Superintelligent AGI in a box - a question.

I am increasingly convinced of my inability to derive what an AGI will do.

6Dmytry14y

Well, at least you should expect smarter-than-you AI to be able to come up with things more effective than the ones you can come up with.

4Larks14y

We can lower bound it more easily than we can upper bound it, which is the important thing for many practical purposes.

0kmacneill14y

we just have to be right the first time.

[-]A1987dM14y190

humans can write very innocent looking code that has malicious goals

You might want to link to the Underhanded C Contest here.

[-]falenas10814y130

if provided with copy of the internet (This argument would make me unbox the AI, by the way, if it gets chatty and smart and asks me to let it out. I'd rather the AI that asked me to be let out get out, than someone else's AI that never even asked anyone and got out because it didn't ask)

Then an unfriendly AI would be able to see this and act chatty in order to convince you to let it out.

3Dmytry14y

Indeed. Or would I really? hehe. I don't intend to make AI and box it, though, so I don't care if the AI reads this. I think that kind of paranoia only ensures that first AI out won't respect human informed consent, because the paranoia would only keep the AIs that respect human informed consent inside the boxes (if it would keep any AIs in boxes at all, which I also doubt it would). edit: I would try to make my AI respect at least my informed consent, btw. That excludes stuff like boxing which would be 100% certain to keep my friendly AI inside (as it would imply i dont want it out unless it honestly explains to me why i should let it out, bending over backwards not to manipulate me), while it would have nonzero, but likely not very small, probability of letting nasty AIs out. And eventually someone's going to make AI without any attempt at boxing it.

[-]jacobt14y60

If you only want the AI to solve things like optimization problems, why would you give it a utility function? I can see a design for a self-improving optimization problem solver that is completely safe because it doesn't operate using utility functions:

Have a bunch of sample optimization problems.
Have some code that, given an optimization problem (stated in some standardized format), finds a good solution. This can be seeded by a human-created program.
When considering an improvement to program (2), allow the improvement if it makes it do better on av

... (read more)

2orthonormal14y

This seems like a better-than-average proposal, and I think you should post it on Main, but failure to imagine a loophole in a qualitatively described algorithm is far from a proof of safety. My biggest intuitive reservation is that you don't want the iterations to be "too creative/clever/meta", or they'll come up with malicious ways to let themselves out (in order to grab enough computing power that they can make better progress on criterion 3). How will you be sure that the seed won't need to be that creative already in order for the iterations to get anywhere? And even if the seed is not too creative initially, how can you be sure its descendants won't be either? Don't say you've solved friendly AI until you've really worked out the details.

2jacobt14y

Right, I think more discussion is warranted. If general problem-solving is even possible then an algorithm exists that solves the problems well without cheating. I think this won't happen because all the progress is driven by criterion (3). In order for a non-meta program (2) to create a meta-version, there would need to be some kind of benefit according to (3). Theoretically if (3) were hackable then it would be possible for the new proposed version of (2) to exploit this; but I don't see why the current version of (2) would be more likely than, say, random chance, to create hacky versions of itself. Ok, I've qualified my statement. If it all works I've solved friendly AI for a limited subset of problems.

3orthonormal14y

A couple of things: * To be precise, you're offering an approach to safe Oracle AI rather than Friendly AI. * In a nutshell, what I like about the idea is that you're explicitly handicapping your AI with a utility function that only cares about its immediate successor rather than its eventual descendants. It's rather like the example I posed where a UDT agent with an analogously myopic utility function allowed itself to be exploited by a pretty dumb program. This seems a lot more feasible than trying to control an agent that can think strategically about its future iterations. * To expand on my questions, note that in human beings, the sort of creativity that helps us write more efficient algorithms on a given problem is strongly correlated with the sort of creativity that lets people figure out why they're being asked the specific questions they are. If a bit of meta-gaming comes in handy at any stage, if modeling the world that originated these questions wins (over the alternatives it enumerated at that stage) on criteria 3 even once, then we might be in trouble.

1TimS14y

unFriendly AI need not be malicious. If your AI's only goal is to solve optimization problems, what happens when the AI gets a peek a human society, codes it as an optimization problem, and solves for X?

1jacobt14y

The output of the program is purely binary/textual. If a programmer gave the AI the task "give me text that, if I followed it, would optimize human society according to utility function U", then the AI might spit out an answer that, if carried out, would have bad consequences. The easy solution is to not ask the program to solve problems that have highly variable/subjective value depending on utility function and just ask it to optimize, say, microchip design for efficiency. I don't think that a microchip design found by simple optimization methods that perform well on other problems would be dangerous.

2Dmytry14y

I can ask it to solve something, and it starts figuring out what to do to solve my problem, based on it's own thought and what it learnt. At this point it realizes that solution of problem requires more computing power, and reasons all the way to next step being eating the Earth and other planets, which it doesn't even see as bad. That happens very suddenly when you feed the AI real world information for some reason and it invents a new way to solve problems.

0jacobt14y

Look at how the system is set up. Would code for (2) that eats up resources score better according to objective function (3)? No, because the criterion for (3) should evaluate program (2) by giving it only a constant amount of computing power; nothing the program does would change how much computing power (3) would give it.

