All of Richard_Ngo's Comments + Replies

Interesting post :) I'm intuitively a little skeptical - let me try to figure out why.

I think I buy that some reasoning process could consistently decide to hack in a robust way. But there are probably parts of that reasoning process that are still somewhat susceptible to being changed by gradient descent. In particular, hacking relies on the agent knowing what its current mesa-objective is - but that requires some type of introspective access, which may be difficult and the type of thing which could be hindered by gradient descent (especially when you're ... (read more)

Ah, that makes sense. In the section where you explain the steps of the game, I interpreted the comments in parentheses as further explanations of the step, rather than just a single example. (In hindsight the latter interpretation is obvious, but I was reading quickly - might be worth making this explicit for others who are doing the same.) So I thought that Bayes nets were built into the methodology. Apologies for the oversight!

I'm still a little wary of how much the report talks about concepts in a humans' Bayes net without really explaining why this is... (read more)

Speaking just for myself, I think about this as an extension of the worst-case assumption. Sure, humans don't reason using Bayes nets -- but if we lived in a world where the beings whose values we want to preserve did reason about the world using a Bayes net, that wouldn't be logically inconsistent or physically impossible, and we wouldn't want alignment to fail in that world.

If you solve something given worst-case assumptions, you've solved it for all cases. Whereas if you solve it for one specific case (e.g. Bayes nets) then it may still fail if that's n... (read more)

We’ll assume the humans who constructed the dataset also model the world using their own internal Bayes net.

This seems like a crucial premise of the report; could you say more about it? You discuss why a model using a Bayes net might be "oversimplified and unrealistic", but as far as I can tell you don't talk about why this is a reasonable model of human reasoning.

I guess I just don't feel like you've established that it would have been reasonable to have credence above 90% in either of those cases. Like, it sure seems obvious to me that computers and automobiles are super useful. But I have a huge amount of evidence now about both of those things that I can't really un-condition on. So, given that I know how powerful hindsight bias can be, it feels like I'd need to really dig into the details of possible alternatives before I got much above 90% based on facts that were known back then.

(Although this depends on how ... (read more)

Interesting post. Overall, though, it feels like you aren't taking hindsight bias seriously enough. E.g. as one example:

Some people thought battleships would beat carriers. Others thought that the entire war would be won from the air. Predicting the future is hard; we shouldn’t be confident. Therefore, we shouldn’t assign more than 90% credence to the claim that powerful, portable computers (assuming we figure out how to build them) will be militarily useful, e.g. in weapon guidance systems or submarine sensor suites.

In this particular case, an alternative... (read more)

I didn't push this point at the time, but Paul's claim that "GPT-3 + 5 person-years of engineering effort [would] foom" seems really wild to me, and probably a good place to poke at his model more. Is this 5 years of engineering effort and then humans leaving it alone with infinite compute? Or are the person-years of engineering doled out over time?

Unlike Eliezer, I do think that language models not wildly dissimilar to our current ones will be able to come up with novel insights about ML, but there's a long way between "sometimes comes up with novel insig... (read more)

The two extracts from this post that I found most interesting/helpful:

The problem is that the resource gets consumed differently, so base-rate arguments from resource consumption end up utterly unhelpful in real life.  The human brain consumes around 20 watts of power.  Can we thereby conclude that an AGI should consume around 20 watts of power, and that, when technology advances to the point of being able to supply around 20 watts of power to computers, we'll get AGI?

I'm saying that Moravec's "argument from comparable resource consumption" must

My recommended policy in cases where this applies is "trust your intuitions and operate on the assumption that you're not a crackpot." 
 

Oh, certainly Eliezer should trust his intuitions and believe that he's not a crackpot. But I'm not arguing about what the person with the theory should believe, I'm arguing about what outside observers should believe, if they don't have enough time to fully download and evaluate the relevant intuitions. Asking the person with the theory to give evidence that their intuitions track reality isn't modest epistemology.

the easiest way to point out why they are dumb is with counterexamples. We can quickly "see" the counterexamples. E.g., if you're trying to see AGI as the next step in capitalism, you'll be able to find counterexamples where things become altogether different (misaligned AI killing everything; singleton that brings an end to the need to compete).

