All of kokotajlod's Comments + Replies

I agree that as time goes on states will take an increasing and eventually dominant role in AI stuff.

My position is that timelines are short enough, and takeoff is fast enough, that e.g. decisions and character traits of the CEO of an AI lab will explain more of the variance in outcomes than decisions and character traits of the US President.

1. My understanding is that relatively few EAs are actual hardcore classic hedonist utilitarians. I think this is ~sufficient to explain why more haven't become accelerationists.
2. Have you cornered a classic hedonist utilitarian EA and asked them? Have you cornered three? What did they say?

Thanks for discussing with me!

(I forgot to mention an important part of my argument, oops -- You wouldn't have said "at least 100 years off" you would have said "at least 5000 years off." Because you are anchoring to recent-past rates of progress rather than looking at how rates of progress increase over time and extrapolating. (This is just an analogy / data point, not the key part of my argument, but look at GWP growth rates as a proxy for tech progress rates: According to this GWP doubling time was something like 600 years back then, whereas it's more l... (read more)

I agree with the claims "this problem is extremely fucking hard" and "humans aren't cracking this anytime soon" and I suspect Yudkowsky does too these days.

I disagree that nanotech has to predate taking over the world; that wasn't an assumption I was making or a conclusion I was arguing for at any rate. I agree it is less likely that ASIs will make nanotech before takeover than that they will make nanotech while still on earth.

I like your suggestion to model a more earthly scenario but I lack the energy and interest to do so right now.

My closing statement ... (read more)

Cool. Seems you and I are mostly agreed on terminology then.

Yeah we definitely disagree about that crux. You'll see. Happy to talk about it more sometime if you like.

Re: galaxy vs. earth: The difference is one of degree, not kind. In both cases we have a finite amount of resources and a finite amount of time with which to do experiments. The proper way to handle this, I think, is to smear out our uncertainty over many orders of magnitude. E.g. the first OOM gets 5% of our probability mass, the second OOM gets 5% of the remaining probability mass, and so fo... (read more)

What if he just said "Some sort of super-powerful nanofactory-like thing?" 

He's not citing some existing literature that shows how to do it, but rather citing some existing literature which should make it plausible to a reasonable judge that a million superintelligences working for a year could figure out how to do it. (If you dispute the plausibility of this, what's your argument? We have an unfinished exchange on this point elsewhere in this comment section. Seems you agree that a galaxy full of superintelligences could do it; I feel like it's pretty plausible that if a galaxy of superintelligences could do it, a mere million also could do it.)

I hope you are right.

I think the tech companies -- and in particular the AGI companies -- are already too powerful for such an informal public backlash to slow them down significantly.

I said IMO. In context it was unnecessary for me to justify the claim, because I was asking whether or not you agreed with it.

I take it that not only do you disagree, you agree it's the crux? Or don't you? If you agree it's the crux (i.e. you agree that probably a million cooperating superintelligences with an obedient nation of humans would be able to make some pretty awesome self-replicating nanotech within a few years) then I can turn to the task of justifying the claim that such a scenario is plausible. If you don't agree, and think that even such a su... (read more)

What part of the scenario would you dispute? A million superintelligences will probably exist by 2030, IMO; the hard part is getting to superintelligence at all, not getting to a million of them (since you'll probably have enough compute to make a million copies)

I agree that the question is about the actual scenario, not the galaxy. The galaxy is a helpful thought experiment though; it seems to have succeeded in establishing the right foundations: How many OOMs of various inputs (compute, experiments, genius insights) will be needed? Presumably a galaxy's ... (read more)

I also would like to see such breakdowns, but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions from this example.

Just because Yudkowsky's first guess about how to make nanotech, as an amateur, didn't pan out, doesn't mean that nanotech is impossible for a million superintelligences working for a year. In fact it's very little evidence. When there are a million superintelligences they will surely be able to produce many technological marvels very quickly, and for each such marvel, if you had asked Yudkowsky to speculate about how to build it, he would have fai... (read more)

Thanks for this thoughtful and detailed deep dive!

