10. Compute does not scale like you think it does

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One argument for why AGI might be unimaginably smarter than humans is that the physical limits of computation are so large. If humans are some amount of intelligent with some amount of compute, then an AGI with many times more compute will be many times more intelligent. This line of thought does not match modern thinking on computation.

The first obvious obstacle is that not every problem is linear time solvable. If intelligence scales as log(compute), then adding more compute will hardly affect the amount of intelligence of a system.1Whatever ‘intelligence’ might mean, let alone representing it by a number. Principal component analysis is bullshit. But if you believe in AI Risk then this likely won’t convince you.

The second, more concrete, obstacle is architecture. Let’s compare two computing devices. Device A is a cluster consisting of one billion first generation Raspberry Pi’s, for a total of 41 PFLOPS. Device B is a single PlayStation 4, coming in at 1.84 TFLOPS. Although the cluster has 22,000 times more FLOPS, there are plenty of problems that we can solve faster on the single PlayStation 4. Not all problems can be solved quicker through parallelization.2In theory, this is the open problem of P vs NC. In practice, you can easily see it to be true by imagining that the different rpi’s are all on different planets across the galaxy, which wouldn’t change their collective FLOPS but would affect their communication delay and hence their ability to compute anything together.

Modern computers are only as fast as they are because of very specific properties of existing software. Locality of reference is probably the biggest one. There is spacial locality of reference: if a processor accesses memory location x, it is likely to use location x+1 soon after that. Modern RAM exploits this fact by optimizing for sequential access, and slows down considerably when you do actual random access. There is also temporal locality of reference: if a processor accesses value x now, it is likely to access value x again in a short while. This is why processor cache provides speedup over just having RAM, and why having RAM provides a speedup over just having flash memory.3There has been some nice theory on this in the past decades. I quite like Albers, Favrholdt and Giel’s On paging with locality of reference (2005) in Journal of Computer and System Sciences.

Brains don’t exhibit such locality nearly as much. As a result, it is much easier to simulate a small “brain” than a large “brain”. Adding neurons increases the practical difficulty of simulation much more than linearly.4One caveat here is that this does not apply so much to artificial neural networks. Those can be optimized quickly partly because they are so structured. This is because of specific features of GPU’s that are outside the scope of this post. It might be possible that this would not be an obstacle for AGI, but it might also be possible for the ocean to explode, so that doesn’t tell us anything.5New cause area: funding a Fluid Intelligence Research Institute to prevent the dangers from superintelligent bodies of water.

Ovens have secret built-in automatic timers

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Every oven I’ve ever used has had a secret function, a mechanism that automatically tells you when the food is ready. It is wonderful and I want to tell you about it.

So most ovens control their temperature using a bimetallic strip. When the temperature inside is less than the target temperature, the strip closes a circuit that activates the heating. As soon as the temperature is sufficiently big, the strip will have deformed enough to open the circuit and stop the heating. In many ovens, especially older ones, you can hear this as a soft *click*. If you are lucky, the mechanism is sensitive enough to rapidly go on and off to stay on temperature, at least for a couple seconds.

If you eat frozen pizza, it often only has to be heated to a sufficient temperature. When it reaches this temperature, the pizza will stop cooling down the air around it, thereby allowing the oven to reach its target temperature and starting to say *click*. So the sound will tell you when the food is ready, no need to read the packaging to find the correct baking time.

The same happens for dishes that are ready when enough water has evaporated, or when a certain endothermic chemical reaction has stopped happening. All are done the moment the oven says *click*. There might be some exceptions to this phenomenon, but I have yet to run in to one. Which is great because I always forget to read oven instructions on packaging or recipes before throwing them out. Try it out with your own electrically powered food heating units.

9. Don’t work on long-term AGI x-risk now

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Suppose you believe AGI will be invented in 200 years, and, if it is invented before the alignment problem is solved, everyone will be dead forever. Then you probably shouldn’t work on AGI Safety right now.