I'm not sure how this would actually work. The proponent of the AGI-capitalism analogy might say "ah yes, AGI killing everyone is another data point on the trend of capitalism becoming increasingly destructive". Or... (read more)

Your comment is phrased as if the object-level refutations have been tried, while conveying the meta-level intuitions hasn't been tried. If anything, it's the opposite: the sequences (and to some extent HPMOR) are practically all content about how to think, whereas Yudkowsky hasn't written anywhere near as extensively on object-level AI safety.

This has been valuable for community-building, but less so for making intellectual progress - because in almost all domains, the most important way to make progress is to grapple with many object-level problems, unti... (read more)

I don't expect such a sequence to be particularly useful, compared with focusing on more object-level arguments. Eliezer says that the largest mistake he made in writing his original sequences was that he "didn’t realize that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory". Better, I expect, to correct the specific mistakes alignment researchers are currently making, until people have enough data points to generalise better.

it seems to me that you want properly to be asking "How do we know this empirical thing ends up looking like it's close to the abstraction?" and not "Can you show me that this abstraction is a very powerful one?"

I agree that "powerful" is probably not the best term here, so I'll stop using it going forward (note, though, that I didn't use it in my previous comment, which I endorse more than my claims in the original debate).

But before I ask "How do we know this empirical thing ends up looking like it's close to the abstraction?", I need to ask "Does the ab... (read more)

I'm still trying to understand the scope of expected utility theory, so examples like this are very helpful! I'd need to think much more about it before I had a strong opinion about how much they support Eliezer's applications of the theory, though.

Not a problem. I share many of your frustrations about modesty epistemology and about most alignment research missing the point, so I sympathise with your wanting to express them.

On consequentialism: I imagine that it's pretty frustrating to keep having people misunderstand such an important concept, so thanks for trying to convey it. I currently feel like I have a reasonable outline of what you mean (e.g. to the level where I could generate an analogy about as good as Nate's laser analogy), but I still don't know whether the reason you find it much more c... (read more)

My model of Eliezer says that there is some deep underlying concept of consequentialism, of which the "not very coherent consequentialism" is a distorted reflection; and that this deep underlying concept is very closely related to expected utility theory. (I believe he said at one point that he started using the word "consequentialism" instead of "expected utility maximisation" mainly because people kept misunderstanding what he meant by the latter.)

I don't know enough about conservative vector fields to comment, but on priors I'm pretty skeptical of this being a good example of coherent utilities; I also don't have a good guess about what Eliezer would say here.

Thanks! I think that this is a very useful example of an advance prediction of utility theory; and that gathering more examples like this is one of the most promising way to make progress on bridging the gap between Eliezer's and most other people's understandings of consequentialism.

My objection is mostly fleshed out in my other comment. I'd just flag here that "In other words, you have to do things the "hard way"--no shortcuts" assigns the burden of proof in a way which I think is not usually helpful. You shouldn't believe my argument that I have a deep theory linking AGI and evolution unless I can explain some really compelling aspects of that theory. Because otherwise you'll also believe in the deep theory linking AGI and capitalism, and the one linking AGI and symbolic logic, and the one linking intelligence and ethics, and the on... (read more)

I think we live in a world where there are very strong forces opposed to technological progress, which actively impede a lot of impactful work, including technologies which have the potential to be very economically and strategically important (e.g. nuclear power, vaccines, genetic engineering, geoengineering).

This observation doesn't lead me to a strong prediction that all such technologies will be banned; nor even that the most costly technologies will be banned - if the forces opposed to technological progress were even approximately rational, then bann... (read more)

Strong upvote, you're pointing at something very important here. I don't think I'm defending epistemic modesty, I think I'm defending epistemic rigour, of the sort that's valuable even if you're the only person in the world.

I suspect Richard isn't actually operating from a frame where he can produce the thing I asked for in the previous paragraphs (a strong model of where expected utility is likely to fail, a strong model of how a lack of "successful advance predictions"/"wide applications" corresponds to those likely failure modes, etc).

Yes, this is corre... (read more)

we already know how to build myopic optimizers

What are you referring to here?

That all makes sense. But I had a skim of (2), (3), (4), and (5) and it doesn't seem like they help explain why myopia is significantly more natural than "obey humans"?

The key idea, in the case of HCH, would be to direct that optimization towards the goal of producing an action that is maximally close to what HCH would do.