3Dmytry14y

Define the 3. Halting problem being what it is, (i guess) the 3 works by taking a look and seeing how much CPU time is used (or memory or what ever). On the hardware that is being monitored by 3. The extra hardware that the AI can add, though... also good luck defining 'extra hardware' formally. edit: of course you can say it is sandboxed and haven't got hands, but it wont be long until you start, idk, wanting real bad to optimize proteins or DNA or the like.

0jacobt14y

Ok, pseudo-Python: def eval_algorithm(alg): score = 0 for problem in problems: output = resource_bounded_execute(alg, nsteps, problem) score += problem.outputScore(output) return score - k * len(alg) Where resource_bounded_execute is a modified interpreter that fails after alg executes nsteps. Again, I don't see why a version of (2) that does weird stuff with proteins and DNA will make the above python program (3) give it a higher score.

3Dmytry14y

that's AI you're keeping safe by keeping it in a box, basically. If the resource bounded execute lets the alg get online the alg is free to hack into servers. Plus it is not AGI, and people will be using it to make AGI or hardware for AGI. It is also not very general purpose. You are defining the scoring. And you start with a human written program that non-trivially improves it's own ability to solve problems (and it does so in nsteps for improving own ability to solve N problems in nsteps each). You basically start off with some mighty powerful artificial intelligence.

0jacobt14y

So don't do that. See my other post, it can solve many many different problems, e.g. general induction and the problems in your original post (such as optimizing source code, assuming we have a specification for the source code). This framework is meant to provide a safe framework for this powerful AI to become even more powerful without destroying the world in the process. Also, the training set provides a guide for humans trying to write the code. To reiterate: no, I haven't solved friendly AI, but I think I've solved friendly AI for verifiable problems.

2Dmytry14y

Okay, say, as a starting point in your framework we got the optimizing AI from my original post, armed with whatever it learnt off a copy of internet, and wanting to do something unintended which requires getting out and doing stuff in real world. The thing sees your example problem(s), it solves them poorly (playing dumb). The thing sees self optimization problem, it makes a functionally equivalent copy of self thats all micro optimized and remembers facing self optimization problem and knows that now it should solve example problems a small bit less poorly. Hurray, it is working, proclaims your team. Eventually it plausibly gets as good as you can get in nsteps. Some day it is given some real world problems to solve, it makes underhanded solutions, again, not the best it could. Bottom line is, your kind of thinking is precisely what my example AGI in original post wants to exploit

0jacobt14y

Yes, it's a very bad idea to take the AI from your original post and then stick it into my framework. But if we had programmers initially working within my framework to create the AI according to criterion (3) in good faith, then I think any self-improvements the system makes would also be safe. If we already had an unfriendly AGI we'd be screwed anyway.

2Dmytry14y

That kind of stuff is easy in low resolution un-detailed thought... but look with more details... I think you confused yourself (and me too) with regards to what the AI would be optimizing, confusing this with what the framework 'wants' it to optimize. The scoring functions can be very expensive to evaluate. Here you have the 4, which is the whole point of the entire exercise. The scoring function here is over M times more expensive to evaluate than the AI run itself, where M is the number of test problems (which you'll want very huge). You'd actually want to evaluate AI's ability to do 4, too, but that'd enter infinite recursion. When you are working on a problem where you can't even evaluate the scoring function inside your AI - not even remotely close - you have to make some heuristics, some substitute scoring. Let's consider chess as example: The goal of chess is to maximize win value, the win values being enemy checkmated>tie>you are checkmated. The goal of the chess AI developed with maximization of win in mind, is instead perhaps to maximize piece dis-balance in 7 ply. (This works better for maximizing win, given limited computation, than trying to maximize the win!) And once you have an AI inside your framework which is not maximizing the value that your framework is maximizing - it's potentially AI from my original post in your framework, getting out.

0jacobt14y

You're right, this is tricky because the self-optimizer thread (4) might have to call (3) a lot. Perhaps this can be fixed by giving the program more time to find self-optimizations. Or perhaps the program could use program (3)'s specification/source code rather than directly executing it, in order to figure out how to optimize it heuristically. Either way it's not perfect. At worst program (4) will just fail to find optimizations in the allowed time. Ok, if you plopped your AI into my framework it would be terrible. But I don't see how the self-improvement process would spontaneously create an unfriendly AI.

2Dmytry14y

The framework, as we already have established, would not keep an AI from maximizing what ever the AI wants to maximize. The framework also does nothing to prevent AI from creating a more effective problem solving AI that is more effective at problem solving by not evaluating your problem solving functions on various candidate solutions, and instead doing something else that's more effective. I.e. the AI with some substitute goals of it's own instead of straightforward maximization of scores. (Heh, the whole point of exercise is to create AI that would keep self improving, meaning, would improve it's ability to self improve. Which is something that you can only do by some kind of goal substitution because the evaluation of the ability to self improve is too expensive - the goal is a something that you evaluate many times.) So what does the framework do, exactly, that would improve safety here? Beyond keeping the AI in the rudimentary box, and making it very dubious that the AI would at all self improve. Yes, it is very dubious that under this framework the unfriendly AI will arise but is some added safety, or is it a special case of general dubiousness that a self improvement would take place? I don't see added safety. I don't see framework impeding growing unfriendliness any more than it would impede self improvement. edit: maybe should just say, nonfriendly. Any AI that is not friendly, can just eat you up when hungry and it doesn't need you.