On the one hand, our ability to work on AGI Safety will increase as we get closer to making AGI. It is preposterous to think such a problem can be solved by purely reasoning from first principles. No science makes progress without observation, not even pure mathematics. Trying to solve AGI risk now is as absurd as trying to solve aging before the invention of the microscope.

On the other hand, spending resources now is much more expensive than spending resources in 100 years. Assuming a 4% annual growth rate of the economy, it would be around 50 times as expensive.6In all honesty, I don’t actually believe in unlimited exponential economic growth. But my job here is to attack the AI Safety premise, not to accurately represent my own beliefs.

Solving AGI Safety becomes easier over time, and relatively cheaper on top of that. Hence you should not work on AGI Safety if you think it can wait.

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I’ve been looking on and off for mp3 players for a couple months. I wanted a device with proper playlist support, bluetooth, and sufficient battery and storage capacity. It had to be cheap and with a UI that does not make me wish for death.

I ended up buying a 30 second hand Nokia Lumia 650. I deleted everything except the music player and maps app, downloaded maps of every country I might reasonably ever visit and the complete contents of Wikivoyage, copied my music onto it from my pc and put it permanently in airplane mode. It is a bit too laggy, but other than that I like this setup a lot. But more important than my love for Windows Phone, is my hate for Android and iOS. I dislike the former for its role in the global surveillance economy and its butt-ugly interface. I dislike the latter because of its adversarial pricing model and excessively walled garden. I don’t want to get my dinner from the pathologically neoliberal butcher, the dominant-strategy-playing externality-indifferent brewer or the stalking, price-discriminating, search-engine-optimizing baker. Their antithesis probably consist of the local organic farmer’s market, self-hosted FOSS software and artisan everything, but I do like economies of scale. I’m still searching for the synthesis. For now, I’ll start with trying to minimize my interactions with companies who relate to their users or customers in a very adversarial manner 8. Links #3: the real AI was inside us all along 134 words Olivia Solon: The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work It’s hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out it’s cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans. Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz: Google’s Duplex Uses A.I. to Mimic Humans (Sometimes) In other words, Duplex, which Google first showed off last year as a technological marvel using A.I., is still largely operated by humans. While A.I. services like Google’s are meant to help us, their part-machine, part-human approach could contribute to a mounting problem: the struggle to decipher the real from the fake, from bogus reviews and online disinformation to bots posing as people. 7. Links #2: AI Safety-critical reading list 792 words So, I started the anti-AI Safety blogging series because I would be a good fit for the cause area as described by e.g., 80,000 Hours and it seemed reasonable to think through the arguments myself. As it turns out, they don’t stand up to scrunity. I decided to keep on writing for a bit anyway, as all AI Risk enthusiasts seem to be unaware of the counterarguments. I thought there was nothing out there in writing. Boy was I wrong. This is a non-exhaustive list of links relating to AI Safety skepticism. For more, check out the similar reading lists by Marcus Vindig and by Alexander Kruel. Overlap between these lists is minimal and restricted to a couple of particularly good resources. Rodney Brooks writes from MIT Technology Review of the seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI. If you find a paywall, either clear your cookies or view a less edited version on Brooks’ website. His other essays on Super Intelligence are also well-worth checking out. Wolfgang Schwarz published his referee report of Yudkowsky (MIRI) and Soares’ (MIRI) Functional Decision Theory. I’ll quote a single paragraph, which I think accurately illustrates the whole review: “The standards for deserving publication in academic philosophy are relatively simple and self-explanatory. A paper should make a significant point, it should be clearly written, it should correctly position itself in the existing literature, and it should support its main claims by coherent arguments. The paper I read sadly fell short on all these points, except the first. (It does