Writing down something I’ve found myself repeating in different conversations:

If you’re looking for ways to help with the whole “the world looks pretty doomed” business, here’s my advice: look around for places where we’re all being total idiots.

Look for places where everyone’s fretting about a problem that some part of you thinks it could obviously just solve.

Look around for places where something seems incompetently run, or hopelessly inept, and where some part of you thinks you can do better.

Then do it better.

For a concrete example, consider Devansh. Devansh came to me last year and said something to the effect of, “Hey, wait, it sounds like you think Eliezer does a sort of alignment-idea-generation that nobody else does, and he’s limited here by his unusually low stamina, but I can think of a bunch of medical tests that you haven’t run, are you an idiot or something?” And I was like, “Yes, definitely, please run them, do you need money”.

I’m not particularly hopeful there, but hell, it’s worth a shot! And, importantly, this is the sort of attitude that can lead people to actually trying things at all, rather than assuming that we live in a more adequate world where all the (seemingly) dumb obvious ideas have already been tried.

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(Epistemic status: attempting to clear up a misunderstanding about points I have attempted to make in the past. This post is not intended as an argument for those points.)

I have long said that the lion’s share of the AI alignment problem seems to me to be about pointing powerful cognition at anything at all, rather than figuring out what to point it at.

It’s recently come to my attention that some people have misunderstood this point, so I’ll attempt to clarify here.

In saying the above, I do not mean the following:

(1) Any practical AI that you’re dealing with will necessarily be cleanly internally organized around pursuing a single objective. Managing to put your own objective into this “goal slot” (as opposed to having the goal slot set by random happenstance) is a central difficult challenge. [Reminder: I am not asserting this] 

Instead, I mean something more like the following:

(2) By default, the first minds humanity makes will be a terrible spaghetti-code mess, with no clearly-factored-out “goal” that the surrounding cognition pursues in a unified way. The mind will be more like a pile of complex, messily interconnected kludges, whose ultimate behavior is sensitive to the particulars of how it reflects and irons out the tensions within itself over time.

Making the AI even have something vaguely nearing a ‘goal slot’ that is stable under various operating pressures (such as reflection) during the course of operation, is an undertaking that requires mastery of cognition in its own right—mastery of a sort that we’re exceedingly unlikely to achieve if we just try to figure out how to build a mind, without filtering for approaches that are more legible and aimable.

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I expect navigating the acute risk period to be tricky for our civilization, for a number of reasons. Success looks to me to require clearing a variety of technical, sociopolitical, and moral hurdles, and while in principle sufficient mastery of solutions to the technical problems might substitute for solutions to the sociopolitical and other problems, it nevertheless looks to me like we need a lot of things to go right.

Some sub-problems look harder to me than others. For instance, people are still regularly surprised when I tell them that I think the hard bits are much more technical than moral: it looks to me like figuring out how to aim an AGI at all is harder than figuring out where to aim it.^[1]

Within the list of technical obstacles, there are some that strike me as more central than others, like “figure out how to aim optimization”. And a big reason why I’m currently fairly pessimistic about humanity’s odds is that it seems to me like almost nobody is focusing on the technical challenges that seem most central and unavoidable to me.

Many people wrongly believe that I’m pessimistic because I think the alignment problem is extraordinarily difficult on a purely technical level. That’s flatly false, and is pretty high up there on my list of least favorite misconceptions of my views.^[2]

I think the problem is a normal problem of mastering some scientific field, as humanity has done many times before. Maybe it’s somewhat trickier, on account of (e.g.) intelligence being more complicated than, say, physics; maybe it’s somewhat easier on account of how we have more introspective access to a working mind than we have to the low-level physical fields; but on the whole, I doubt it’s all that qualitatively different than the sorts of summits humanity has surmounted before.

It’s made trickier by the fact that we probably have to attain mastery of general intelligence before we spend a bunch of time working with general intelligences (on account of how we seem likely to kill ourselves by accident within a few years, once we have AGIs on hand, if no pivotal act occurs), but that alone is not enough to undermine my hope. Read more »

Preamble:

(If you’re already familiar with all basics and don’t want any preamble, skip ahead to Section B for technical difficulties of alignment proper.)