I think it misses the main cruxes though. Yes, some people (Drexler and young Yudkowsky) thought that ordinary human science would get us all the way to atomically precise manufacturing in our lifetimes. For the reasons you mention, that seems probably wrong.

But the question I'm interested in is whether a million superintelligences could figure it out in a few years or less. (If it takes them, say, 10 years or longer, then probably they'll have better ways of taking over the world) Since that's the situatio... (read more)

OK, so our credences aren't actually that different after all. I'm actually at less than 65%, funnily enough! (But that's for doom = extinction. I think human extinction is unlikely for reasons to do with acausal trade; there will be a small minority of AIs that care about humans, just not on Earth. I usually use a broader definition of "doom" as "About as bad as human extinction, or worse.")

I am pretty confident that what happens in the next 100 years will straightforwardly translate to what happens in the long run. If humans are still well-cared-for in 2... (read more)

Those words were not yours, but you did say you agreed it was the main crux, and in context it seemed like you were agreeing that it was a crux for you too. I see now on reread that I misread you and you were instead saying it was a secondary crux. Here, let's cut through the semantics and get quantitative:

What is your credence in doom conditional on AIs not caring for humans? 

If it's >50%, then I'm mildly surprised that you think the risk of accidentally creating a permanent pause is worse than the risks from not-pausing. I guess you did say that ... (read more)

First of all, you are goal-post-moving if you make this about "confident belief in total doom by default" instead of the original "if you really don't think unchecked AI will kill everyone." You need to defend the position that the probability of existential catastrophe conditional on misaligned AI is <50%.

Secondly, "AI motives will generalize extremely poorly from the training distribution" is a confused and misleading way of putting it. The problem is that it'll generalize in a way that wasn't the way we hoped it would generalize.

Third, to answer your... (read more)

Thanks! 

I think this is evidence for a groupthink phenomenon amongst superforecasters. Interestingly my other experiences talking with superforecasters have also made me update in this direction (they seemed much more groupthinky than I expected, as if they were deferring to each other a lot. Which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense -- I imagine if I were participating in forecasting tournaments, I'd gradually learn to reflexively defer to superforecasters too, since they genuinely would be performing well.)

Ironically, one of the two predictions you quote as example of bad prediction, is in fact an example of a good prediction: "The most realistic estimate for a seed AI transcendence is 2020."

Currently it seems that AGI/superintelligence/singularity/etc. will happen sometime in the 2020's. Yudkowsky's median estimate in 1999 was 2020 apparently, so he probably had something like 30% of his probability mass in the 2020s, and maybe 15% of it in the 2025-2030 period when IMO it's most likely to happen.

Now let's compare to what other people would have been saying... (read more)

The XPT forecast about compute in 2030 still boggles my mind. I'm genuinely confused what happened there. Is anybody reading this familiar with the answer?

Fair, but still: In 2019 Microsoft invested a billion dollars in OpenAI, roughly half of which was compute: Microsoft invests billions more dollars in OpenAI, extends partnership | TechCrunch

And then GPT-3 happened, and was widely regarded to be a huge success and proof that scaling is a good idea etc.

So the amount of compute-spending that the most aggressive forecasters think could be spent on a single training run in 2032... is about 25% as much compute-spending as Microsoft gave OpenAI starting in 2019, before GPT-3 and before the scaling hypothesis. Th... (read more)

Also, if you do various searches on LW and Astral Codex Ten looking for comments I've made, you might see some useful ones maybe.

No, alas. However I do have this short summary doc I wrote back in 2021: The Master Argument for <10-year Timelines - Google Docs

And this sequence of posts making narrower points: AI Timelines - LessWrong

Perhaps this should be a top-level comment.