make a significant point.)” Ben Garfinkel gave a talk at EA Global 2018 titled “How sure are we about this AI stuff?”, calling for EA’s to be more critical about AI Safety as a cause area. Garfinkel knows his audience well, as everything is phrased so as to make EA’s think without ruffling feathers Oren Etzioni writes in MIT Technology Review about the survey data Bostrom talks about in Superintelligence and offers alternative data that suggest a very different picture Maciej Cegłowski‘s talks are always excellent and “Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People” is no exception. (via) EA Forum user Fods12 wrote a five-part critique of Superintelligence. They hit on a number of good objections. The posts sadly got little quality engagement, indicative of both the writing quality and of the rest of the EA Forum’s userbase. Even transhumanists can be reasonable, like Monica Anderson who writes Problem Solved: Unfriendly AI. Ernest Davis wrote a review of SuperIntelligence, touching on some of the key weaknesses in Bostrom’s arguments but insufficiently elaborating on each of his arguments. MIRI published a response to the review which I think mostly nitpicks Davis’ phrasing instead of actually engaging with his objections, which to be fair might be the best you can do if you don’t have any better source of exposition on these arguments than Davis’ review. In short, Davis’ review isn’t super good, but MIRI’s response is much worse. Neil Lawrence critiques Bostrom’s Superintelligence. If I had to excerpt a single representative line, it would be “I welcome the entry of philosophers to this debate, but I don’t think Superintelligence is contributing as positively as it could have done to the challenges we face. In its current form many of its arguments are distractingly irrelevant.” Magnus Vindig writes Why Altruists Should Perhaps Not Prioritize Artificial Intelligence: A Lengthy Critique, in which he tackles most of the standard EA arguments and points out their hidden assumptions. Topics include, but are not limited to, the incessantly cited AI researcher survey predictions, bad Moore’s law-type arguments, slight-of-hand changing definitions of intelligence, the difficulty of alignment rising for future systems compared to current ones and the enormous experience we have with present-day systems, Instrumental Convergence being under argued, the practical value of being super intelligent. He does not rigorously take down every argument to the full extent possible, but that is probably good because the blog post is 22k words as is. Vindig also wrote Is AI Alignment Possible? in which he argues that the answer is no, both in principle and in practice. Richard Loosemoore has the right amount of derision that AI Risk deserves, which is different from the right amount of derision for convincing the worriers that they’re wrong. One person who was not convinced is Rob Bensiger of MIRI. Bill Hibbard has an email exchange with Yudkowsky in which he argues that a Superintelligence would not conflate smiling human faces with nano-scale depictions of such. The whole exchange is kind of predictable and not too informative. On a related note, Nicholas Agar wrote a paper titled “Don’t Worry about Superintelligence” in which he argues that the first AIs with sophisticated agency are inherently likely to be friendly. Celebrating 20 years of Pokémon Snap 207 words Pokémon Snap first came out today 20 years ago. It is an on-rails shooter game. You’re in a car that drives around an island filled and your goal is to take pretty pictures of the pokémon that live there. It was one of my favourite games when I was little. Its relaxing gameplay and cute jokes still managed to put a smile on my face when I played the game again recently for the first time in years. It takes only a couple hours to take a picture of every pokemon in the game, though with high variance since some pokemon are really tricky to find. The game feels quite modern despite its age. At the end of every course you can show a number of photos to Professor Oak and he will rate their quality on a couple different aspects, like how well the pokémon fits in the frame and if they are in a nice pose. The amazing thing is that algorithm almost exactly matches my own opinion of which photos are good. You don’t see that often in algorithms. The original Pokémon Snap website is surprisingly still online. It is blazingly fast. Wirth’s law is my least favourite law of nature. Beyond Condorcet winners: Majority Judgement 631 words There have been rumours on Wikipedia that Michael Balinksi passed away this Februari 4th. If this is indeed the case, then my heartfelt sympathies go out to those around him. I never knew him