I have several times failed to write up a well-organized list of reasons why AGI will kill you.  People come in with different ideas about why AGI would be survivable, and want to hear different obviously key points addressed first.  Some fraction of those people are loudly upset with me if the obviously most important points aren’t addressed immediately, and I address different points first instead.

Having failed to solve this problem in any good way, I now give up and solve it poorly with a poorly organized list of individual rants.  I’m not particularly happy with this list; the alternative was publishing nothing, and publishing this seems marginally more dignified.

Three points about the general subject matter of discussion here, numbered so as not to conflict with the list of lethalities:

-3.  I’m assuming you are already familiar with some basics, and already know what ‘orthogonality’ and ‘instrumental convergence’ are and why they’re true.  People occasionally claim to me that I need to stop fighting old wars here, because, those people claim to me, those wars have already been won within the important-according-to-them parts of the current audience.  I suppose it’s at least true that none of the current major EA funders seem to be visibly in denial about orthogonality or instrumental convergence as such; so, fine.  If you don’t know what ‘orthogonality’ or ‘instrumental convergence’ are, or don’t see for yourself why they’re true, you need a different introduction than this one.

-2.  When I say that alignment is lethally difficult, I am not talking about ideal or perfect goals of ‘provable’ alignment, nor total alignment of superintelligences on exact human values, nor getting AIs to produce satisfactory arguments about moral dilemmas which sorta-reasonable humans disagree about, nor attaining an absolute certainty of an AI not killing everyone.  When I say that alignment is difficult, I mean that in practice, using the techniques we actually have, “please don’t disassemble literally everyone with probability roughly 1” is an overly large ask that we are not on course to get.  So far as I’m concerned, if you can get a powerful AGI that carries out some pivotal superhuman engineering task, with a less than fifty percent change of killing more than one billion people, I’ll take it.  Even smaller chances of killing even fewer people would be a nice luxury, but if you can get as incredibly far as “less than roughly certain to kill everybody”, then you can probably get down to under a 5% chance with only slightly more effort.  Practically all of the difficulty is in getting to “less than certainty of killing literally everyone”.  Trolley problems are not an interesting subproblem in all of this; if there are any survivors, you solved alignment.  At this point, I no longer care how it works, I don’t care how you got there, I am cause-agnostic about whatever methodology you used, all I am looking at is prospective results, all I want is that we have justifiable cause to believe of a pivotally useful AGI ‘this will not kill literally everyone’.  Anybody telling you I’m asking for stricter ‘alignment’ than this has failed at reading comprehension.  The big ask from AGI alignment, the basic challenge I am saying is too difficult, is to obtain by any strategy whatsoever a significant chance of there being any survivors.

-1.  None of this is about anything being impossible in principle.  The metaphor I usually use is that if a textbook from one hundred years in the future fell into our hands, containing all of the simple ideas that actually work robustly in practice, we could probably build an aligned superintelligence in six months.  For people schooled in machine learning, I use as my metaphor the difference between ReLU activations and sigmoid activations.  Sigmoid activations are complicated and fragile, and do a terrible job of transmitting gradients through many layers; ReLUs are incredibly simple (for the unfamiliar, the activation function is literally max(x, 0)) and work much better.  Most neural networks for the first decades of the field used sigmoids; the idea of ReLUs wasn’t discovered, validated, and popularized until decades later.  What’s lethal is that we do not have the Textbook From The Future telling us all the simple solutions that actually in real life just work and are robust; we’re going to be doing everything with metaphorical sigmoids on the first critical try.  No difficulty discussed here about AGI alignment is claimed by me to be impossible – to merely human science and engineering, let alone in principle – if we had 100 years to solve it using unlimited retries, the way that science usually has an unbounded time budget and unlimited retries.  This list of lethalities is about things we are not on course to solve in practice in time on the first critical try; none of it is meant to make a much stronger claim about things that are impossible in principle.

That said:

Here, from my perspective, are some different true things that could be said, to contradict various false things that various different people seem to believe, about why AGI would be survivable on anything remotely remotely resembling the current pathway, or any other pathway we can easily jump to.

