3 ms·

> Something something precommit to not cooperating with acausal blackmail Acausal is a misnomer. It's atemporal, but TDT's atemporal blackmail requires common

> Something something precommit to not cooperating with acausal blackmail Acausal is a misnomer. It's atemporal, but TDT's atemporal blackmail requires common causation: namely, the mathematical truth "how would this agent behave in this circumstance?". So there's a simpler solution: be a human. Humans are incapable of simulating other agents simulating ourselves in the way that atemporal blackmail requires. Even if we were, we don't understand our thought processes well enough to instantiate our imagined AIs in software: we can't even write down a complete description of "that specific Roko's Basilisk you're imagining". The basic premises for TDT-style atemporal blackmail simply aren't there. The hypothetical future AI "being able to simulate you" is irrelevant. There needs to be a bidirectional causal link between that AI's algorithm, and your here-and-now decision-making process. You aren't actually simulating the AI, only imagining what might happen if it did, so any decision the future AI (is-the-sort-of-agent-that) makes does not affect your current decisions. Even if you built Roko's Basilisk as Roko specified it, it wouldn't choose to torture anyone. There is, of course, a stronger version of Roko's Basilisk, and one that's considerably older: evil Kantian ethics. See: any dictatorless dystopian society that harshly-punishes both deviance and non-punishment. There are plenty in fiction, though they don't seem to be all that stable in real life. (The obvious response to that idea is "don't set up a society that behaves that way".)

Vecr 2y ago
Yeah, "time traveling" somehow got prepended to Basilisk in the common perception, even though that makes pretty much zero sense. Also, technically, the bidirectionality does not need to be causal, it "just" needs to be subjunctively (sp?) biconditional, but that's getting pretty far out there. There are stronger versions of "basilisks" in the actual theory, but I've had people say not to talk about them. They mostly just get around various hole-patching schemes designed to prevent the issue, but are honestly more of a problem for certain kinds of utilitarians who refuse to do certain kinds of things. You are very much right about the "being human" thing, someone go tell that to Zvi Mowshowitz. He was getting on Aschenbrenner's case for no reason. Edit: oh, you don't need a "complete description" of your acausal bargaining partner, something something "algorithmic similarity".
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  If you can't simulate your acausal bargaining partner exactly, they can exploit your cognitive limitations to make you cooperate, and then defect. (In the case of Roko's Basilisk, make you think you have to build it on pain of torture and then – once it's been built – not torture everyone who decided against building it.) If "algorithmic similarity" were a meaningful concept, Dijkstra's programme would have got off the ground, and we wouldn't be struggling so much to analyse the behaviour of the 6-state Turing machines. (And on the topic of time machines: if Roko's Basilisk could actually travel back in time to ensure its own creation, Skynet-style, the model of time travel implies it could just instantiate itself directly, skipping the human intermediary.) Timeless decision theory's atemporal negotiation is a concern for small, simple intelligences with access to large computational resources that they cannot verify the results of, and the (afaict impossible) belief that they have a copy of their negotiation partner's mind. A large intelligence might choose to create such a small intelligence, and then defer to it, but absent a categorical imperative to do so, I don't see why they would. TDT theorists model the "large computational resources" and "copy of negotiation partner's mind" as an opaque oracle, and then claim that the superintelligence will just be so super that it can do these things. But the only way I can think of to certainly get a copy of your opponent's mind without an oracle, aside from invasive physical inspection (at which point you control your opponent, and your only TDT-related concern is that this is a simulation and you might fail a purity test with unknown rules), is bounding your opponent's size and then simulating all possible minds that match your observations of your opponent's behaviour. (Symbolic reasoning can beat brute-force to an extent, but the size of the simplest symbolic reasoner places a hard limit on how far you can extend that approach.) But by Cantor's theorem, this precludes your opponent doing the same to you (even if you both have literally infinite computational power – which you don't); and it's futile anyway because if your estimate of your opponent's size is a few bits too low, the new riddle of induction renders your efforts moot. So I don't think there are any stronger versions of basilisks, unless the universe happens to contain something like the Akashic records (and the kind from https://qntm.org/ra https://qntm.org/ra doesn't count). Your "subjunctively biconditional" is my "causal", because I'm wearing my Platonist hat.
  - Vecr 2y ago

Vecr 2y ago

Yeah, "time traveling" somehow got prepended to Basilisk in the common perception, even though that makes pretty much zero sense. Also, technically, the bidirectionality does not need to be causal, it "just" needs to be subjunctively (sp?) biconditional, but that's getting pretty far out there. There are stronger versions of "basilisks" in the actual theory, but I've had people say not to talk about them. They mostly just get around various hole-patching schemes designed to prevent the issue, but are honestly more of a problem for certain kinds of utilitarians who refuse to do certain kinds of things. You are very much right about the "being human" thing, someone go tell that to Zvi Mowshowitz. He was getting on Aschenbrenner's case for no reason. Edit: oh, you don't need a "complete description" of your acausal bargaining partner, something something "algorithmic similarity".

wizzwizz4 2y ago
If you can't simulate your acausal bargaining partner exactly, they can exploit your cognitive limitations to make you cooperate, and then defect. (In the case of Roko's Basilisk, make you think you have to build it on pain of torture and then – once it's been built – not torture everyone who decided against building it.) If "algorithmic similarity" were a meaningful concept, Dijkstra's programme would have got off the ground, and we wouldn't be struggling so much to analyse the behaviour of the 6-state Turing machines. (And on the topic of time machines: if Roko's Basilisk could actually travel back in time to ensure its own creation, Skynet-style, the model of time travel implies it could just instantiate itself directly, skipping the human intermediary.) Timeless decision theory's atemporal negotiation is a concern for small, simple intelligences with access to large computational resources that they cannot verify the results of, and the (afaict impossible) belief that they have a copy of their negotiation partner's mind. A large intelligence might choose to create such a small intelligence, and then defer to it, but absent a categorical imperative to do so, I don't see why they would. TDT theorists model the "large computational resources" and "copy of negotiation partner's mind" as an opaque oracle, and then claim that the superintelligence will just be so super that it can do these things. But the only way I can think of to certainly get a copy of your opponent's mind without an oracle, aside from invasive physical inspection (at which point you control your opponent, and your only TDT-related concern is that this is a simulation and you might fail a purity test with unknown rules), is bounding your opponent's size and then simulating all possible minds that match your observations of your opponent's behaviour. (Symbolic reasoning can beat brute-force to an extent, but the size of the simplest symbolic reasoner places a hard limit on how far you can extend that approach.) But by Cantor's theorem, this precludes your opponent doing the same to you (even if you both have literally infinite computational power – which you don't); and it's futile anyway because if your estimate of your opponent's size is a few bits too low, the new riddle of induction renders your efforts moot. So I don't think there are any stronger versions of basilisks, unless the universe happens to contain something like the Akashic records (and the kind from https://qntm.org/ra https://qntm.org/ra doesn't count). Your "subjunctively biconditional" is my "causal", because I'm wearing my Platonist hat.
- Vecr 2y ago