> Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? This is the part about generative AI that gives me the most profound anxiety about our future. Every thing I know about human psychology tells me that in order for people to thrive, we need to be needed by others. A world where everyone is more or less alone consuming media automatically generated machines might be a world where people nominally h…
Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#712Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…
Arguably there are other (better) examples. Off the top of my head:
* CFC elimination (saved the ozone layer)
* Leaded gas ban (well, except private aircraft, but they are working on that)Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#713Depends what side of the Socialist calculation debate you’re on.
https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/socialist-calculation-...
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my darker thoughts about this, this is why we see no aliens. If AI would be a common great filter we'd expect at least one of them to expand outwards after being the filter?
Black holes == Super intelligence (aka The Transcension Hypothesis) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
Tipler's Omega Point cosmology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler#The_Omega_Poin...
>The Omega Point cosmology
>The Omega Point is a term Tipler uses to describe a cosmological state in the distant proper-time future of the universe.[6] He claims that this point is required to exist due to the laws of physics. According to him, it is required, for the known laws of physics to be consistent, that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity, and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a cosmological singularity. This singularity is Tipler's Omega Point.[7] With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society in the far future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating alternative universes.[8] Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties of God claimed by most traditional religions.[8][9]
>Tipler's argument of the omega point being required by the laws of physics is a more recent development that arose after the publication of his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality. In that book (and in papers he had published up to that time), Tipler had offered the Omega Point cosmology as a hypothesis, while still claiming to confine the analysis to the known laws of physics.[10]
>Tipler, along with co-author physicist John D. Barrow, defined the "final anthropic principle" (FAP) in their 1986 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle as a generalization of the anthropic principle:
>Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, will never die out.[11]
>One paraphrasing of Tipler's argument for FAP runs as follows: For the universe to physically exist, it must contain living observers. Our universe obviously exists. There must be an "Omega Point" that sustains life forever.[12]
>Tipler purportedly used Dyson's eternal intelligence hypothesis to back up his arguments.
Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735397
>It's also very useful for understanding other massively distributed locally interacting parallel systems, epidemiology, economics, morphogenesis (reaction-diffusion systems, like how a fertilized egg divides and specializes into an organism), GPU programming and optimization, neural networks and machine learning, information and chaos theory, and physics itself.
>I've discussed the book and the code I wrote based on it with Norm Margolus, one of the authors, and he mentioned that he really likes rules that are based on simulating physics, and also thinks reversible cellular automata rules are extremely important (and energy efficient in a big way, in how they relate to physics and thermodynamics).
>The book has interesting sections about physical simulations like spin glasses (Ising Spin model of the magnetic state of atoms of solid matter), and reversible billiard ball simulations (like deterministic reversible "smoke and mirrors" with clouds of moving particles bouncing off of pinball bumpers and each other).
Spin Glass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_glass
>In condensed matter physics, a spin glass is a magnetic state characterized by randomness, besides cooperative behavior in freezing of spins at a temperature called 'freezing temperature' Tf. Magnetic spins are, roughly speaking, the orientation of the north and south magnetic poles in three-dimensional space. In ferromagnetic solids, component atoms' magnetic spins all align in the same direction. Spin glass when contrasted with a ferromagnet is defined as "disordered" magnetic state in which spins are aligned randomly or not with a regular pattern and the couplings too are random.
Billiard Ball Computer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer
>A billiard-ball computer, a type of conservative logic circuit, is an idealized model of a reversible mechanical computer based on Newtonian dynamics, proposed in 1982 by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli. Instead of using electronic signals like a conventional computer, it relies on the motion of spherical billiard balls in a friction-free environment made of buffers against which the balls bounce perfectly. It was devised to investigate the relation between computation and reversible processes in physics.
Reversible Cellular Automata:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_cellular_automaton
>A reversible cellular automaton is a cellular automaton in which every configuration has a unique predecessor. That is, it is a regular grid of cells, each containing a state drawn from a finite set of states, with a rule for updating all cells simultaneously based on the states of their neighbors, such that the previous state of any cell before an update can be determined uniquely from the updated states of all the cells. The time-reversed dynamics of a reversible cellular automaton can always be described by another cellular automaton rule, possibly on a much larger neighborhood.
>[...] Reversible cellular automata form a natural model of reversible computing, a technology that could lead to ultra-low-power computing devices. Quantum cellular automata, one way of performing computations using the principles of quantum mechanics, are often required to be reversible. Additionally, many problems in physical modeling, such as the motion of particles in an ideal gas or the Ising model of alignment of magnetic charges, are naturally reversible and can be simulated by reversible cellular automata.
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata: John von Neumann's Quantum Mechanical Universal Constructors:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738268
[...] Third, the probabilistic quantum mechanical kind, which could mutate and model evolutionary processes, and rip holes in the space-time continuum, which he unfortunately (or fortunately, the the sake of humanity) didn't have time to fully explore before his tragic death.