Why do you expect this to be any easier than directing that optimisation towards the goal of "doing what the human wants"? In particular, if you train a system on the objective "imitate HCH", why wouldn't it just end up with the same long-term goals as HCH has? That seems like a much more natural thing for it to learn than the concept of imitating HCH, because in the process of imitating HCH it still ha... (read more)

+1 for interesting investigations. I want to push back on your second point, though - the framing of the problem of high-level distributional shift. I don't think this actually captures the core thing we're worried about. For example, we can imagine a model that remains in the same environment, but becomes increasingly intelligent during training, until it realises that it has the option of doing a treacherous turn. Or we can think about the case of humans - the core skills and goals that make us dangerous to other species developed in our ancestral enviro... (read more)

I really feel there is more disagreement on the second question than on the first

What is this feeling based on? One way we could measure this is by asking people about how much AI xrisk there is conditional on there being no more research explicitly aimed at aligning AGIs. I expect that different people would give very different predictions.

People like Paul and Evan and more are actually going for the core problems IMO, just anchoring a lot of their thinking in current ML technologies.

Everyone agrees that Paul is trying to solve foundational problems. And ... (read more)

This is already reflected in the upvotes, but just to say it explicitly: I think the replies to this comment from Rob and dxu in particular have been exceptionally charitable and productive; kudos to them. This seems like a very good case study in responding to a provocative framing with a concentration of positive discussion norms that leads to productive engagement.

I think one core issue here is that there are actually two debates going on. One is "how hard is the alignment problem?"; another is "how powerful are prosaic alignment techniques?" Broadly speaking, I'd characterise most of the disagreement as being on the first question. But you're treating it like it's mostly on the second question - like EY and everyone else are studying the same thing (cancer, in your metaphor) and just disagree about how to treat it.

My attempt to portray EY's perspective is more like: he's concerned with the problem of ageing, and a ... (read more)

Thanks, that's helpful. I do think there's a weak version of this which is an important background assumption for the post (e.g. without that assumption I'd need to explain the specific ways in which ANNs and BNNs are similar), so I've now edited the opening lines to convey that weak version instead. (I still believe the original version but agree that it's not worth defending here.)

Why would that be our default expectation?

Lots of reasons. Neural networks are modelled after brains. They both form distributed representations at very large scales, they both learn over time, etc etc. Sure, you've pointed out a few differences, but the similarities are so great that this should be the main anchor for our expectations (rather than, say, thinking that we'll understand NNs the same way we understand support vector machines, or the same way we understand tree search algorithms, or...).

Compare: when trying to predict events, you should use their base rate except when you have specific updates to it.

Similarly, I claim, our beliefs about brains should be the main reference for our beliefs about neural networks, which we can then update from.

I agree that the phrasing could be better; any suggestions?

The images in this post seem to be broken.

What mechanism would ensure that these two logic pieces only fire at the same time? Whatever it is, I expect that mechanism to be changed in response to failures.

The argument that Adam mentions me making is fleshed out in this post.

I discuss the possibility of it going in some other direction when I say "The two most salient options to me". But the bit of Evan's post that this contradicts is:

Now, if the model gets to the point where it's actually just failing because of this, then gradient descent will probably just remove that check—but the trick is never to actually get there.

Interesting report :) One quibble:

For one, our AIs can only use “things like SPI” if we actually formalize the approach

I don't see why this is the case. If it's possible for humans to start using things like SPI without a formalisation, why couldn't AIs too? (I agree it's more likely that we can get them to do so if we formalise it, though.)

Whether this is a point for the advocate or the skeptic depends on whether advances in RL from human feedback unlock other alignment work more than they unlock other capabilities work. I think there's room for reasonable disagreement on this question, although I favour the former.

Skeptic: It seems to me that the distinction between "alignment" and "misalignment" has become something of a motte and bailey. Historical arguments that AIs would be misaligned used it in sense 1: "AIs having sufficiently general and large-scale motivations that they acquire the instrumental goal of killing all humans (or equivalently bad behaviour)". Now people are using the word in sense 2: "AIs not quite doing what we want them to do". But when our current AIs aren't doing quite what we want them to do, is that mainly evidence that future, more general... (read more)

These aren't complicated or borderline cases, they are central example of what we are trying to avert with alignment research.

I'm wondering if the disagreement over the centrality of this example is downstream from a disagreement about how easy the "alignment check-ins" that Critch talks about are. If they are the sort of thing that can be done successfully in a couple of days by a single team of humans, then I share Critch's intuition that the system in question starts off only slightly misaligned. By contrast, if they require a significant proportion of ... (read more)

I'm not sure what you mean by "actual computation rather than the algorithm as a whole". I thought that I was talking about the knowledge of the trained model which actually does the "computation" of which move to play, and you were talking about the knowledge of the algorithm as a whole (i.e. the trained model plus the optimising bot).