The XPT forecasters are so in the dark about compute spending that I just pretend they gave more reasonable numbers. I'm honestly baffled how they could be so bad. The most aggressive of them thinks that in 2025 the most expensive training run will be $70M, and that it'll take 6+ years to double thereafter, so that in 2032 we'll have reached $140M training run spending... do these people have any idea how much GPT-4 cost in 2022?!?!? Did they not hear about the investments Microsoft has been making in OpenAI? And remember that's what the most aggressive among them thought! The conservatives seem to be living in an alternate reality where GPT-3 proved that scaling doesn't work and an AI winter set in in 2020.

• I haven’t considered all of the inputs to Cotra’s model, most notably the 2020 training computation requirements distribution. Without forming a view on that, I can’t really say that ~53% represents my overall view.

Sorry to bang on about this again and again, but it's important to repeat for the benefit of those who don't know: The training computation requirements distribution is by far the biggest cruxy input to the whole thing; it's the input that matters most to the bottom line and is most subjective. If you hold fixed everything else Ajeya inputs, but... (read more)

Another nice story! I consider this to be more realistic the previous one about open-source LLMs. In fact I think this sort of 'soft power takeover' via persuasion is a lot more probable than most people seem to think. That said, I do think that hacking and R&D acceleration are also going to be important factors, and my main critique of this story is that it doesn't discuss those elements and implies that they aren't important. 

In addition to building more data centers, MegaAI starts constructing highly automated factories, which will produce the

FWIW I think that it's pretty likely that AGI etc. will happen within 10 years absent strong regulation, and moreover that if it doesn't, the 'crying wolf' effect will be relatively minor, enough that even if I had 20-year medians I wouldn't worry about it compared to the benefits.

Normally I'd say yes, but my AGI timelines are now 50% in ~4 years, so there isn't much time for R&D to make a difference. I'd recommend interventions that pay off quickly, therefore. Bed nets, GiveDirectly, etc.

Ouch, I wasn't aware of those rules, they do seem quite restrictive. If it's a website rather than an app, how easy would it be to set it up so that you can access it with a single button press? I guess you can have favorites, default sites, etc.

But really, before anyone actually goes and invests significant effort into building this, you should coordinate with me + other people in this comment section.

Minimum acceptable features are the bits prior to "That's it really."

Oh dang. How about: When you press the button it doesn't donate the money right away, but just adds it to an internal tally, and then once a quarter you get a notification saying 'time to actually process this quarter's donations, press here to submit your face for scanning, sorry bout the inconvenience'

Oh dang. I definitely want it to be the former, not the latter. Maybe we can get around the iOS platform constraints somehow, e.g. when you press the button it doesn't donate the money right away, but just adds it to an internal tally, and then once a quarter you get a notification saying 'time to actually process this quarter's donations, press here to submit your face for scanning, sorry bout the inconvenience'

Everyone please downvote this comment of mine if they want to support the app idea but don't want to give me karma as a byproduct of my polling strategy; this cancels out the karma I get from the OP.

Hmmm. I really don't want the karma, I was using it as a signal of how good the idea is. Like, creating this app is only worth someone's time and money if it becomes a popular app that lots of people use. So if it only gets  like 20 karma then it isn't worth it, and arguably even if it gets 50 karma it isn't worth it. But if it blows up and hundreds of people like it, that's a signal that it's going to be used by lots of people.

Maybe I should have just asked "Comment in the comments if you'd use this app; if at least 30 people do so then I'll fund this app." Idk. If y'all think I should do something like that instead I'm happy to do so.

ETA: Edited the OP to remove the vote-brigady aspect.

Yep! I love when old threads get resurrected.

Not sure I'm assuming that. Maybe. The way I'd put it is, selection pressure towards grabby values seems to require lots of diverse agents competing over a lengthy period, with the more successful ones reproducing more / acquiring more influence / etc. Currently we have this with humans competing for influence over AGI development, but it's overall fairly weak pressure. What sorts of things are you imagining happening that would strengthen the pressure? Can you elaborate on the sort of scenario you have in mind?

