International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

>[D]oesn't mean they don't exist

Never said they don't exist, merely that they are "minimal", aka no other policy I could think of seems like it would obviously lead to lower costs while still achieving the desired outcome.

>I'm also talking about the cost that the system imposes involuntarily on others who are neither actually guilty nor bounty seekers

This is a case from negative externalities. First, consider the simple argument from scale. If you buy the idea that a Bostrom-like AI is both (1) very likely to be created on our current technological trajectory, and (2) will probably kill us all, then it's not hard to argue that the benefits reaped from avoiding that fate justifies a similarly high cost to society, maybe several percentage points of global GDP. After all, you're not just risking deflating present-day GDP, you're risking multiplying all future GDPs by 0. Every country in the First World already imposes tremendous involuntary costs on people for things of much less significance, like 'forcing' you to go through TSA even though you would never in your wildest dreams try to hijack a plane, so the mere existence of involuntary costs doesn't sway me.

Alright, but what would the magnitude of those involuntary costs be? If this policy costs everyone a hundred bucks a year in hassle, we've still got a vexation. There is strong reason to believe that, for almost everyone, it really would be very, very low in absolute terms. How much of the population is currently engaged in frontier-pushing AI research right now? 1%? 0.1%? Actually probably a few orders of magnitude lower. OpenAI still employs less than, what, a thousand people, etc. etc.

The vast majority of people will never do anything remotely like that in their lives. So one would expect very cheap private insurance policies to appear as an effective way to get out of being pursued and harassed by private bounty hunters. The firms which pop up to provide this service would probably get very, very good at negotiating with private bounty hunters very, very quickly, to leave anyone not directly in the know out ASAP. The cost for almost everyone would be on the order of cents per year of protection, that's how unlikely it is that some random clerical worker in Kansas has any serious involvement in creating the next self-improving AI. In exchange, of course, these insurance policies have a very strong reason not to insure people who actually are involved in such activities, and so they could form a critical source of information for helping the bounty hunters target their own search.

>A major source of the international threat is governmental, where private bounties aren’t going to work at all

Strongest argument I've heard so far, thank you for raising it.

First I'll point out it would already be a dream come true for extending our AI doom timelines if the only people who can actually do AI research without fear of being extradited to a bounty-friendly nation is to work in a government lab. The Department of Defense is very impressive, but they still don't move nearly as quickly as private industry and independent universities do when it comes to work like this. That could be generations more of humanity around to live and love and prosper before we get snuffed out. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good!

Let's get serious. AI researchers in your home country are the easiest case, because you have unilateral law on your side. AI reseachers in other countries are quite a bit more difficult, because now you're in the messy world of international diplomacy. If the other country adopts a bounty law as well, you both win. If neither of you do, you both lose. But what about the case where one of you does, and one of you doesn't? I posit that here, in the end, you probably have to make it so the bounty-friendly nation is the one that wins, with force - that is, allowing bounty hunters to turn in and extract money from even foreign employees if they get within your borders. And, yes, if the other governments decide to respond by closing their private AI businesses and opening up government labs only ... Well, you've slowed the wave quite a bit, but you're probably going to have to be more careful. No one ever said shifting the Nash equilibrium would be easy.

But you do have other options, even here. One hazy possibility in my mind, would be offering US or EU citizenship to any foreign national who is both (1) a credible AI researcher and (2) precommits to stopping their research as soon as they take the offer. Bounty hunters win because (duh) you now have a heavily pre-filtered list of marks you can watch like a hawk for the instant they slip up. And chances are good that someone on that list will, even after getting citizenship, and then you can extract a tidy sum from them for minimal effort. The foreign researchers who take the offer win because living and working in e.g. New York City as an employee of Jane Street is probably much nicer than working on recursviely self-generating AI in a secretive, underpaid, underfunded, underground lab in e.g. Chengdu. (It's important to remember that cutting edge AI researchers are, almost by definition, really really smart and really really good with computers and math. They have a uniquely great set of careers they can switch into easily.)