Mesa-optimizers are in the search space and would achieve high scores in the training set, so why wouldn't we expect to see them?

I like this as a statement of the core concern (modulo some worries about the concept of mesa-optimisation, which I'll save for another time).

With respect to formalization, I did say up front that less-formal work, and empirical work, is still valuable.

I missed this disclaimer, sorry. So that assuages some of my concerns about balancing types of work. I'm still not sure what intuitions or arguments underlie your optimism about fo... (read more)

I have fairly mixed feelings about this post. On one hand, I agree that it's easy to mistakenly address some plausibility arguments without grasping the full case for why misaligned mesa-optimisers might arise. On the other hand, there has to be some compelling (or at least plausible) case for why they'll arise, otherwise the argument that 'we can't yet rule them out, so we should prioritise trying to rule them out' is privileging the hypothesis. 

Secondly, it seems like you're heavily prioritising formal tools and methods for studying mesa-optimisatio... (read more)

The trained AlphaZero model knows lots of things about Go, in a comparable way to how a dog knows lots of things about running.

But the algorithm that gives rise to that model can know arbitrarily few things. (After all, the laws of physics gave rise to us, but they know nothing at all.)

I'd say that this is too simple and programmatic to be usefully described as a mental model. The amount of structure encoded in the computer program you describe is very small, compared with the amount of structure encoded in the neural networks themselves. (I agree that you can have arbitrarily simple models of very simple phenomena, but those aren't the types of models I'm interested in here. I care about models which have some level of flexibility and generality, otherwise you can come up with dumb counterexamples like rocks "knowing" the laws of physic... (read more)

I don't think there is a fundamental difference in kind between trees, bacteria, humans, and hypothetical future AIs

There's at least one important difference: some of these are intelligent, and some of these aren't.

It does seem plausible that the category boundary you're describing is an interesting one. But when you indicate in your comment below that you see the "AI hypothesis" and the "life hypothesis" as very similar, then that mainly seems to indicate that you're using a highly nonstandard definition of AI, which I expect will lead to confusion.

It feels like this post pulls a sleight of hand. You suggest that it's hard to solve the control problem because of the randomness of the starting conditions. But this is exactly the reason why it's also difficult to construct an AI with a stable implementation. If you can do the latter, then you can probably also create a much simpler system which creates the smiley face.

Similarly, in the real world, there's a lot of randomness which makes it hard to carry out tasks. But there are a huge number of strategies for achieving things in the world which don't r... (read more)

The human knows the rules and the win condition. The optimisation algorithm doesn't, for the same reason that evolution doesn't "know" what dying is: neither are the types of entities to which you should ascribe knowledge.

it's not obvious to me that this is a realistic target

Perhaps I should instead have said: it'd be good to explain to people why this might be a useful/realistic target. Because if you need propositions that cover all the instincts, then it seems like you're basically asking for people to revive GOFAI.

(I'm being unusually critical of your post because it seems that a number of safety research agendas lately have become very reliant on highly optimistic expectations about progress on interpretability, so I want to make sure that people are forced to defend that assumption rather than starting an information cascade.)

As an additional reason for the importance of tabooing "know", note that I disagree with all three of your claims about what the model "knows" in this comment and its parent.

(The definition of "know" I'm using is something like "knowing X means possessing a mental model which corresponds fairly well to reality, from which X can be fairly easily extracted".)

I think at this point you've pushed the word "know" to a point where it's not very well-defined; I'd encourage you to try to restate the original post while tabooing that word.

This seems particularly valuable because there are some versions of "know" for which the goal of knowing everything a complex model knows seems wildly unmanageable (for example, trying to convert a human athlete's ingrained instincts into a set of propositions). So before people start trying to do what you suggested, it'd be good to explain why it's actually a realistic target.

I used to define "agent" as "both a searcher and a controller"

Oh, I really like this definition. Even if it's too restrictive, it seems like it gets at something important.

I'm not sure what you meant by "more compressed".

Sorry, that was quite opaque. I guess what I mean is that evolution is an optimiser but isn't an agent, and in part this has to do with how it's a very distributed process with no clear boundary around it. Whereas when you have the same problem being solved in a single human brain, then that compression makes it easier to point to the huma... (read more)