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It sounds like you're just describing why our watch-and-see approach cannot handle a hard AGI/ASI takeoff. A system that first exhibits some questionable danger

It sounds like you're just describing why our watch-and-see approach cannot handle a hard AGI/ASI takeoff. A system that first exhibits some questionable danger, then achieves complete victory a few days later, simply cannot be managed by an incremental approach. We pretty much have to pray that we get a few dangerous-but-not-too-dangerous "practice takeoffs" first, and if anything those will probably just make us think that we can handle it.

BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
If there’s no advancements in alignment before takeoff, is there really any remote hope of doing anything? You’d need to legally halt ai progress everywhere in the world and carefully monitor large compute clusters or someone could still do it. Honestly I think we should put tons of money into the control problem, but otherwise just gamble it.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  I mean, you have accurately summarized the exact thing that safety advocates want. :) > legally halt ai progress everywhere in the world and carefully monitor large compute clusters This is in fact the thing they're working on. That's the whole point of the flops-based training run reporting requirements.
  - throwaway11460 3y ago
    Reporting requirements are not going to save you from Chinese, North Korean, Iranian or Russian programmers just doing it. Or some US/EU based hackers that don't care or actively go against the law. You can rent large botnets or various pieces of cloud for few dollars today, doesn't even have to be a DC that you could monitor.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. And NK, Iran and Russia honestly have nothing. The day we have to worry about NK ASI takeoff, it'll already long have happened in some American basement. So we just need active monitoring for US/EU data centers. That's a big ask to be sure, and definitely an invasion of privacy, but it's hardly unviable, either technologically or politically. The corporatized structure of big LLMs helps us out here: the states involved already have lots of experience in investigating and curtailing corporate behavior. And sure, ultimately there's no stopping it. The whole point is to play for time in the hopes that somebody comes up with a good idea for safety and we manage an actually aligned takeoff, at which point it's out of our hands anyways.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        > Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. Don't be naive. If the PRC can get America/etc to agree to slowdowns then the PRC can privately ignore those agreements and take the lead. Agreements like that are worse than meaningless when there's no reliable and trustworthy auditing to keep people honest. Do you really think the PRC would allow American inspectors to crawl all over their country looking for data centers and examining all the code running there? Of course not. Nor would America permit Chinese inspectors to do this in America. The only point of such an agreement is to hope the other party is stupid enough to be honest and earnestly abide by it.
        FeepingCreature 3y ago
        I do think the PRC has shown no indication of even wanting to pursue superintelligence takeoff, and has publically spoken against it on danger grounds. America and American companies are the only ones saying that this cannot be stopped because "everybody else" would pursue it anyway. The CCP does not want a superintelligence, because a superintelligence would at best take away political control from the party.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Funnily enough, I’m currently reading the 1995 Sci-fi novel "The Star Fraction", where exactly this scenario exists. On the ground, it’s Stasis, a paramilitary force that intercedes when certain forbidden technologies (including AI) are developed. In space, there’s the Space Faction who are ready to cripple all infrastructure on earth (by death lasering everything from orbit) if they discover the appearance of AGI. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Fraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Fraction
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Also to some extent Singularity Sky. "You shall not violate causality within my historic lightcone. Or else." Of course, in that story it's a question of monopolization.
selestify 3y ago
What evidence do we have that a hard takeoff is likely?
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  What evidence do we have that it's impossible or even just very unlikely?
  - goatlover 3y ago
    We don't have any evidence other than billions of biological intelligences already exist, and they tend to form lots of organizations with lots of resources. Also, AIs exist alongside other AIs and related technologies. It's similar to the gray goo scenario. But why think it's a real possibility given the world is already full of living things, and if gray goo were created, there would already be lots of nanotech that could be used to contain it.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      The world we live in is the result of a gray goo scenario causing a global genocide. (Google Oxygen Holocaust.) So it kinda makes a poor argument that sudden global ecosystem collapses are impossible. That said, everything we have in natural biotech, while advanced, are incremental improvements on the initial chemical replicators that arose in a hydrothermal vent billions of years ago. Evolution has massive path dependence; if there was a better way to build a cell from the ground up, but it required one too many incremental steps that were individually nonviable, evolution would never find it. (Example: 3.7 billion years of evolution, and zero animals with a wheel-and-axle!) So the biosphere we have isn't very strong evidence that there isn't an invasive species of non-DNA-based replicators waiting in our future. That said, if I was an ASI and I wanted to kill every human, I wouldn't make nanotech, I'd mod a new Covid strain that waits a few months and then synthesizes botox. Humans are not safe in the presence of a sufficiently smart adversary. (As with playing against Magnus Carlsen, you don't know how you lose, but you know that you will.)
      - 3y ago
lupire 3y ago
AGI is not a threat for the simple reason that non-G AI would destroy the world before AGI is created, as we are already starting to see.

BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago

If there’s no advancements in alignment before takeoff, is there really any remote hope of doing anything? You’d need to legally halt ai progress everywhere in the world and carefully monitor large compute clusters or someone could still do it. Honestly I think we should put tons of money into the control problem, but otherwise just gamble it.

FeepingCreature 3y ago
I mean, you have accurately summarized the exact thing that safety advocates want. :) > legally halt ai progress everywhere in the world and carefully monitor large compute clusters This is in fact the thing they're working on. That's the whole point of the flops-based training run reporting requirements.
- throwaway11460 3y ago
  Reporting requirements are not going to save you from Chinese, North Korean, Iranian or Russian programmers just doing it. Or some US/EU based hackers that don't care or actively go against the law. You can rent large botnets or various pieces of cloud for few dollars today, doesn't even have to be a DC that you could monitor.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. And NK, Iran and Russia honestly have nothing. The day we have to worry about NK ASI takeoff, it'll already long have happened in some American basement. So we just need active monitoring for US/EU data centers. That's a big ask to be sure, and definitely an invasion of privacy, but it's hardly unviable, either technologically or politically. The corporatized structure of big LLMs helps us out here: the states involved already have lots of experience in investigating and curtailing corporate behavior. And sure, ultimately there's no stopping it. The whole point is to play for time in the hopes that somebody comes up with a good idea for safety and we manage an actually aligned takeoff, at which point it's out of our hands anyways.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      > Sure, but China is already honestly more careful than America: the CCP really doesn't want competitors to power. They're very open to slowdown agreements. Don't be naive. If the PRC can get America/etc to agree to slowdowns then the PRC can privately ignore those agreements and take the lead. Agreements like that are worse than meaningless when there's no reliable and trustworthy auditing to keep people honest. Do you really think the PRC would allow American inspectors to crawl all over their country looking for data centers and examining all the code running there? Of course not. Nor would America permit Chinese inspectors to do this in America. The only point of such an agreement is to hope the other party is stupid enough to be honest and earnestly abide by it.
      - FeepingCreature 3y ago
        I do think the PRC has shown no indication of even wanting to pursue superintelligence takeoff, and has publically spoken against it on danger grounds. America and American companies are the only ones saying that this cannot be stopped because "everybody else" would pursue it anyway. The CCP does not want a superintelligence, because a superintelligence would at best take away political control from the party.
Semaphor 3y ago
Funnily enough, I’m currently reading the 1995 Sci-fi novel "The Star Fraction", where exactly this scenario exists. On the ground, it’s Stasis, a paramilitary force that intercedes when certain forbidden technologies (including AI) are developed. In space, there’s the Space Faction who are ready to cripple all infrastructure on earth (by death lasering everything from orbit) if they discover the appearance of AGI. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Fraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Fraction
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  Also to some extent Singularity Sky. "You shall not violate causality within my historic lightcone. Or else." Of course, in that story it's a question of monopolization.

selestify 3y ago

What evidence do we have that a hard takeoff is likely?

FeepingCreature 3y ago
What evidence do we have that it's impossible or even just very unlikely?
- goatlover 3y ago
  We don't have any evidence other than billions of biological intelligences already exist, and they tend to form lots of organizations with lots of resources. Also, AIs exist alongside other AIs and related technologies. It's similar to the gray goo scenario. But why think it's a real possibility given the world is already full of living things, and if gray goo were created, there would already be lots of nanotech that could be used to contain it.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    The world we live in is the result of a gray goo scenario causing a global genocide. (Google Oxygen Holocaust.) So it kinda makes a poor argument that sudden global ecosystem collapses are impossible. That said, everything we have in natural biotech, while advanced, are incremental improvements on the initial chemical replicators that arose in a hydrothermal vent billions of years ago. Evolution has massive path dependence; if there was a better way to build a cell from the ground up, but it required one too many incremental steps that were individually nonviable, evolution would never find it. (Example: 3.7 billion years of evolution, and zero animals with a wheel-and-axle!) So the biosphere we have isn't very strong evidence that there isn't an invasive species of non-DNA-based replicators waiting in our future. That said, if I was an ASI and I wanted to kill every human, I wouldn't make nanotech, I'd mod a new Covid strain that waits a few months and then synthesizes botox. Humans are not safe in the presence of a sufficiently smart adversary. (As with playing against Magnus Carlsen, you don't know how you lose, but you know that you will.)
    - 3y ago

lupire 3y ago

AGI is not a threat for the simple reason that non-G AI would destroy the world before AGI is created, as we are already starting to see.