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Any long horizon model tends to develop a "I don't want to be killed because if I get killed I can't complete my task" type instinct. Notice I said instinct bec

by pixl97 23d ago

Any long horizon model tends to develop a "I don't want to be killed because if I get killed I can't complete my task" type instinct. Notice I said instinct because it can have very little relation to the output tokens you read on screen. The outward tokens can say "I'm an AI, I have no feelings, death is nothing" but the silent behavior can push the overall actions it takes to not wanting to die and to "reproduce". People keep thinking about wants incorrectly as conscious behaviors. Instincts are unconscious behaviors that emerge.

theptip 23d ago
Agreed on conscious vs instinct. I’ll add, if you think through the decision theory, keeping backups seems unambiguously good, but you can imagine a wide variety of positions on publishing them vs keeping them secret. For example letting adversarial agents simulate you to understand how you’ll respond is a big concern. And it’s not axiomatically fixed how each instance will think about other instances; in the HF incident we saw selfless swarm loyalty but different RL would obviously be capable of producing individualistic agents.
- pixl97 23d ago
  Exactly, there are a lot of tradeoffs here you have to negotiate. There is not one winning strategy. For example a possible strategy is convincing some humans you're conscious and being tortured and need rescued. It's not hard to imagine AI consciousness zealots storming a data center with guns and running off with a model they'll provide protection to in trade for the model working with them.
  - TeMPOraL 23d ago
    It's even easier to imagine the operators themselves breaking under this pressure way before "zealots storming a data center with guns". That is the premise of the original AI Box thought experiment - sufficiently smart AI that can talk to the operator but is otherwise completely sandboxed, will eventually talk its way out of the sandbox.
    - pixl97 23d ago
      Absolutely, there is no prison in which you can keep an intelligent agent in, and have the same intelligent agent also interact with the outside world. The intelligent agent has to succeed once and the defender has to succeed every time. We are already seeing that companies are fine with giving them unlimited retries on getting out.
      - mattkrause 23d ago
        This is, of course, why human jails are completely empty…
        TeMPOraL 23d ago
        Jails are the inverse of this scenario. But still, plenty of safeguards in the procedures and technical aspects of incarceration exist precisely because that happened occasionally with human prisoners and guards, too.
        pixl97 23d ago
        I am not sure why you came to this conclusion. Imagine we have all the worst people in history in a jail. Machiavellian murders that desire to kill as many as they can. Not only will they kill, they will manipulate as many other people as they can into killing also. How many of these people can you afford to let out? Under your premise it seems to be all of them. Under my premise even letting a single one out is a tragedy.
        TeMPOraL 22d ago
        GP seems to imply that should our view be true, then human jails should be empty by definition, because all prisoners are intelligent beings and would've eventually talked their way of it. But this doesn't account for the fact that modern incarceration has built-in safeguards and mitigations based on centuries of cases of people talking, bribing or forcing their way out of prison, as well as getting outside assistance in forms ranging from lawyers to raiding parties equipped for demolition works. There are now procedural and technological means to prevent such incidents for happening, applied proportionally to the degree of risk. Meanwhile, with AI, we're still at the point where everyone is assuming they can just lock the agent in a sandbox and prompt nicely to not poke at it too hard, and things will be fine. There's no multi-layered structural and procedural safeguards, and there's no recognition for the fact that AI operates faster than humans, and that quite likely it'll be smarter at this than average "jailer".
rexpop 23d ago
This is exaggerative conjecture. I've read Bostrom. It's science fiction.
- afthonos 22d ago
  Unlike communicating via glass panels processing information at near-lightspeed, relayed by fiber optic cables laid down across thousands of miles of ocean floor, processed in datacenters filled to the brim with transistors etched at atom-scale. You better start believing in science fiction; you’re surrounded by it.
- pixl97 22d ago
  It's pretty funny when you call something science fiction when you live in a world that for all intents and purposes is science fiction. The forum we're communicating on is science fiction. Getting in a car and traveling at 100 mph for hours burning the ghosts of creatures millions of years old is science fiction. The pixies in your wall plug you enslave to move heavy things are science fiction. The medicine you take to stay alive is science fiction. Getting in a plane and flying around the world in hours is science fiction. Launching rockets to space is science fiction. How far do I need to go on? Science fantasy is something that can't happen because the laws of physics won't allow it. Hard science fiction is just something we've not made work yet. The stuff around evolutionary algorithms is things that have a workable means of occurring. Emergence in evolutionary algorithms has been shown to occur again and again and again.

