Scenario planning for AI x-risk

post by Corin Katzke (corin-katzke) · 2024-02-10T00:14:11.934Z · LW · GW · 12 comments

This is a link post for https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tCq2fi6vhSsCDA5Js/scenario-planning-for-ai-x-risk

Contents

  Summary
  The Problem with Forecasting
  Strategic Parameters & Methods
    Generating scenarios 
    Examples
  Threat Models & Theories of Victory
    Threat models 
    Theories of victory 
  Conclusion
None
12 comments

This post is part of a series by Convergence Analysis. In it, I’ll motivate and review some methods for applying scenario planning methods to AI x-risk strategy. Feedback and discussion are welcome.

Summary

AI is a particularly difficult domain in which to predict the future. Neither AI expertise nor forecasting methods yield reliable predictions. As a result, AI governance lacks the strategic clarity[1] necessary to evaluate and choose between different intermediate-term options.

To complement forecasting, I argue that AI governance researchers and strategists should explore scenario planning. This is a core feature of the AI Clarity program’s approach at Convergence Analysis. Scenario planning is a group of methods for evaluating strategies in domains defined by uncertainty. The common feature of these methods is that they evaluate strategies across several plausible futures, or “scenarios.”

One way scenario planning methods are differentiated is by how they use strategic parameters to generate scenarios. I use “strategic parameters” to mean features of the world that act as dimensions of uncertainty relevant to AI governance. With only a small number of scenarios, it’s possible to evaluate strategies deductively. Larger numbers of scenarios require more complicated methods.

Scenario planners for AI x-risk can evaluate strategies with respect to threat models and theories of victory. Threat models are descriptions of and proximal pathways to existential catastrophes. However, there are several challenges to specifying and using threat models. First, it isn’t clear which threat models are both plausible and describe truly existential outcomes. Second, less-than-existential threats might still indirectly affect x-risk. Third, expected AI x-risk mitigation is not a perfect proxy for expected value.

Theories of victory are descriptions of and proximal pathways to avoiding existential catastrophes. There is much less existing work on theories of victory than there is on threat models. Theories of victory should likely be developed to meet certain conditions, such as 1) plausibility 2) action-guidingness, and 3) sustainability.

I recommend that AI governance researchers and strategists use scenario planning methods both to evaluate strategies as well as identify the right questions to forecast.

The Problem with Forecasting

AI governance has a forecasting problem. When compared with other domains, both experts and forecasters fail to reliably predict AI developments. 

Expertise. AI experts disagree widely about AI risk and development trajectories. This is reason enough to distrust any particular expert forecast. Discussing the results of a large survey of AI experts, Grace et al.[2] note that:

“these experts are not accurate forecasters across the range of questions we ask. For one thing, on many questions different respondents give very different answers, which limits the number of them who can be close to the truth.” (20) 

Since the experts’ responses also exhibit large framing effects (variations that depend on the phrasing of the question), “even aggregate answers to any particular question are not an accurate guide to the answer.” Therefore, even though AI experts’ predictions might be useful in other ways, they “should not be seen as a reliable guide to objective truth [...].” (2)        

Forecasting. Forecasters don’t fare much better. Best practice when forecasting is to establish a base rate with respect to a reference class (a set of relevantly similar events), but there is no clear reference class for many AI x-risk questions. We can’t — to take an obvious example — establish a base rate for AI x-risk by comparing how many times humanity has successfully navigated a transition to a post-TAI world to how many times it has failed. 

Forecasting’s success for AI risk-relevant questions is accordingly limited. As evidence, consider the 2019 “Forecasting AI Progress” tournament run by Metaculus.[3] An analysis[4] found that “Metaculus narrowly beats chance and performs worse in this tournament than on average across all continuous questions on the site [...].”

In a previous analysis[5] of forecasts for a different set of AI questions, Mühlbacher and Scoblic argued that Metaculus predictions did better than “narrowly” beat chance, but agree that “AI-related questions tend to be intrinsically harder than many other questions.”[6] Metaculus does at least have a worse track record for AI than for other categories.[7] 

Forecasting with experts. One way to explain these results would be that AI experts lack training in forecasting methods, and forecasters lack AI expertise.