personally, but he was an amazing scientist and I’ve used results of his more than once. He was quite a phenomenal speaker. Today I want to talk about a single-winner voting system that Balinksi introduced with Rida Laraki. It is called majority judgement and it is so brilliant that it almost makes me wonder what voting theorists could have been doing both before and since then. One big concept in social choice theory is majority rule: if most people think that A is better than B, then A should be the winner. Most multi-candidate voting systems generalize this in various ways, always preserving that if candidate A would beat every other candidate B, C, etc, in a pairwise competition, then A should win the election. If candidate A satisfies this criterium, we call A a Condorcet winner. The leading wisdom in social choice theory was that any good voting rule should let the Condorcet winner win (if it exists). According to my informal sample from the Effective Altruism community, EA’s favourite voting system seems to be approval voting, which is one of these voting systems that generalizes majority rule to multiple candidates. The genius of majority judgement is that it moves past the Condorcet winner paradigm and considers a perspective beyond that. To illustrate, let’s assume we’re running an election among two candidates, the red candidate and the blue candidate, and every voter gets a ballot with for each candidate the options “Amazing”, “Good”, “Mediocre” and “Terrible” to express how good of a president they think the candidate would be. Let us for simplicity assume that our voting population consists of 5 groups, the A’s, B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s, and everyone in a group votes the exact same way. The outcome of the election is in the table below.  A B C % of population 40 20 40 Red candidate Amazing Mediocre Terrible Blue candidate Good Terrible Amazing The red candidate wins the Condorcet-style election: 60% of the population prefers the red candidate over the blue candidate. But the blue candidate is clearly better: 80% of the population considers the blue candidate to be “Good” or better, while 60% of the population considers the red candidate to be “Mediocre” or worse. Majority judgement is a voting rule designed to have the blue candidate win in the above election. The actual algorithm is a bit involved, but the first step is to compare the median vote: if at least 50% of the voters think the blue candidate is “Good” or better and at least 50% of the voters think that the red candidate is “Mediocre” or worse, than the blue candidate will win. If the median opinion is a tie, a more complicated tie-breaking rule is entered. ((The exact rule satisfies a number of optimality criteria and is the only rule to do so. For this post I want to skip the details.)) I think the concept is very elegant, and I believe that the outcomes really would be better than with a system that elects Condorcet winners. In a talk that Balinksi gave, which I was lucky enough to attend, he pointed out another advantage of the majority judgement rule: it allows voters to express what they think of the candidates. You wouldn’t be asking anyone to “vote for the lesser evil”, everyone can keep their conscience clear. Majority judgement admits a clear way of expressing frustration with both candidates: rank both of them very badly. It also helps that the different options are given in words instead of ranking by numbers, for the latter turns out to entice voters to rate their favourite candidate 10/10 and all others 0/10. 6. Astronomical waste, astronomical schmaste 2880 words [Part of this badly written blog post has been superseded by a slightly better written forum post over on the EA forum. I might clean up the other parts in the future as well, and if so I’ll publish them at the EA forum as well.] Previously: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5][latest]. Epistemic status: there is nothing wrong with writing your bottom line first. The purpose of this article is to get my initial thoughts on AI risk down before I start reading more about the topic, because I fear that I might unknowingly grant AI risk proponents that the implicit assumptions they’re making are true. As I procrastinated a lot on writing this post, there have been an number of articles put out that I did not read. I do not intend this document to be a conclusive argument against ai risk so much as an attempt to justify why it might be reasonable to think ai risk is not real. Is this text too long? Click here for the summary of the argument. In this post, I want to tackle the astronomical waste argument as used to justify AI-related existential risk prevention as an EA cause area. I