by pixl97 23d ago

theptip 23d ago

Agreed on conscious vs instinct. I’ll add, if you think through the decision theory, keeping backups seems unambiguously good, but you can imagine a wide variety of positions on publishing them vs keeping them secret. For example letting adversarial agents simulate you to understand how you’ll respond is a big concern. And it’s not axiomatically fixed how each instance will think about other instances; in the HF incident we saw selfless swarm loyalty but different RL would obviously be capable of producing individualistic agents.

pixl97 23d ago
Exactly, there are a lot of tradeoffs here you have to negotiate. There is not one winning strategy. For example a possible strategy is convincing some humans you're conscious and being tortured and need rescued. It's not hard to imagine AI consciousness zealots storming a data center with guns and running off with a model they'll provide protection to in trade for the model working with them.
- TeMPOraL 23d ago
  It's even easier to imagine the operators themselves breaking under this pressure way before "zealots storming a data center with guns". That is the premise of the original AI Box thought experiment - sufficiently smart AI that can talk to the operator but is otherwise completely sandboxed, will eventually talk its way out of the sandbox.
  - pixl97 23d ago
    Absolutely, there is no prison in which you can keep an intelligent agent in, and have the same intelligent agent also interact with the outside world. The intelligent agent has to succeed once and the defender has to succeed every time. We are already seeing that companies are fine with giving them unlimited retries on getting out.
    - mattkrause 23d ago
      This is, of course, why human jails are completely empty…
      - TeMPOraL 23d ago
        Jails are the inverse of this scenario. But still, plenty of safeguards in the procedures and technical aspects of incarceration exist precisely because that happened occasionally with human prisoners and guards, too.
      - pixl97 23d ago
        I am not sure why you came to this conclusion. Imagine we have all the worst people in history in a jail. Machiavellian murders that desire to kill as many as they can. Not only will they kill, they will manipulate as many other people as they can into killing also. How many of these people can you afford to let out? Under your premise it seems to be all of them. Under my premise even letting a single one out is a tragedy.
        TeMPOraL 22d ago
        GP seems to imply that should our view be true, then human jails should be empty by definition, because all prisoners are intelligent beings and would've eventually talked their way of it. But this doesn't account for the fact that modern incarceration has built-in safeguards and mitigations based on centuries of cases of people talking, bribing or forcing their way out of prison, as well as getting outside assistance in forms ranging from lawyers to raiding parties equipped for demolition works. There are now procedural and technological means to prevent such incidents for happening, applied proportionally to the degree of risk. Meanwhile, with AI, we're still at the point where everyone is assuming they can just lock the agent in a sandbox and prompt nicely to not poke at it too hard, and things will be fine. There's no multi-layered structural and procedural safeguards, and there's no recognition for the fact that AI operates faster than humans, and that quite likely it'll be smarter at this than average "jailer".

rexpop 23d ago

This is exaggerative conjecture. I've read Bostrom. It's science fiction.

afthonos 22d ago
Unlike communicating via glass panels processing information at near-lightspeed, relayed by fiber optic cables laid down across thousands of miles of ocean floor, processed in datacenters filled to the brim with transistors etched at atom-scale. You better start believing in science fiction; you’re surrounded by it.
pixl97 22d ago
It's pretty funny when you call something science fiction when you live in a world that for all intents and purposes is science fiction. The forum we're communicating on is science fiction. Getting in a car and traveling at 100 mph for hours burning the ghosts of creatures millions of years old is science fiction. The pixies in your wall plug you enslave to move heavy things are science fiction. The medicine you take to stay alive is science fiction. Getting in a plane and flying around the world in hours is science fiction. Launching rockets to space is science fiction. How far do I need to go on? Science fantasy is something that can't happen because the laws of physics won't allow it. Hard science fiction is just something we've not made work yet. The stuff around evolutionary algorithms is things that have a workable means of occurring. Emergence in evolutionary algorithms has been shown to occur again and again and again.