It was perhaps in response to this dilemma that the Forecasting Research Institute conducted a long-run tournament forecasting existential risks involving both ‘superforecasters’ and domain experts.[8] However, despite months of debate, the two groups’ estimates failed to converge on AI risk-relevant questions. The report observes that:

“The most pressing practical question for future work is: why were superforecasters so unmoved by experts’ much higher estimates of AI extinction risk, and why were experts so unmoved by the superforecasters’ lower estimates? The most puzzling scientific question is: why did rational forecasters, incentivized by the XPT to persuade each other, not converge after months of debate and the exchange of millions of words and thousands of forecasts?” (1)

Therefore, despite sophisticated efforts to elicit reliable information from experts and forecasters, AI remains a particularly difficult domain in which to predict the future. As a result, AI governance lacks the strategic clarity necessary to evaluate and choose between different intermediate-term options.[9] 

Scenario planning. In light of the limitations of forecasting, I argue that AI governance researchers and strategists should explore an alternative and complementary approach: scenario planning. This is a core feature of the AI Clarity  programs’s approach at Convergence Analysis. Scenario planning is a group of methods for evaluating strategies in domains defined by uncertainty. The common feature of these methods is that they evaluate strategies across several plausible futures, or “scenarios.” Scenario planning can help decision-makers and researchers prepare for several possible futures, rather than banking on a single predicted future.

Scenario planning is a complementary approach to forecasting because it can help identify the right questions to forecast. An ideal strategy would work in every scenario, but it’s more likely that any given strategy will work in some scenarios but not others. In that case, we will have to decide which subset of scenarios is more likely than the other.

In the next section, I introduce and review some methods for generating scenarios. After that, I describe some criteria against which AI scenario planners might evaluate strategies: threat models and theories of victory.

Strategic Parameters & Methods

A key tool of analysis in scenario planning are strategic parameters. I adopted this term from Matthijs Maas’ Concepts in Advanced AI Governance.[10] Maas defines strategic parameters as:

“[...] features of the world that significantly determine the strategic nature of the advanced AI governance challenge. These parameters serve as highly decision-relevant or even crucial considerations, determining which interventions or solutions are appropriate, necessary, viable, or beneficial to addressing the advanced AI governance challenge; accordingly, different views of these underlying strategic parameters constitute underlying cruxes for different theories of actions and approaches.”

For example, a few commonly-cited strategic parameters are timelines to TAI, takeoff trajectories, and difficulty of technical alignment.

In addition to their content, strategic parameters can vary according to their formal properties. For example, a parameter might be a continuous variable (time to TAI), or it might be a discrete variable (paradigm of TAI).

Strategic parameters might also be more or less fixed. At one extreme, a parameter might capture a rigid feature of the world (for example, the relationship between general intelligence and agency). At the other extreme, a parameter might describe the status of active policy agendas (for example, the existence of international AI safety standards). This might also vary depending on the actor: a rigid parameter for one actor might be a lever for another.

Generating scenarios 

The parameters I’ve mentioned so far are by no means exhaustive. In fact, there is no one correct or appropriate set. What constitutes an appropriate set of parameters depends on the scope and methods of the research in question.

Strategic parameters are sometimes referred to as “variables” or “dimensions” in scenario planning, and are used to generate “scenarios.” Scenarios can be defined as combinations of parameters set to particular values (though they often also include narrative descriptions).

One way scenario planning methods are differentiated is by how they use strategic parameters to generate scenarios. 

In the simplest case, a scenario planner might consider only one parameter with a few possible values. For example, in his article Scenario Planning for an A(G)I Future,[11] Antonin Korinek considered three values across a parameter capturing timelines to AGI. The three scenarios he identifies are 1) “business as usual,” 2) AGI in ~20 years, and 3) AGI in ~5 years.

Another example of scenario planning across a single dimension is present in Anthropic’s Core Views on AI Safety.[12] Anthropic considers the “dimension of uncertainty” describing the difficulty of technical safety across “optimistic”, “intermediate”, and “pessimistic” scenarios. Anthropic writes that:

“Our goal is essentially to develop:

  1. better techniques for making AI systems safer,
  2. better ways of identifying how safe or unsafe AI systems are.