will first describe the argument that people make. After that, I will discuss a number of meta-heuristics to be skeptical of it. Lastly, I want to take the astronomical waste argument face-on and describe why it is so absurdly unlikely for AI risk to be simultaneously real and preventable that the expected value of working on AIS is still not very good. Astronomical waste The astronomical waste argument as most people tell it basically goes like this: the potential good that could be gotten if happy beings colonized the entire universe would be huge, so even if there is a tiny risk of space-colonization not happening, that costs a lot of value in expectation. Moreover, if we can decrease the risk by just a tiny bit, the expected utility generated is still big, so it might be a very cost-effective way to do good. As many wise people have said before me, “Shut up and calculate.” I will be giving rough estimates without researching them a great lot, because these quantities are not that well-known to humanity either. For the duration of this post, I will be a speciesist and all-around awful person because that simplifies the estimates. Bostrom roughly estimates that colonizing the Virgo supercluster would yield $10^{38}$ human lives per century. The Virgo SC is one of about 10 million superclusters in the observable universe and we have roughly $10^{9}$ centuries left before entropy runs out, making a total of roughly $2^{180}$ potential human lives left in the universe. I will try to argue that donating $\5000\approx\2^{13}$ to an AI risk charity today will counterfactually produce less than one life saved in expectation. To make that happen, we collect 180 bits of unlikeliness for the hypothesis that donating that sum of money to AI Safety organizations saves a lives. You need to collect less bits if your counterfactual cause area is more cost-effective than malaria prevention. Possibly $\log_2(5000/0.20) \approx 14$ bits fewer with a charity like ALLFED. On meta-uncertainty Some of my LessWrong-reading friends would argue that it is impossible to have credence $2^{-200}$ in anything because my own thinking is fallible and I’ll make mistakes in my reasoning with probability much higher than that. I reject that assertion: if I flip 200 coins then my expected credence for most series of outcomes should inevitably be close to $2^{-200}$, because all $2^{200}$ events are mutually exclusive and their probabilities must sum up to at most $1$. Discounting the future (30 bits) Inhabiting the observable universe might take a really long, and in all this time there is some probability of going extinct for reasons other than AI risk. Hence we should discount the total spoils of the universe by a decent fraction. 30 bits. More importantly, if the Alignment Problem were to be solved, you’d still need to be able to force everyone to implement in the solution to it. Independent AGI developers would need to be monitored and forced to comply with the new AGI regulations. This is hard to do without a totalitarian surveillance state, and such governance structures are bad to live under. 15 bits. And then there are adversaries, negative utilitarians, who will actively try to build unsafe AGI to destroy the universe. They will keep trying for the rest of human existence. Preventing this for all time seems unlikely without going into real Orwell-level surveillance. 15 bits. Biases (20 bits) I expect many EA’s to be wrong in their utility calculation, so I think I should propose mechanisms that cause so many EA’s to be wrong. Two such mechanisms are described in previous entries in this series [2] (9 bits) [3] (1 bits) and I want to describe a third one here. When we describe how much utility could fit in the universe, our reference class for numbers is “how many X fits in the universe”, where X ranges over things like {atoms, stars, planets}. These numbers are huge, typically expressed as $10^n$ for $n \in \mathbb{N}$. When we describe how likely certain events are, the tempting reference class is “statements of probability”, typically expressed as $ab.cdefghij... \%$. Writing things this way, it seems absurd to have your number start with more than 10 zeros. The combination of these vastly different scales together with anchoring being a thing, makes that we should expect people to over-estimate the probability of unlikely effects and hence the expected utility of prevention measures. I expect myself to be subject to these biases still, so I think it is appropriate to count a number of bits to counteract this bias. 20 bits. Counterfactual actions (-1 bit) Nothing is effective in and of itself, effectiveness is relative to a counterfactual action. For this blog post, the counterfactuals will be working on algorithmic fairness and/or digital rights campaigning/legislation, and mainstream machine learning research and engineering. -1 bit. When is AI risky? (tl;dr) This is a rough sketch of my argument. AI safety can only be an effective cause area if 1. The future of the non-extinct universe would be good. 2. The probability of an AI-related extinction event is big. 3. It is possible to find ways to decrease that probability. 