All of lukehmiles's Comments + Replies

There is a lot of room between "ignore people; do drastic thing" and "only do things where the exact details have been fully approved". In other words, the Overton window has pretty wide error bars.

I would be pleased if someone sent me a computer virus that was actually a security fix. I would be pretty upset if someone fried all my gadgets. If someone secretly watched my traffic for evil AI fingerprints I would be mildly annoyed but I guess glad?

Even google has been threatening unpatched software people to patch it or else they'll release the exploit iirc

So some of the Q of "to pivotally act or not to pivotally act" is resolved by acknowledging that extent is relevant and you can be polite in some cases

This is the post I would have written if I had had more time, knew more, thought faster, etc

One note about your final section: I expect the tool -> sovereign migration to be pretty easy and go pretty well. It is also kind of multistep, not binary.

Eg current browser automation tools (which bring browsers one step up the agency ladder to scriptable processes) work very well, probably better than a from-scratch web scripting tool would work.

Fake example: predict proteins, then predict interactions, then predict cancer-preventiveness, THEN, if everything is... (read more)

Someone make a PR for a builder/breaker feature on lesswrong

Thanks, especially like vague/incorrect labels to refer to that mismatch. Well-posed Q by Garrabrant, might touch on that in my next post.

Good point about validators failing silently and being more strongly vetted.

using a 'cleanroom' approach and investing heavily in formal verification (and testing) can get you an orders-of-magnitude lower error rate than ordinary software... at orders-of-magnitude greater cost

Abstractly, it seems to me that once the tooling and process is figured out for one task in a narrow domain, you could reuse that stuff on other tasks in the same domain at relatively low cost. But the history of repeated similar vulnerabilities over long time ranges in narrow dom... (read more)

Thoughts on when models will or won't use edge cases? For example, if you made an electronic circuit using evolutionary algorithms in a high fidelity simulation, I would expect it to take advantage of V = IR being wrong in edge cases.

In other words, how much of the work do you expect to be in inducing models to play nice with abstraction?

ETA: abstractions are sometimes wrong in stable (or stabilizable) states, so you can't always lean on chaos washing it out

3johnswentworth6mo
When we have a good understanding of abstraction, it should also be straightforward to recognize when a distribution shift violates the abstraction. In particular, insofar as abstractions are basically deterministic constraints [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJf4FrfiQdDGg7uco/the-telephone-theorem-information-at-a-distance-is-mediated], we can see when the constraint is violated. And as long as we can detect it, it should be straightforward (though not necessarily easy) to handle it.

What counts as a solution? You could ofc set this up completely manually. Or you could train another net to tweak the first. Gold standard would be to have a basically normal net do this on a basically normal task...

3johnswentworth6mo
I was assuming manual setup. I don't expect these things to show up spontaneously in the wild, so I'm not actually that interested in doing it on a normal task as a demonstration of a risk mode. Though of course if someone did find a gradient hacker on a normal task, that would be a big update.

This is true in every field and is very difficult to systemize apparently. Perhaps a highly unstable social state to have people changing directions or thinking/speaking super honestly often.

How could one succeed where so few have?

It seems I was missing the right keywords in my search for demos of this because when I google "ai research assistant" there is quite a lot of work

The difference between evolution and gradient descent is sexual selection and predator/prey/parasite relations.

Agents running around inside everywhere -- completely changes the process.

Likewise for comparing any kind of flat optimization or search to evolution. I think sexual selection and predator-prey made natural selection dramatically more efficient.

So I think it's pretty fair to object that you don't take evolution as adequate evidence to expect this flat, dead, temporary number cruncher will blow up in exponential intelligence.

I think there are other reasons to expect that though.

I haven't read these 500 pages of dialogues so somebody probably made this point already.

That misses element 4 right?

>>> from itertools import product
>>> B = [[{0, 1}, {2, 3, 4}], [{0, 2, 3}, {1, 3}]]
>>> list(product(*B))
[({0, 1}, {0, 2, 3}),
({0, 1}, {1, 3}),
({2, 3, 4}, {0, 2, 3}),
({2, 3, 4}, {1, 3})]
>>> [set.intersection(*tup) for tup in product(*B)]
[{0}, {1}, {2, 3}, {3}]
>>> set.union(*[set.intersection(*tup) for tup in product(*B)])
{0, 1, 2, 3}
2Scott Garrabrant2y
Looks like you copied it wrong. Your B only has one 4.

Definition paraphrasing attempt / question:

Can we say "a factorization B of a set S is a set of nontrivial partitions of S such that  " (cardinality not taken)? I.e., union(intersect(t in tuple) for tuple in cartesian_product(b in B)) = S. I.e., can we drop the intermediate requirement that each intersection has a unique single element, and only require the union of the intersections is equal to S?

3Scott Garrabrant2y
If I understand correctly, that definition is not the same. In particular, it would say that you can get nontrivial factorizations of a 5 element set: {{{0,1},{2,3,4}},{{0,2,4},{1,3}}}.

One way to test the "tasks don't overlap" idea is to have two nets do two different tasks, but connect their internal layers. Then see how high the weights on those layers get. Like, is the internal processing done by Mario AI useful for Greek translation at all? If it is then backprop etc should discover that.

Or something simpler would be that the agent's money counter is in the environment but unmodifiable except by getting tokens, and the agent's goal is to maximize this quantity. Feels kind of fake maybe because money gives the agent no power or intelligence, but it's a valid object-in-the-world to have a preference over the state of.

Yet another option is to have the agent maximize energy tokens (which actions consume)

Yes I agree it feels fishy. The problem with maximizing rubes is that the dilemmas might get lost in the detail of preventing rube hacking. Perhaps agents can "paint" existing money their own color, and money can only be painted once, and agents want to paint as much money as possible. Then the details remain in the env

1Luke H Miles4y
Or something simpler would be that the agent's money counter is in the environment but unmodifiable except by getting tokens, and the agent's goal is to maximize this quantity. Feels kind of fake maybe because money gives the agent no power or intelligence, but it's a valid object-in-the-world to have a preference over the state of. Yet another option is to have the agent maximize energy tokens (which actions consume)