Section A:

This is a very lethal problem, it has to be solved one way or another, it has to be solved at a minimum strength and difficulty level instead of various easier modes that some dream about, we do not have any visible option of ‘everyone’ retreating to only solve safe weak problems instead, and failing on the first really dangerous try is fatal.

1.  Alpha Zero blew past all accumulated human knowledge about Go after a day or so of self-play, with no reliance on human playbooks or sample games.  Anyone relying on “well, it’ll get up to human capability at Go, but then have a hard time getting past that because it won’t be able to learn from humans any more” would have relied on vacuum.  AGI will not be upper-bounded by human ability or human learning speed.  Things much smarter than human would be able to learn from less evidence than humans require to have ideas driven into their brains; there are theoretical upper bounds here, but those upper bounds seem very high. (Eg, each bit of information that couldn’t already be fully predicted can eliminate at most half the probability mass of all hypotheses under consideration.)  It is not naturally (by default, barring intervention) the case that everything takes place on a timescale that makes it easy for us to react.

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Editor’s note:  The following is a lightly edited copy of a document written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in November 2017. Since this is a snapshot of Eliezer’s thinking at a specific time, we’ve sprinkled reminders throughout that this is from 2017.

A background note:

It’s often the case that people are slow to abandon obsolete playbooks in response to a novel challenge. And AGI is certainly a very novel challenge.

Italian general Luigi Cadorna offers a memorable historical example. In the Isonzo Offensive of World War I, Cadorna lost hundreds of thousands of men in futile frontal assaults against enemy trenches defended by barbed wire and machine guns.  As morale plummeted and desertions became epidemic, Cadorna began executing his own soldiers en masse, in an attempt to cure the rest of their “cowardice.” The offensive continued for 2.5 years.

Cadorna made many mistakes, but foremost among them was his refusal to recognize that this war was fundamentally unlike those that had come before.  Modern weaponry had forced a paradigm shift, and Cadorna’s instincts were not merely miscalibrated—they were systematically broken.  No number of small, incremental updates within his obsolete framework would be sufficient to meet the new challenge.

Other examples of this type of mistake include the initial response of the record industry to iTunes and streaming; or, more seriously, the response of most Western governments to COVID-19.

 

 

As usual, the real challenge of reference class forecasting is figuring out which reference class the thing you’re trying to model belongs to.

For most problems, rethinking your approach from the ground up is wasteful and unnecessary, because most problems have a similar causal structure to a large number of past cases. When the problem isn’t commensurate with existing strategies, as in the case of AGI, you need a new playbook.

I’ve sometimes been known to complain, or in a polite way scream in utter terror, that “there is no good guy group in AGI”, i.e., if a researcher on this Earth currently wishes to contribute to the common good, there are literally zero projects they can join and no project close to being joinable.  In its present version, this document is an informal response to an AI researcher who asked me to list out the qualities of such a “good project”.

In summary, a “good project” needs:

• Trustworthy command:  A trustworthy chain of command with respect to both legal and pragmatic control of the intellectual property (IP) of such a project; a running AGI being included as “IP” in this sense.
• Research closure:  The organizational ability to close and/or silo IP to within a trustworthy section and prevent its release by sheer default.
• Strong opsec:  Operational security adequate to prevent the proliferation of code (or other information sufficient to recreate code within e.g. 1 year) due to e.g. Russian intelligence agencies grabbing the code.
• Common good commitment:  The project’s command and its people must have a credible commitment to both short-term and long-term goodness.  Short-term goodness comprises the immediate welfare of present-day Earth; long-term goodness is the achievement of transhumanist astronomical goods.
• Alignment mindset:  Somebody on the project needs deep enough security mindset plus understanding of AI cognition that they can originate new, deep measures to ensure AGI alignment; and they must be in a position of technical control or otherwise have effectively unlimited political capital.  Everybody on the project needs to understand and expect that aligning an AGI will be terrifically difficult and terribly dangerous.
• Requisite resource levels:  The project must have adequate resources to compete at the frontier of AGI development, including whatever mix of computational resources, intellectual labor, and closed insights are required to produce a 1+ year lead over less cautious competing projects.

I was asked what would constitute “minimal, adequate, and good” performance on each of these dimensions.  I tend to divide things sharply into “not adequate” and “adequate” but will try to answer in the spirit of the question nonetheless.
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