This is an extended and edited transcript of the talk I recently gave at EAGxSingapore 2022. The title has been changed for easier searchability of "Contractualist AI Alignment". Abstract: Artificial intelligence seems poised to alter our civilization in transformative ways. How can we align this development with our collective interests?...
This is an extended transcript of the talk I gave at EAGxAsiaPacific 2020. In the talk, I present a somewhat critical take on how AI alignment has grown as a field, and how, from my perspective, it deserves considerably more philosophical and disciplinary diversity than it has enjoyed so far....
This is an extended and edited transcript of the talk I recently gave at EAGxSingapore 2022.
The title has been changed for easier searchability of "Contractualist AI Alignment".
Abstract: Artificial intelligence seems poised to alter our civilization in transformative ways. How can we align this development with our collective interests? Dominant trends in AI alignment research adopt a preference utilitarian conception of alignment, but this faces practical challenges when extended to a multiplicity of humans, values, and AI systems. This talk develops contractualist AI alignment as an alternative framework, charting out a vision of societal-scale alignment where AI systems can serve a plurality of roles and values, governed by and accountable to collectively decided,... (read 7407 more words →)
This is an extended transcript of the talk I gave at EAGxAsiaPacific 2020. In the talk, I present a somewhat critical take on how AI alignment has grown as a field, and how, from my perspective, it deserves considerably more philosophical and disciplinary diversity than it has enjoyed so far. I'm sharing it here in the hopes of generating discussion about the disciplinary and philosophical paradigms that (I understand) the AI alignment community to be rooted in, and whether or how we should move beyond them. Some sections cover introductory material that most people here are likely to be familiar with, so feel free to skip them.
Hey everyone, my name is... (read 5789 more words →)
Apologies for the belated reply.
Yes, the summary you gave above checks out with what I took away from your post. I think it sounds good on a high level, but still too vague / high-level for me to say much in more detail. Values/ethics are definitely a system (e.g., one might think that morality was evolved by humans for the purposes of co-operation), but at the end of the day you're going to have to make some concrete hypothesis about what that system is in order to make progress. Contractualism is one such concrete hypothesis, and folding ethics under the broader scope of normative reasoning is another way to understand the underlying logic of ethical reasoning. Moral naturalism is another way of going "beyond human values", because it argues that statements about ethics can be reduced to statements about the natural world.
Hopefully this is helpful food for thought!
Very interesting work! This is only a half-formed thought, but the diagrams you've created very much remind me of similar diagrams used to display learned "topics" in classic topic models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Figure 8 from the paper is below):
I think there's possibly something to be gained by viewing what the MLPs and attention heads are learning as something like "topic models" -- and it may be the case that some of the methods developed for evaluating topic interpretability and consistency will be valuable here. A couple of references:
Not sure if this is the same as the awards contest entry, but EJT also made this earlier post ("There are no coherence theorems") arguing that certain Dutch Book / money pump arguments against incompleteness fail!
It seems to me that it's not right to assume the probability of opportunities to trade are zero?
Suppose both John and David are alive on a desert island right now (but slowly dying), and there's a chance that a rescue boat will arrive that will save only one of them, leaving the other to die. What would they contract to? Assuming no altruistic preferences, presumably neither would agree to only the other person being rescued.
It seems more likely here that bargaining will break down, and one of them will kill off the other, resulting in an arbitrary resolution of who ends up on the rescue boat, not a "rational" resolution.
While I've focused on death here, I think this is actually much more general -- there are a lot of irreversible decisions that people make (and that artificial agents might make) between potentially incommensurable choices. Here's a nice example from Elizabeth Anderson's "Value in Ethics & Economics" (Ch. 3, P57 re: the question of how one should live one's life, to which I think irreversibility applies
Similar incommensurability applies, I think, to what kind of society we collectively we want to live in, given that path dependency makes many choices irreversible.
Interesting argument! I think it goes through -- but only under certain ecological / environmental assumptions:
But this isn't always the case! Consider:
This is already a case of weakly incomplete preferences which, while technically reducible to a complete order over "indifference sets", doesn't seem well described by a utility function! In particular, it seems really important to represent the fact that neither person would trade their life for... (read more)
Fascinating evidence!
I suspect this maybe because RLHF elicits a singular scale of "goodness" judgements from humans, instead of a plurality of "goodness-of-a-kind" judgements. One way to interpret language models is as *mixtures* of conversational agents: they first sample some conversational goal, then some policy over words, conditioned on that goal:
On this interpretation, what RL from human feedback does is shift/concentrate the distribution over conversational goals into a smaller range: the range of goals consistent with human feedback so far. And if humans are asked to give only a singular "goodness" rating, the distribution will shift towards only goals that do well on those ratings - perhaps dramatically so! We lose goal diversity,... (read more)
Great to know, and good to hear!
Regarding causal scrubbing in particular, it seems to me that there's a closely related line of research by Geiger, Icard and Potts that it doesn't seem like TAISIC is engaging with deeply? I haven't looked too closely, but it may be another example of duplicated effort / rediscovery:
... (read more)The importance of interventions
Over a series of recent papers (Geiger et al. 2020, Geiger et al. 2021, Geiger et al. 2022, Wu et al. 2022a, Wu et al. 2022b), we have argued that the theory of causal abstraction (Chalupka et al. 2016, Rubinstein et al. 2017, Beckers and Halpern 2019, Beckers et al. 2019) provides a powerful toolkit for achieving the desired kinds of explanation
Strongly upvoting this for being a thorough and carefully cited explanation of how the safety/alignment community doesn't engage enough with relevant literature from the broader field, likely at the cost of reduplicated work, suboptimal research directions, and less exchange and diffusion of important safety-relevant ideas. While I don't work on interpretability per se, I see similar things happening with value learning / inverse reinforcement learning approaches to alignment.