In optimistic scenarios, (i) will help AI developers to train beneficial systems and (ii) will demonstrate that such systems are safe. In intermediate scenarios, (i) may be how we end up avoiding AI catastrophe and (ii) will be essential for ensuring that the risk posed by advanced AI is low. In pessimistic scenarios, the failure of (i) will be a key indicator that AI safety is insoluble and (ii) will be the thing that makes it possible to convincingly demonstrate this to others.”

A slightly more complicated case would be to consider two parameters. In one common[13] scenario planning method, two extremes along two parameters are combined to create four scenarios, which can be represented as a 2x2 grid. There’s no need to consider only extremes, though: for example, we could combine Korinek and Anthropic’s chosen parameters to create 9 scenarios in a 3x3 grid:

 “business as usual”AGI in ~20 yearsAGI in ~5 years
optimisticScenario 1Scenario 2Scenario 3
intermediateScenario 4Scenario 5Scenario 6
pessimisticScenario 7Scenario 8Scenario 9

With only a small number of possible scenarios, it’s possible to deductively evaluate strategies across them all. As we continue to add more parameters and values, however, the problem becomes more complicated. An upper limit to straightforward deduction is usually around 4 to 6 parameters, depending on how many possible values each parameter can take.

Examples

Hua and Belfield. Hua and Belfield hit the limit of straightforward deduction in their paper “Effective Enforceability of EU Competition Law Under AI Development Scenarios.” They select strategic parameters according to their role in evaluating the efficacy of EU competition law, and divide them into two categories: technical and non-technical.

Technical VariablesNon-Technical Variables

Key inputs: the distribution of importance among the input driving AI capabilities development (algorithmic innovation, computational resources, or data). [3 values]

Speed of development: “the speed of AI development, measured in

terms of the length of time between an arbitrary set of benchmarks” (599) [3 values]

Capability: “the tasks and ‘work’ that can be accomplished by an AI system or collection of systems” (600) [3 values]

Number of actors: the number of actors (corporations or states) developing and deploying AI with comparable levels of capability. [3 values]

Nature and relationship: “whether the actor(s) are companies/private actors or states, and whether the relationship between the actors is competitive or cooperative.” (602) [6 values]

The total number of possible combinations of Hua and Belfield’s parameters is 486, and it would be a herculean task to deductively evaluate a strategy across them all. So, instead of considering combinations of parameters (with the exception of “nature and relationship”, which is really two parameters), Hua and Belfield evaluate the efficacy of EU competition law across each parameter separately.

However, one of the key benefits to analyzing parameters together is the possibility of combination effects. For example, consider again the 3x3 grid above. Separately, we might prefer AGI in ~20 years to AGI in ~5 years, and optimistic technical alignment to pessimistic technical alignment. But that doesn’t imply that scenario 2 is preferable to scenario 3 —hypothetically, if alignment is easy, then the expected value of TAI might be positive, and we might prefer shorter timelines.[14]

It may be appropriate to consider only a small number of possible scenarios when planning for a particular actor (in Anthropic’s case) or when evaluating a particular policy domain (in Hua and Belfield’s case). However, larger scopes will likely call for more parameters. The addition of more parameters will in turn require new methods.

Kilian et al. In their paper, “Examining the Differential Risk from High-level Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Control,”[15] Kilian et al. list 14 strategic parameters across four categories:

Technological Evolution, Transitions, and DiffusionAI Paradigm, Possible Accelerants & TimelineGeopolitical Race Dynamics, Technical Ecology & RiskInternational Governance, Institutional & Technical Control

Capability & Generality: “Overall power of a system to achieve objectives, influence the world, and degree of generalizability across domains.”

Diffusion: “The distribution of systems at the time of development and the breadth of distribution”

Technological Transition: “The rate of change of the system or technology as it increases in capability”

Paradigm: “The paradigm or architecture that can achieve high-level capability and general-purpose functionality.”

Accelerant: “The technological insight or innovation that accelerates capabilities.”

Timeline: “The duration of the transition once a sufficient level of capability and generality is reached.”

Race dynamics: “The economic and geopolitical dynamics of increased competition”

Primary risk class: “The highest impact risks from advanced AI systems”

Technical safety risk: “The technical risks from agent systems that could pose a significant danger with advanced systems.”

AI Safety: “Technical safety approach to align AI systems and their ability to transfer to more general-purpose advanced systems.”

