon interactions), and that is effectively equivalent to an efficient approximation that beats DFT+GWA.

Definitely we're still making progress for more interesting materials (e.g. cuprates) - or at least people are still arguing. So even if we really can't do better than what we have now for diamond, we should still expect a superintelligent AI to be better at numerical modeling for lots of cases of interest.

 > "guess  a password on 1st try"

In my life, I tried to guess a password O(10) times. I succeeded on the first try in two cases. This would seem to make this more feasible than you think.

Here there are two selection effects working against my argument:

1. I won't even try to guess a password if I don't think I have a chance for some reason;
2. I'm answering to this point because I'm someone who pulled this off, while people who never happened to guess a password on the first try will stay silent.

However, selection plays in favor of the hypothetical AI too: maybe you are confident you picked your password in a way that makes it unpredictable via public information, but there are other people who are not like that. Overall, about the question "Could it happen at least once that an important password was chosen in a way that made it predictable to an ASI, even assuming the ASI truly constrained in a box?", I don't feel confident either way right now.

If I play chess against Magnus Carlsen, I don't expect him to play a mathematically perfect game, but I still expect him to win.

Also:

There's a reason takeover plans tend to rely on secrecy.

Currently speculation tends to be biased towards secrecy-based plans, I think, because such plans are less dependent on the unique details of the factual context that an AI would be facing than are plans based around trying to manipulate humans.