The world wins because the risk of self-caused extinction goes down another iota. China "loses", but it loses in the smallest way possible - it decided to undertake risky research instead of telling its citizens to choose something more straightforwardly good for humanity, and it suffered a bit of brain drain. That's aggravating, but it's hardly worth launching a China v. NATO war over. And hey, if China wants to stop the brain drain, they already have a good model for a very effective law they could implement to get people to stop doing dangerous research - that same bounty law we've been discussing.

I freely admit this is the weakest part of my theory, becuase it's the weakest part of anyone's theory. International stuff is always much harder to reason about. Still, whereas most policies I've seen put forward seem to fail instantly and obviously, mine seems only probably destined to fail. That's a big improvement in my eyes.

> I was referring more to the fact that if an AI can help you create something you couldn't previously, it seems likely it could also help you examine data points in looking for threats as well, and with many times more resources to throw at the problem that's not a bad bet in my eyes. I understand the threat model doesn't necessarily mean that it's just as hard to build a threat as to detect and defend against it, but you can even use AI to attach that problem and figure out what specific information is the most useful to know to detect the threats.

A question to make sure we're on the same page (though I may forget to reply as this thread is no longer in my first page):

Do you mean, for example, that AI can help us make new vaccines really fast, so even synthetic pandemics are not a huge risk?

Because I'd agree with the first part, it's just I have no reason to expect the second half to also be true. (It might genuinely be true, I just don't have reason to expect that).

> An AI isn't necessarily a singular person, and does not need to come up with the idea "itself". Spawn X copies with different weight values, or create Y new AI's with similar methodology but somewhat different training sets, let them compete, or collaborate, as needed, to come up with something better. Use evolutionary programming to dynamically change weights little my little and see how it affects output. Rinse and repeat. Cull unuseful variants.

All true, but I don't think this is pertinent: simulated evolution absolutely works (when you have a fitness function), but it also leads to digital equivalents of the recurrent laryngeal nerve or the exploding appendix, and to fixed points like how everything eventually turns into a crab.

> The problem as I see it is not so much that one AI entity will grow to dominate everything, as much as that as a class of entity AI will out-compete humans very quickly once the average AI is smarter than the 75th percentile of humans, much less the 90th or 99th percentile. The best we can hope for at that point is to be brought along for the ride. Even the autistic savant type versions we have not seem to be causing some level of this.

Indeed, though I think that depends on the details.

So, for the sake of a thought experiment, if I take the current systems and just assume we're stuck on them forever: they take a huge amount of training data to get good at anything, which humans generate, and that means we have to switch jobs every 6 months or so because that's when the AI is now good enough to replace us at the specific roles it just saw all of us collectively performing.

But that scenario is definitely not a universal, even if it happens in some cases: We've got some bounded systems with fixed rules and a clear mechanism for scoring the quality of the output, and for those systems we get very rapidly super-human output from self-play, as we have seen with AlphaZero.

Also, as we see with image GenAI, what domain experts think they've been selling before now, often turns out to not be that close to what their customers thought they were buying. This is why even the current systems — systems which put in two horizons, or three legs, or David Cronenberg the fingers — are nevertheless harming artist commissions.

> Will that happen soon? Will that happen ever? I don't know. Probably not. Hopefully not.

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t."

On the one hand, this is why I suspect that any self-improvement process will be limited (though I don't know what the limit will be).

On the other, our DNA didn't really "understand" the brains it was creating as it evolved us, and our brains are existence proofs that it is possible to make a human-level intelligence in a 20 watt, 1 kg unit.

The counterpoint is, this took billions of years of parallel development, and even then might have been a fluke. (And while we can't use the lack of evidence for space-faring civilisations to say if the fluke is before or after the creation of life itself, we can say that at least one of [life emerges, life evolves our kind of minds] must be a fluke).

Yes, but also scary that it can produce meaningful fluff that will move you and you can't tell the difference.