Actors: “The entity that leads in the development of transformative advanced AI systems.”

Region: “The region that leads in advanced AI capabilities or develops the first instantiation.”

International Governance: “The international governance bodies in place when advanced AI is developed.”

Corporate Governance: “The degree of coordination on safety standards by AI companies.”

They identify a total of 47 values across these parameters, which can combine to generate 15,116,544 unique scenarios. Clearly, it would be intractable to manually evaluate a strategy across them all. Instead, Kilian et al. survey experts on their forecasts of each dimension, and then use a computational method — General Morphological Analysis (GMA) — to identify four scenarios that best capture clusters of those forecasts. They name these scenarios “balancing act,” “accelerating change,” “shadow intelligent networks,” and “emergence,” and accompany each with a narrative description.

An advantage of Kilian et al.’s approach is that they are able to extract a deductively-tractable number of scenarios from a large number of parameters. This is possible because their method doesn’t treat each parameter as an independent variable — instead, they assume inferential relationships between parameters such that some combinations of values are plausible, and others not.

However, the data they use to construct inferential relationships are expert forecasts. Therefore, while their four scenarios might accurately describe clusters of expert forecasts, they should only be taken as predictively valuable to the extent that one takes expert forecasts to be predictively valuable.

Clarke et al. Clarke et al.’s Modeling Transformative AI Risks[16] represents a different approach to handling large numbers of parameters. Clarke et al. identify and discuss 26 parameters that, either directly or through each other, influence the probability of an existential catastrophe. Each of these parameters is itself modeled with its own set of sub-parameters.

Clarke et al. share the insight with Kilian et al. that parameters exhibit inferential relationships, but, rather than exploit that insight computationally, they map those relationships graphically.

An advantage of Clarke et al.’s method is that it directly integrates threat models (see the next section). In the previous methods discussed, additional work is necessary to evaluate strategies across generated scenarios with respect to their effect on x-risk. In this method, the effect of a strategy can be represented directly as a change to a particular parameter.

However, Clarke et al.’s method is also relatively fragile — it requires a lot of up-front work to be done correctly. It’s unlikely that a straightforward inferential diagram accurately captures the dynamics influencing x-risk, which are both unprecedented and complex. For similar reasons, contemporary safety engineering has moved away from cause-and-effect and towards complex systems theory.[17] 

Threat Models & Theories of Victory

In the last section, I introduced some methods for generating scenarios. This section discusses some criteria for evaluating a strategy within a given scenario. My focus is on existential risks to humanity’s future, which include extinction as well as permanent human disempowerment and dystopia.

Threat models 

Threat models are descriptions of and proximal pathways to existential catastrophes. They are sometimes also referred to as “hazards,” “failure modes,” “existential risks,” or “x-risks.”

Hendrycks et al. Hendrycks et al.[18] categorize threat models into “malicious use,” “AI race,” “organizational risks,” and “rogue AIs,” which they describe as “intentional,” “environmental/structural,” “accidental,” and “internal,” respectively. Similarly, Kilian et al. categorize AI risks as “misuse,” “structural,” “accidents,” and “agential.”[19]

  1. Intentional. Intentional threat models involve intentional misuse of TAI to cause catastrophes or “lock-in” dystopic power structures. For example, narrowly-superintelligent systems might enable malicious actors to deploy artificial super-pandemics[20] or cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. They might also enable authoritarian governments to massively surveil and control populations.
  2. Structural. Structural threat models involve game-theoretic forces that push society towards collectively catastrophic outcomes. For example, competition between corporations or arms race dynamics between nations might lead to the development and deployment of increasingly dangerous AI systems.
  3. Accidental. Accidental threat models involve sudden and unintentional catastrophes. AI systems — as well as the organizations and societies in which they are embedded — are complex systems, which can exhibit unpredictable and extreme interactions. For example, automated stock trading precipitated a trillion-dollar “flash crash” in 2010.[21] As AI systems become increasingly powerful and embedded in critical infrastructure, economic activity, and military activity,[22] unforeseeable accidents could have catastrophic consequences.
  4. Agential. Agential threat models involve the possibility that the goals of agential systems may not be aligned with those of their operators. AI safety literature has argued that agential systems may be power-seeking,[23] and, if sufficiently intelligent, may gain a decisive strategic advantage over humanity. These threat models are sometimes referred to as “rogue AI” or “AI takeover.”