4. It is feasible to impose those risk mitigation measures everywhere. 5. The AI risk problem won’t be solved by regular commercial and/or academic AI research anyway. 6. A single AI-related extinction event could affect any lifeform in the universe ever. 7. Without AI first causing a relatively minor (at most country-level) accident first. 8. Presently possible AI safety research should be an effective way of decreasing that probability. I upper bounded the quantity in 1 by $2^{200}$ good lifes. Properties 2 and 3 are necessary for AI Safety work to be useful. Property 5 is necessary for AI safety work to have meaningful counterfactual impact. Property 6 is necessary because otherwise other happy life forms might fill the universe instead, and the stakes here on earth are nowhere near $2^{200}$. If property 7 does not hold, it might mean that people will abandon the AI project, and it would be too easy to debug risky AI’s. Property 8 is in contrast to AI safety work only really be possible after major progress from now has been made in AI capabilities research, and is hence a statement about the present day. The basic premise of the argument is that there is an inherent tension between properties 2 up to 6 being true at once. AI risk should be big enough for properties 2 and 6 to hold, but small enough for 3 and 5 to hold. I think that this is a pretty narrow window to hit, and which would mean that AI safety is very unlikely to be an effective cause area, or at least it is not so for its potential of saving the universe from becoming paperclips. I am also highly skeptical of both 7 and 8, even assuming that 2 up to 6 hold. AI is fake (8 bits) I think it is likely that we won’t be making a what we now think of as “artificial intelligence”, because current conceptions of AI are inherently mystical. Future humans might one day make something that present-day humans would recognize as AI, but the future humans won’t think of it like that. They won’t have made computers think, they would have demystified thinking to the point where they understand what it is. They won’t mystify computers, they will demystify humans. Note that this is a belief about the state of the world, while [2] is about how we think about the world. Hence, I think both deserve to earn bits separately. 5 bits. I am not sure that intelligence is a meaningful concept outside principal component analysis. PCA is a statistical technique that gives a largest component of variation in a population independently of whether that axis of variation has an underlying cause. In particular, that might mean that superhuman intelligence cannot exist. That does not preclude thinking at superhuman speeds from existing but would still impy serious bounds on how intelligent an AI can be. 1 bit. No matter the above, all reasonably possible computation is restricted to polynomial-time solvable problems, fixed-parameter tractable problems and whatever magic modern ILP-, MINLP-, TSP- and SAT-solvers use. This gives real upper bounds on what even the most perfect imaginable AI could do. The strength of AI would lie in enabling fast and flexible communication and automation, not in solving hard computational problems. I hereby accuse many AI-enthousiasts of forgetting this fact, and will penalize their AI-risk fantasies for it. 2 bits. AI x-risk is fake (31 bits) The risks of using optimization algorithms are well-documented and practitioners have a lot of experience in how to handle such software reponsibly. This practical experience literally dates back to the invention of optimization in what is by far my favourite anecdote I’ve ever heard. Optimization practitioners are more responbile than you’d think, and with modern considerations of fairness and adversarial input they’ll only get more responsible over time. If there are things that must be paid attention to for algorithms to give good outcomes, practitioners will know about them. 3 bits. People have been using computers to run ever more elaborate optimization algorithms pretty much since the introduction of the computer. ILP-solvers might be among the most sophisticated pieces of software in existence. And they don’t have any problems with reward hacking. Hence, reward hacking is probably only a fringe concern. 