Viruses are optimizing their own spread, not killing all humans. This seems to be further optimizing an > already highly optimized artifact, not flowing optimization through an optimized channel.
Well I'm saying that the virus's ability to penetrate the organism, penetrate cells and nuclei, and hijack the DNA transcription machinery, is a channel. It already exists and was optimized to transmit optimization power: selection on the viral genome is optimization, and it passes through this channel, in that this channel allows the viral genome (when outsi...
I glanced at the first paper you cited, and it seems to show a very weak form of the statements you made. AFAICT their results are more like "we found brain areas that light up when the person reads 'cat', just like how this part of the neural net lights up when given input 'cat'" and less like "the LLM is useful for other tasks in the same way as the neural version is useful for other tasks". Am I confused about what the paper says, and if so, how? What sort of claim are you making?
Essentially, the assumption I made explicitly, which is that there exists a policy which achieves shutdown with probability 1.
Oops, I missed that assumption. Yeah, if there's such a policy, and it doesn't trade off against fetching the coffee, then it seems like we're good. See though here, arguing briefly that by Cromwell's rule, this policy doesn't exist. https://arbital.com/p/task_goal/
...Even with a realistic probability of shutdown failing, if we don’t try to juice so high that it exceeds , my guess is there woul
Problem: suppose the agent foresees that it won't be completely sure that a day has passed, or that it has actually shut down. Then the agent A has a strong incentive to maintain control over the world past when it shuts down, to swoop in and really shut A down if A might not have actually shut down and if there might still be time. This puts a lot of strain on the correctness of the shutdown criterion: it has to forbid this sort of posthumous influence despite A optimizing to find a way to have such influence.
(The correctness might be assumed by the...
This seems in danger of being a "sponge alignment" proposal, i.e. the proposed system doesn't do anything useful. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities#:~:text=sponge
Certainly it doesn't matter what substrate the computation is running on.
I read Yudkowsky as positing some kind of conservation law. Something like, if the plans produced by your AI succeed at having specifically chosen far-reaching consequences if implemented, then the AI must have done reasoning about far-reaching consequences. Then (I'm guessing) Yudkowsky is applying that conservation law to [a big assemblage of myopic reasoners which outputs far-reaching plans], and concluding that either the reasoners weren't myopic, or else the assemblage implement...
Something like, if the plans produced by your AI succeed at having specifically chosen far-reaching consequences if implemented, then the AI must have done reasoning about far-reaching consequences. Then (I'm guessing) Yudkowsky is applying that conservation law to [a big assemblage of myopic reasoners which outputs far-reaching plans], and concluding that either the reasoners weren't myopic, or else the assemblage implements a non-myopic reasoner with the myopic reasoners as a (mere) substrate.
Endorsed.
Well, a main reason we'd care about codespace distance, is that it tells us something about how the agent will change as it learns (i.e. moves around in codespace). (This is involving time, since the agent is changing, contra your picture.) So a key (quasi)metric on codespace would be, "how much" learning does it take to get from here to there. The if True: x() else: y() program is an unnatural point in codespace in this metric: you'd have to have traversed the both the distances from null to x() and from null to y(), and it's weird to have traversed a dis...
Thanks for trying to clarify "X and only X", which IMO is a promising concept.
One thing we might want from an only-Xer is that, in some not-yet-formal sense, it's "only trying to X" and not trying to do anything else. A further thing we might want is that the only-Xer only tries to X, across some relevant set of counterfactuals. You've discussed the counterfactuals across possible environments. Another kind of counterfactual is across modifications of the only-Xer. Modification-counterfactuals seem to point to a key problem of alignment: how does this gene...
Without digging in too much, I'll say that this exchange and the OP is pretty confusing to me. It sounds like MB is like "MIRI doesn't say it's hard to get an AI that has a value function" and then also says "GPT has the value function, so MIRI should update". This seems almost contradictory.
A guess: MB is saying "MIRI doesn't say the AI won't have the function somewhere, but does say it's hard to have an externally usable, explicit human value function". And then saying "and GPT gives us that", and therefore MIRI should update.
And EY is blobbing those two... (read more)
To which I say: "dial a random phone number and ask the person who answers what's good" can also be implemented with a small number of bits. In order for GPT-4 to be a major optimistic update about alignment, we need some specific way to lev... (read more)