This taxonomy likely includes all plausible threat models that describe existential catastrophes from AI. However, it also includes threat models that describe negative but not truly existential outcomes. For example, a massive cyber attack or an accidental “flash crash” would not directly threaten humanity’s future. Determining which threat models are both plausible and represent truly existential catastrophes is an open research question.  

Most discussions of AI x-risk consider a subset of this taxonomy. For example, Vold and Harris’ review of AI x-risk cites the “control problem”, “AI arms race”, and the “weaponization of AI,” which they describe as “accidental”, “structural”, and “misuses,” respectively.[24] Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy is designed with only “misuse” and “autonomy and replication” in mind.[25] Many other discussions only include agential threat models.

That being said, “mere” catastrophes can’t be safely ignored in x-risk scenario planning. On one hand, they might indirectly exacerbate x-risk (for example, AI-enabled misinformation isn’t existential in itself, but might erode society’s ability to respond well to other threats). On the other hand, they might indirectly mitigate x-risk (for example, an AI-enabled accident might act as a “warning shot,” improving society's response to AI x-risk).

Finally, expected AI x-risk mitigation is not a perfect proxy for expected value. For example, AI might improve humanity’s ability to respond to other x-risks, such that the strategy which best mitigates AI x-risk is not the strategy which best mitigates all x-risk. It also doesn’t capture the effect that the development of AI moral patienthood might have on expected value.

Theories of victory 

Theories of victory are descriptions of and proximal pathways to averting existential catastrophes. They have been defined elsewhere as:

Theories of victory may be more useful than threat models for evaluating strategies because it's more straightforward to design a strategy to achieve a particular outcome than it is to avoid a set of outcomes.

Hobbhahn et al. There is less published work developing and categorizing theories of victory than for threat models. Below, I summarize and discuss two attempts. In the first attempt, Hobbhahn et al.[28] describe six “good TAI transition scenarios[29]”:

  1. “Alignment is much easier than expected.” This scenario considers the possibility that technical AI safety is able to easily control the behavior of TAI. It is more of a hope than a plan of action. It should also be noted that even this optimistic scenario is only a theory of victory over agential threat models.
  2. “The combination of many technical and governance strategies works.” In this scenario, while no one strategy is sufficient, a combination of technical safety and governance interventions successfully complement each other, or combine to form a “defense in depth.” 
  3. “Accident and regulation.” In this scenario (modeled on nuclear power), a catastrophic but not existential accident spurs public outcry and strict regulation of the development and deployment of AI systems.
  4. “Alignment by chance.” Like the first scenario, this scenario is optimistic. Unlike the first scenario, however, it assumes that the first TAI system developed is aligned by chance, even though the general problem of technical safety remains unsolved. This system is then used to solve technical safety, and effective governance ensures that no unaligned TAI systems are deployed.
  5. “US-China driven global cooperation.” In this scenario, the two leaders in AI — the US and China — cooperate to establish effective international governance of the development and deployment of AI systems. This includes both agreements setting international safety standards as well as institutionalized enforcement of those standards.
  6. “Apollo Project for AI.” The final scenario assumes that the resources necessary to develop TAI are beyond those available to corporations. TAI development is taken up by a few national governments, with one nation (perhaps the US) at a clear lead. This clear lead eliminates an arms race dynamic, and the leading nation is able to sufficiently invest in technical safety, or coordinate with other nations to end TAI development.

Räuker and Aird. Räuker and Aird[30] taxonomize theories of victory into five categories, which largely overlap Hobbhahn et al.’s scenarios:

  1. “A multilateral international monitoring & enforcement regime emerges and prevents unsafe AI development/deployment.” This theory of victory corresponds to Hobbhahn et al.’s second scenario.
  2. “The US (likely alongside allies) uses geopolitical influence to prevent unsafe AI development/deployment.” This theory of victory assumes that the US is able to unilaterally regulate AI. For example, the US might be able to successfully control the global semiconductor supply chain.
  3. “Leading corporate labs come to prioritize safety more, coordinate among themselves, and implement and advocate for various risk-reducing actions.” This theory of victory partially overlaps with Hobbhahn et al.’s second scenario. It assumes that leading AI labs have the potential to effectively self-regulate.
  4. “A single lab develops “minimal aligned AGI” and uses it to end the acute risk period.” This theory of victory corresponds to Hobbhahn et al.’s first and fourth scenarios. In an extreme form, this theory is sometimes referred to as the first aligned TAI system performing a “pivotal act.” 
  5. “Humanity pursues a diverse range of risk-reduction methods, ensures key institutions and norms are adaptable and competent, and ‘muddles through.’” This theory of victory corresponds to Hobbhahn et al.’s second scenario.