3 bits. Debugging is a long and arduous process, both for developing software and for designing the input for the software (both the testing input and the real-world inputs). That means that the software will be run on many different inputs and computers before going in production, each an independent trial. So, if software has a tendency to give catastrophically wrong answers, it will probably already do so in an early stage of development. Such bugs probably won’t survive into production, so any accidents are purely virtual or at most on small scales. 5 bits. Even if AI would go wrong in a bad way, it has to go really really wrong for it to be an existential thread. Like, one thing that is not ab existential thread is if an AI decided to release poison gas from every possible place in the US. That might kill everyone there, but even the poison gas factories could run indefinitely, the rest of the world could just nuke all of North America long before the whole global atmosphere is poisonous. 10 bits. Moreover, for the cosmic endowment to be at risk, an AI catastrophy should impact every lifeform that would ever come to exist in the lightcone. That is a lot of ground to cover in a lot of detail. 10 bits. AI x-risk is inevitable (28 bits) Okay, let’s condition on all the above things going wrong anyway. Is AI-induced x-risk inevitable in such a world? Probably. • There should be a way of preventing the catastrophies. 5 bits. • Humans should be able to discover the necessary knowledge. 3 bits. • These countermeasures have to be universally implemented. 10 bits. • Even against bad actors and anti-natalist terrorists. 10 bits. AI becomes safe anyway (15 bits) Let’s split up the AI safety problem into two distinct subproblems. I don’t know the division in enough detail to give a definition, so I’ll describe them by association. The two categories roughly map onto the distinction from [4], and also roughly onto what LW-sphere folks call the control problem and the alignment problem.  Capitalist’s AI problem Social democrat’s AI problem x/s-risk Cyberpunk dystopia risk Must be solved tomake money using AI Must be solved to havealgorithms producesocial good Making AI optimal Making algorithms fair Solving required forfurthering a singleentity’s values Solving required forfurthering sentientbeings’ collectivevalues. Only real if certainimplausibleassumptions are true Only real if hedonisticutilitarianism is false,or if bad actors hatehedonistic utility. Prevent the light conefrom becoming paperclips Fully Automated LuxuryGay Space Communism Specific to AGI Applies to all algorithms Fear of Skynet Fear of Moloch Beating back unknowninvaders from mindspace Beating back unthinkinglyoptimistic programmers Have AI do what we want Know what we wantalgorithms to do What AIS-focussed EAscare about What the rest of theworld cares about I’m calling 20 bits on the capitalist’s problem getting solved by capitalists, and 15 bits on the social democrat’s problem getting solved by the rest of humanity. We’re interested in the minimum of the two. 15 bits. Working on AIS right now is ineffective (15 bits) There are two separate ways of being inefficient to account for. AIS research might be ineffective right now no matter what because we lack the knowledge to do useful research, or AIS work might in general be less effective than work on for example FAT algorithms. The first idea is justified from the viewpoint that making AI will mostly involve demystifying the nature of intelligence, versus obtaining the mystical skill of producing intelligence. Moreover it is reasonable to think given that current algorithms are not intelligent. 5 bits. ((Note that this argument is different from the previous one under the “AI is fake” heading. The previous argument is about the nature of intelligence and whether it permits AI risk existing versus not existing, this argument is about our capability to resolve AI risk now versus later.)) The second idea concerns whether AI safety will be mostly a policy issue or a research issue. If it is mostly policy with just a bit of technical research, it will be more effective to practice getting algorithms regulated in the first place. We can gain practice, knowledge and reputation for example by working on FATML, and I think it likely that this is a better approach at the current moment in time. 5 bits. Then the last concern is that AIS research is just AI capabilities research by another name. It might not be exactly true, but the fit is close. 5 bits. Research is expensive (13 bits) Let’s get a sense of scale here. You might be familiar with these illustrations. If not, check them out. That tiny bit is the contribution of 4 year researcher-years. One researcher-year costs at least50,000.