NIce post! My current guess is that the inter-civ selection effect is extremely weak and that the intra-civ selection effect is fairly weak. N=1, but in our civilization the people gunning for control of AGI seem more grabby than average but not drastically so, and it seems possible for this trend to reverse e.g. if the US government nationalizes all the AGI projects.

Nice. Well, I guess we just have different intuitions then -- for me, the chance of extinction or worse in the Octopcracy case seems a lot bigger than "small but non-negligible" (though I also wouldn't put it as high as 99%).

Human groups struggle against each other for influence/power/control constantly; why wouldn't these octopi (or AIs) also seek influence? You don't need to be an expected utility maximizer to instrumentally converge; humans instrumentally converge all the time.

Oh also you might be interested in Joe Carlsmith's report on power-seeking AI, it has a relatively thorough discussion of the overall argument for risk.

Nice analysis! 

I think a main point of disagreement is that I don't think systems need to be "dangerous maximizers" in the sense you described in order to predictably disempower humanity and then kill everyone. Humans aren't dangerous maximizers yet we've killed many species of animals, neanderthals, and various other human groups (genocide, wars, oppression of populations by governments, etc.) Katja's scenario sounds plausible for me except for the part where somehow it all turns out OK in the end for humans. :)

Another, related point of disagreement:... (read more)

Alright, let's make it happen! I'll DM you + Timothy + anyone else who replies to this comment in the next few days, and we can arrange something.

Great list, thanks!
My current tentative expectation is that we'll see a couple things in 1, but nothing in 2+, until it's already too late (i.e. until humanity is already basically in a game of chess with a superior opponent, i.e. until there's no longer a realistic hope of humanity coordinating to stop the slide into oblivion, by contrast with today where we are on a path to oblivion but there's a realistic possibility of changing course.)

I definitely agree that near term, non-agentic AI will cause a lot of chaos. I just don't expect it to be so much chaos that the world as a whole feels significantly more chaotic than usual. But I also agree that might happen too.

I also agree that this sort of thing will have a warning-shot effect that makes a Covid-in-feb-2020-type response plausible.

It seems we maybe don't actually disagree that much?

Re: uncharitability: I think I was about as uncharitable as you were. That said, I do apologize -- I should hold myself to a higher standard.

I agree they might be impossible. (If it only finds some niche application in medicine, that means it's impossible, btw. Anything remotely similar to what Drexler described would be much more revolutionary than that.)

If they are possible though, and it takes (say) 50 years for ordinary human scientists to figure it out starting now... then it's quite plausible to me that it could take 2 OOMs less time than that, or po... (read more)

Oh, I thought you had much more intense things in mind than that. Malicious actor using LLMs in some hacking scheme to get security breaches seems probable to me.

But that wouldn't cause instability to go above baseline. Things like this happen every year. Russia invaded Ukraine last year, for example--for the world to generally become less stable there needs to be either events that are a much bigger deal than that invasion, or events like that invasion happening every few months.

If you can convince me of the "many many years" claim, that would be an update. Other than that you are just saying things I already know and believe.

I never claimed that nanotech would be the best plan, nor that it would be Yudkowky's bathtub-nanotech scenario instead of a scenario involving huge amounts of experimentation. I was just reacting to your terrible leaps of logic, e.g. "nanobots are a terrible method for world destruction given that they have not been invented yet" and "making nanobots requires experimentation and resources therefore AIs won't... (read more)

It seems a lot of people are interested in this one! For my part, the answer is "Infohazards kinda, but mostly it's just that I haven't gotten around to it yet." I was going to do it two years ago but never finished the story.

If there's enough interest, perhaps we should just have a group video call sometime and talk it over? That would be easier for me than writing up a post, and plus, I have no idea what kinds of things you find plausible and implausible, so it'll be valuable data for me to hear these things from you.

A superintelligent AI will be able to do significant amounts of experimentation and acquire significant amounts of resources.