Some of these theories of victory are more plausible than others. Additionally, some are action-guiding across scenarios (for example, developing strong international regulation), and others are only possible in specific scenarios (for example, technical safety is easy).

There is much more work to be done developing theories of victory. For example, theories of victory should likely be developed to meet certain conditions, such as 1) plausibility, 2) action-guidingness, and 3) sustainability.

By “sustainability,” I mean that a theory of victory should ideally not reduce AI x-risk per year to a constant, low level, but instead continue to reduce AI x-risk over time. In the former case, “expected time to failure”[31] would remain constant, and total risk over a long enough time period would inevitably reach unacceptable levels. (For example, a 1% chance of an existential catastrophe per year implies an approximately 63% chance over 100 years.) If instead x-risk continued to decrease each year, then expected time to failure would increase with time, and total risk might approach a limit.

That being said, sustainability might trade off against tractability, especially in the short term. In that case, It might be best to pursue a more tractable theory of victory in the short term to “buy time” to develop and pursue a sustainable theory of victory in the longer term.

Conclusion

Scenario planning is a promising complementary approach to forecasting in AI governance. I recommend that AI governance researchers use scenario planning methods both to evaluate strategies as well as identify the right questions to forecast.

Different scenario planning methods are appropriate for different scopes. However, the methods for smaller scopes — such as scenarios involving short timelines to TAI — are more straightforward, and likely more appropriate for initial research.

There also remains much work to be done selecting and developing threat models and theories of victory. I’m particularly excited about work designing plausible, action-guiding, and sustainable theories of victory.
 

Acknowledgements: Thank you to David Kristoffersson, Zershaaneh Qureshi, Justin Bullock, Elliot Mckernon, Deric Cheng, and Justin Shovelain for feedback.

 

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     I’m not taking a stand on the definition of “narrow”. The predictions on binary questions had a Brier score of 0.207. For reference, uniformly predicting “50%” on binary questions would yield a Brier score of 0.25, and omniscience would yield a Brier score of 0.

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    To emphasize: this is a hypothetical argument solely meant to illustrate the possibility of combination effects.

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    Note that Hobbhahn et al are using "scenario" how I use"theory of victory" — and not in the technical sense as a combination of values across strategic parameters.

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12 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Zac Hatfield-Dodds (zac-hatfield-dodds) · 2024-02-10T10:21:54.822Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

By “sustainability,” I mean that a theory of victory should ideally not reduce AI x-risk per year to a constant, low level, but instead continue to reduce AI x-risk over time. In the former case, “expected time to failure”[31] would remain constant, and total risk over a long enough time period would inevitably reach unacceptable levels. (For example, a 1% chance of an existential catastrophe per year implies an approximately 63% chance over 100 years.)

Obviously yes, a 1% pa chance of existential catastrophe is utterly unacceptable! I'm not convinced that "continues to reduce over time" is the right framing though; if we achieved a low enough constant rate for a MTBF of many millions of years I'd expect other projects to have higher long-term EV given the very-probably-finite future resources available anyway. I also expect that the challenge is almost entirely in getting to an acceptably low rate, not in the further downward trend, so it's really a moot point.

(I'm looking forward to retiring from this kind of thing if or when I feel that AI risk and perhaps synthetic biorisk are under control, and going back to low-stakes software engineering r&d... though not making any active plans)

Replies from: corin-katzke
comment by Corin Katzke (corin-katzke) · 2024-02-13T17:22:47.938Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yep, fair enough. I agree that an MTBF of millions of years is an alternative sustainable theory of victory. 