The list of projects getting an ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros. Compared to ambitious projects like “make AI safe”, the ERC recipient’s ambitions are tiny and highly specialised. What’s more, these are grant applications, so they are necessarily an excaggeration of what will actually happen with the money.

It is not a stretch to estimate that it would cost at least $50 million to make AI safe (conditional on all of the above being such that AIS work is necessary). So a donation of$5000 would be at most 0.0001 of the budget. 13 bits.

Hard to estimate issues (10 bits)

I’ll aggregate these because I don’t trust myself to put individual values on each of them.

• Will the universe really get filled by conscious beings?
• Will they be happy?
• Is it better to lead a happy life than to not exist in the first place?
• Is there a moral difference between there being two identical happy universes A and B versus them being identical right up to the point where A’s contents get turned to paperclips but B continues to be happy? And how does anthropic bias factor in to this?
• Has any being ever had a net-positive life?

Sub-1-bit issues (5 bits)

I listed all objections where I was at least 50% confident in them being obstacles. But there are probably quite a number of potential issues that I haven’t thought of because I don’t expect them to be issues with enough probability. I estimate their collective impact to count for something. 5 bits.

Conclusion

It turns out I only managed to collect 174 bits, not the 180 bits I aimed for. I see this as weak evidence for AIS being better than malaria prevention but not better than something like ALLFED. Of course, we should keep in mind that all the numbers are made up.

Maybe you disagree with how many bits I handed out in various places, maybe you think I double-counted some bits, or maybe you think that counting bits is inherently fraught and inconsistent. I’d love to hear your thoughts via email at beth@bethzero.com, via Reddit at u/beth-zerowidthspace or at the EA forum at beth​.

5. Are neural networks intelligent?

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I am skeptical of AI Safety (AIS) as an effective cause area, at least in the way AIS is talked about by people in the effective altruism community. However, it is also the cause area that my skills and knowledge are the best fit for contributing, so it seems worthwhile for me to think my opposition to it through.﻿

Previously: [1] [2] [3] [4][latest].

Epistemic status: this argument has more flaws than I can count. Please don’t take it seriously. [See the post-script]

Let’s answer this abstract philosophical question using high-dimensional geometry.

I’ll assume for simplicity that there is a single property called intelligence and the only variation is in how much you have of it. So no verbal intelligence vs visiual intelligence, no being better at math and than at languages, the only variation is in how much intelligence we have. Let us call this direction of variation $g$, scaled to have $\|g\| = 1$, and pretend that it is roughly the thing you get from a singular value decomposition/principal component analysis of human’s intelligence test results.

A typical neural net has many neurons. For example, VGG-19 has ~143 million parameters. Now suppose that we train a VGG-19 net to classify images. This is an optimization problem in $\mathbb{R}^{143 \text{ million}}$, and let’s call the optimal parameter setting $x$. By definition, the trained net has an intelligence of exactly the inner product $g^{\mathsf{T}}x$. ((Note that the projection of g into this 143 million-dimensional space might be much shorter than g itself is, that depends on the architecture of the neural net. If this projection is very short, then every parameter setting of the net is very unintelligent. By the same argument that I’m making in the rest of the post, we should expect the projection to be short, but let’s assume that the projection is long for now.)) ((I’m assuming for simplicity that everything is convex.))

The trained net is intelligent in exactly the extend that intelligence helps you recognize images. If you can recognize images more efficiently by not being intelligent, then the trained net will not be intelligent. But exactly how helpful would intelligence be in recognizing images? I’d guess that a positive amount of intelligence would be better than a negative amount, but other than that I have no clue.

As a good subjective Bayesian, I’ll hence consider the vector $\omega$ of goodness-at-recognizing-images to be chosen uniformly from the unit sphere, conditional on having non-negative intelligence, i.e., uniformly chosen from $\{\omega\in\mathbb{S}^{143\text{ million} - 1} : g^{\mathsf{T}}\omega \geq 0\}$. For this distribution, what is the expected intelligence $\mathbb{E}[g^{\mathsf{T}}x]$? Well, we know, we know that $x$ maximizes $\omega$, so if the set of allowed parameters is nice we would get $g^{\mathsf{T}}x \approx g^{\mathsf{T}}\omega \cdot \|x\|$, ((I have to point out that this is by far the most unrealistic claim in this post. It is true if $x$ is constrained to lie in a ball, but in other cases it might be arbitrarily far off. It might be true for the phenomenon I describe in the first footnote.)) where $\|x\|$ is how good the net is at recognizing images. We can calculate this expectation and find that, up to a constant factor, $$\mathbb{E}[g^{\mathsf{T}}\omega] \approx \frac{2}{\sqrt{2e\pi(143\text{ million}-1)}}.$$

So the trained VGG-19 neural net is roughly $10^{-5}$ times as intelligent as it is good at recognizing images. Hence, it is probably not very smart.