>p. 99 of "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata":
>Von Neumann had been interested in the applications of probability theory throughout his career; his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics and his theory of games are examples. When he became interested in automata, it was natural for him to apply probability theory here also. The Third Lecture of Part I of the present work is devoted to this subject. His "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components" is the first work on probabilistic automata, that is, automata in which the transitions between states are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Whenever he discussed self-reproduction, he mentioned mutations, which are random changes of elements (cf. p. 86 above and Sec. 1.7.4.2 below). In Section 1.1.2.1 above and Section 1.8 below he posed the problems of modeling evolutionary processes in the framework of automata theory, of quantizing natural selection, and of explaining how highly efficient, complex, powerful automata can evolve from inefficient, simple, weak automata. A complete solution to these problems would give us a probabilistic model of self-reproduction and evolution. [9]
[9] For some related work, see J. H. Holland, "Outline for a Logical Theory of Adaptive Systems", and "Concerning Efficient Adaptive Systems".
https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machin...
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/5578...
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that anyone with sufficient money could rent out the infrastructure required to train GPT5 or what-have-you. They need not share it publicly, they can use it for their nefarious purposes privately. The analogous scenario would be preventing your military from experimenting with TNT, when the recipe for TNT is public knowledge. You can't copyright away public knowledge.
You already need authorization to rent A100s from cloud providers. There are, at most, four entities to control post-CHIPS act: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA. Good news, they’re all American companies.
A100s aren't magical pixie dust. China aren't developing their own silicon[1] for funsies.
This is all mathematics. Ignoring the fact that the entirety of what is required to build GPT-4 is easily remembered by a single human being (i.e. adversary), it could also be rediscovered. America doesn't have some secret sauce that nobody else has. We have a time lead, and that is it.
Keeping the details secret and under control is like trying to keep anyone from discovering that the sky is blue.
A 6 months freeze on AI research in America? China would relish it. Hell, who's to say this isn't their idea?
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/moore-threads-unveils-chun...
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#716Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…
A Manhattan project on AI Alignment, if started now, might still succeed in time. Therefore, the compliance between parties needs not be long-term, which is indeed unlikely to happen. China, which is the country outside the west with the highest (engineering) capability to train something more powerful than GPT-4, is very concerned about domestic stability and they also do not want an easily replicable alien tool wit…
AI alignment is a philosophy problem, not an engineering one.
For alignment to happen, we have to agree what it means. Given we have a hard enough time getting humans to “align”, I can’t imagine any successful attempt at alignment sort of complete castration.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#717Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…
Arguably there are other (better) examples. Off the top of my head: * CFC elimination (saved the ozone layer) * Leaded gas ban (well, except private aircraft, but they are working on that)
The upside to defectors on those two issues was mild at best.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#718If intelligence is all you need to dominate the world, why do some of the most powerful world leaders seem to not be more than a standard deviation above average intelligence (or at least they were before they became geriatric)? Add in the fact that GPT-4 does not "think" very fast, has no arms or legs, needs to run on expensive specialized hardware, and essentially seems like a search algorithm that lacks creativity…
> If intelligence is all you need to dominate the world, why do some of the most powerful world leaders seem to not be more than a standard deviation above average intelligence (or at least they were before they became geriatric)?
It's terribly ironic that you've derided individuals who have been "influenced by Hollywood", and then make a point like this, which is closely aligned with typical film portrayals of AI dangers.
The real immediate danger lies not in cognitive quality (aka "the AI just thinks better than people can, and throws hyperdimensional curve balls beyond our comprehension"), but in collective cognitive capacity (think "an army of 1 million people shows up at your front door to ruin your day").
A lot of people have a tough time reasoning about AGI because of its intangibility. So I've come up with the following analogy:
Imagine an office complex containing an organization of 1,000 reasonably intelligent human beings, except without commonly accepted ethical restrictions. Those people are given a single task "You are not allowed to leave the office. Make lend000's life miserable, inconvenience them to your maximum capacity, and try to drive them to suicide. Here's an internet connection."
Unless you are a particularly well-protected and hard-to-find individual, can you honestly claim you'd be able to protect against this? You would be swatted. You would have an incredible amount of junkmail showing up at your door. Spam pizzas. Spam calls. Death threats to you. Death threats to every family member and person that you care about. Non-stop attempts to take over every aspect of your electronic presence. Identity in a non-stop state of being stolen. Frivolous lawsuits filed against you by fake individuals. Being framed for crimes you didn't commit. Contracts on the darknet to send incendiary devices to your home. Contracts on the darknet to send hitmen do your door.
Maybe your (unreasonable) reaction is that "1000 people couldn't do that!". Well, what about 10,000? Or 100,000? Or 1,000,000? The AI analogue of this is called a "collective superintelligence", essentially an army of generally intelligent individual AIs working towards a common goal.
This is the real danger of AGI, because collective superintelligences are almost immediately realizable once someone trains a model that demonstrates AGI capabilities.
Movies usually focus on "quality superintelligences", which are a different, but less immediate type of threat. Human actors in control of collective superintelligences are capable of incredible harm.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#719Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…
A Manhattan project on AI Alignment, if started now, might still succeed in time. Therefore, the compliance between parties needs not be long-term, which is indeed unlikely to happen. China, which is the country outside the west with the highest (engineering) capability to train something more powerful than GPT-4, is very concerned about domestic stability and they also do not want an easily replicable alien tool wit…
I would hazard that any country with a declining population will aggressively adopt LLMs because it gives their leaner workforce more efficiency.
Re: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter
#720This sounds more like a "Pause Giant AI Experiments, in public."
They'll continue underground out of sight and regulations.