Could you expand on "the challenge is almost entirely in getting to an acceptably low rate"? It's not clear to me that that's true. For example, it seems plausible that at some point nuclear risk was at an acceptably low rate (maybe post-fall of the USSR? I'm niether an expert nor old enough to remember) conditional on a further downward trend — but we didn't get a further downward trend.

comment by Zac Hatfield-Dodds (zac-hatfield-dodds) · 2024-02-10T10:20:45.537Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

However, the data they use to construct inferential relationships are expert forecasts. Therefore, while their four scenarios might accurately describe clusters of expert forecasts, they should only be taken as predictively valuable to the extent that one takes expert forecasts to be predictively valuable.

No, it's plausible that this kind of scenario or cluster is more predictively accurate than taking expert forecasts directly. In practice, this happens when experts disagree on (latent) state variables, but roughly agree on dynamics - for example there might be widespread disagreement on AGI timelines, but agreement that

  • if scaling laws and compute trends hold and no new paradigm is needed, AGI timelines of five to ten years are plausible
  • if the LLM paradigm will not scale to AGI, we should have a wide probability distribution over timelines, say from 2040 -- 2100

and then assigning relative probability to the scenarios can be a later exercise. Put another way, forming scenarios or clusters is more like formulating an internally-coherent hypothesis than updating on evidence.

Replies from: corin-katzke
comment by Corin Katzke (corin-katzke) · 2024-02-13T17:47:39.052Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yep, another good point, and in principle I agree. A couple of caveats, though:

First, it's not clear to me that experts would agree on enough dynamics to make these clusters predicatively reliable. There might be agreement on the dynamics between scaling laws and timelines (and that's a nice insight!) — but the Killian et al. paper considered 14 variables, which (for example) would be 91 pairwise dynamics to agree on. I'd at least like some data on whether conditional forecasts converge. I think FRI is doing some work on that.

Second, the Grace et al. paper suggested that expert forecasts exhibited framing effects. So, even if experts did agree on underlying dynamics, those agreements might not be able to be reliably elicited. But maybe conditional forecasts are less susceptible to framing effects.

comment by Zac Hatfield-Dodds (zac-hatfield-dodds) · 2024-02-10T10:20:24.809Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

“The most pressing practical question for future work is: why were superforecasters so unmoved by experts’ much higher estimates of AI extinction risk, and why were experts so unmoved by the superforecasters’ lower estimates? The most puzzling scientific question is: why did rational forecasters, incentivized by the XPT to persuade each other, not converge after months of debate and the exchange of millions of words and thousands of forecasts?”

This post by Peter McClusky, a participating superforecaster, renders the question essentially non-puzzling to me. Doing better would be fairly simple, although attracting and incentivising the relevant experts would be fairly expensive.

  • The questions were in many cases somewhat off from the endpoints we care about, or framed in ways that I believe would distort straightforward attempts to draw conclusions
  • The incentive structure of predicting the apocalypse is necessarily screwy, and using a Keynsian beauty prediction contest doesn't really fix it
  • Most of the experts and superforecasters just don't know much about AI, and thought that (as of 2022) the recent progress was basically just hype. Hopefully it's now clear that this was just wrong?

Some selected quotes:

I didn’t notice anyone with substantial expertise in machine learning. Experts were apparently chosen based on having some sort of respectable publication related to AI, nuclear, climate, or biological catastrophic risks. ... they’re likely to be more accurate than random guesses. But maybe not by a large margin.

Many superforecasters suspected that recent progress in AI was the same kind of hype that led to prior disappointments with AI. I didn't find a way to get them to look closely enough to understand why I disagreed. My main success in that area was with someone who thought there was a big mystery about how an AI could understand causality. I pointed him to Pearl, which led him to imagine that problem might be solvable.

I didn't see much evidence that either group knew much about the subject that I didn't already know. So maybe most of the updates during the tournament were instances of the blind leading the blind. None of this seems to be as strong evidence as the changes, since the tournament, in opinions of leading AI researchers, such as Hinton and Bengio.

I think the core problem is actually that it's really hard to get good public predictions of AI progress, in any more detail than "extrapolate compute spending, hardware price/performance, scaling laws, and then guess at what downstream-task performance that implies (and whether we'll need a new paradigm for AGI [tbc: no!])". To be clear, I think that's a stronger baseline than the forecasting tournament achieved!

But downstream task performance is hard to predict, and there's a fair bit of uncertainty in the other parameters too. Details are somewhere between "trade secrets" and "serious infohazards", and the people who are best at predicting AI progress are mostly - for that reason! - work at frontier labs with AI-xrisk-mitigation efforts. I think it's likely that inferring frontier lab [members]'s beliefs from their actions and statements would give you better estimates than another such tournament.

Replies from: nathan-helm-burger
comment by Nathan Helm-Burger (nathan-helm-burger) · 2024-04-23T21:46:07.474Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The interesting thing to me about the question, "Will we need a new paradigm for AGI?" is that a lot of people seem to be focused on this but I think it misses a nearby important question.

As we get closer to a complete AGI, and start to get more capable programming and research assistant AIs, will those make algorithmic exploration cheaper and easier, such that we see a sort of 'Cambrian explosion' of model architectures which work well for specific purposes, and perhaps one of these works better at general learning than anything we've found so far and ends up being the architecture that first reaches full transformative AGI?

The point I'm generally trying to make is that estimates of software/algorithmic progress are based on the progress being made (currently) mostly by human minds. The closer we get to generally competent artificial minds, the less we should expect past patterns based on human inputs to hold.

Replies from: zac-hatfield-dodds
comment by Zac Hatfield-Dodds (zac-hatfield-dodds) · 2024-04-23T23:52:34.982Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Tom Davidson's work on a compute-centric framework for takeoff speed [LW · GW] is excellent, IMO.

Replies from: nathan-helm-burger
comment by Nathan Helm-Burger (nathan-helm-burger) · 2024-04-24T04:46:21.912Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I generally agree, i just have some specific evidence which I believe should adjust estimates in the report towards expecting more accessible algorithmic improvements than some people seem to think.

comment by Zac Hatfield-Dodds (zac-hatfield-dodds) · 2024-02-10T10:20:08.364Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm a big fan of scenario modelling in general, and loved this post reviewing its application to AI xrisk. Thanks for writing it!

Replies from: corin-katzke
comment by Corin Katzke (corin-katzke) · 2024-02-13T17:50:36.502Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you for reading and responding to it! For what it's worth, some of these ideas got rolling during your "AI safety under uncertainty" workshop at EAG Boston.

comment by Zac Hatfield-Dodds (zac-hatfield-dodds) · 2024-02-10T10:24:19.643Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Most discussions of AI x-risk consider a subset of this [misuse / structural / accidental / agentic] taxonomy. ... Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy is designed with only “misuse” and “autonomy and replication” in mind.

No, we've[1] been thinking about all four of these aspects!

  • Misuse is obvious - our RSP defines risk levels, evals, and corresponding safeguards and mitigations before continued training or deployment.
  • Structural risks are obviously not something we can solve unilaterally, but nor are we neglecting them. The baseline risk comparisons in our RSP are specifically excluding other provider's models, so that e.g. we don't raise the bar on allowable cyberoffense capabilities even if a competitor has already released a more-capable model. (UDT approved strategy!) Between making strong unilateral safety committments, advancing industry-best-practice, and supporting public policy through e.g. testimony and submissions to government enquiries, I'm fairly confident that our net contribution to structural risks is robustly positive.
  • Accident and agentic risks are IMO on a continuous spectrum - you could think of the underlying factor as "how robustly-goal-pursuing is this system?", with accidents being cases where it was shifted off-goal-distribution and agentic failures coming from a treacherous turn by a schemer. We do technical safety research to address various points on this spectrum, e.g. Constitutional AI or investigating faithfulness of chain-of-thought to improve robustness of prosaic alignment, and our recent Sleeper Agents paper on more agentic risks. Accidents are more linked to specific deployments though, and corresponding less emphasized in our RSP - though if you can think of a good way to evaluate accident risks before deployment, let me know!

  1. as usual, these are my opinions only, I'm not speaking for my employer. Further hedging omitted for clarity. ↩︎

Replies from: corin-katzke
comment by Corin Katzke (corin-katzke) · 2024-02-13T17:30:22.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for the clarification! I didn't mean to imply that Anthropic hasn't been thinking about the full spectrum of risk — only that "misuse" and "autonomy and replication" are the two categories of catastrophic risk explicitly listed in the RSP.

If I do think of a good way to evaluate accident risks before deployment, I'll definitely let you know. (I might actually pitch my team to work on this.)