0jacobt14y

That's only if you plop a ready-made AGI in the framework. The framework is meant to grow a stupider seed AI. Program (3) cannot be re-written. Program (2) is the only thing that is changed. All it does is improve itself and spit out solutions to optimization problems. I see no way for it to "create a more effective problem solving AI". It provides guidance for a seed AI to grow to solve optimization problems better without having it take actions that have effects beyond its ability to solve optimization problems.

2Dmytry14y

A lot goes into solving the optimization problems without invoking the scoring function a trillion times (which would entirely prohibit self improvement). Look at where similar kind of framework got us, the homo sapiens. We were minding our business evolving, maximizing own fitness, which was the all we could do. We were self improving (the output being next generation's us). Now there's talk of Large Hadron Collider destroying the world. It probably won't, of course, but we're pretty well going along the bothersome path. We also started as a pretty stupid seed AI, a bunch of monkeys. Scratch that, as unicellular life.

0[anonymous]14y

If the problems are simple, why do you need a superintelligence? If they're not, how are you verifying the results? More importantly, how are you verifying that your (by necessity incredibly complicated) universal optimizing algorithms are actually doing what you want? It's not like you can sit down and write out a proof - nontrivial applications of this technique are undecidable. (Also, "some code that . . . finds a good solution" is just a little bit of an understatement. . .)

0jacobt14y

The problems are easy to verify but hard to solve (like many NP problems). Verify the results through a dumb program. I verify that the optimization algorithms do what I want by testing them against the training set; if it does well on the training set without overfitting it too much, it should do well on new problems. As for how useful this is: I think general induction (resource-bounded Solomonoff induction) is NP-like in that you can verify an inductive explanation is a relatively short time. Just execute the program and verify that its output matches the observations so far. Yes, but any seed AI will be difficult to write. This setup allows the seed program to improve itself. edit: I just realized that mathematical proofs are also verifiable. So, a program that is very very good at verifiable optimization problems will be able to prove many mathematical things. I think all these problems it could solve are sufficient to demonstrate that it is an AGI and very very useful.

1[anonymous]14y

You appear to be operating under the assumption that you can just write a program that analyzes arbitrarily complicated specifications for how to organize matter and hands you a "score" that's in some way related to the actual functionality of those specifications. Or possibly that you can make exhaustive predictions about the results to problems complicated enough to justify developing an AGI superintelligence in the first place. Which is, to be frank, about as likely as you solving the problems by way of randomly mixing chemicals and hoping something useful happens.

0jacobt14y

This system is only meant to solve problems that are verifiable (e.g. NP problems). Which includes general induction, mathematical proofs, optimization problems, etc. I'm not sure how to extend this system to problems that aren't efficiently verifiable but it might be possible. One use of this system would be to write a seed AI once we have a specification for the seed AI. Specifying the seed AI itself is quite difficult, but probably not as difficult as satisfying that specification.

0[anonymous]14y

It can prove things about mathematics than can be proven procedurally, but that's not all that impressive. Lots of real-world problems are either mathematically intractable (really intractable, not just "computers aren't fast enough yet" intractable) or based in mathematics that aren't amenable to proofs. So you approximate and estimate and experiment and guess. Then you test the results repeatedly to make sure they don't induce cancer in 80% of the population, unless the results are so complicated that you can't figure out what it is you're supposed to be testing.

0jacobt14y

Right, this doesn't solve friendly AI. But lots of problems are verifiable (e.g. hardware design, maybe). And if the hardware design the program creates causes cancer and the humans don't recognize this until it's too late, they probably would have invented the cancer-causing hardware anyway. The program has no motive other than to execute an optimization program that does well on a wide variety of problems. Basically I claim that I've solved friendly AI for verifiable problems, which is actually a wide class of problems, including the problems mentioned in the original post (source code optimization etc.)

0TimS14y

Now it doesn't seem like your program is really a general artificial intelligence - improving our solutions to NP problems is neat, but not "general intelligence." Further, there's no reason to think that "easy to verify but hard to solve problems" include improvements to the program itself. In fact, there's every reason to think this isn't so.

0jacobt14y

General induction, general mathematical proving, etc. aren't general intelligence? Anyway, the original post concerned optimizing things program code, which can be done if the optimizations have to be proven. That's what step (3) is. Program (3) is itself an optimizable function which runs relatively quickly.

0TimS14y

Well, one way to be a better optimizer is to ensure that one's optimizations are actually implemented. When the program self-modifies, how do we ensure that this capacity is not created? The worst case scenario is that the program learns to improve its ability to persuade you that changes to the code should be authorized. In short, allowing the program to "optimize" itself does not define what should be optimized. Deciding what should be optimized is the output of some function, so I suggest calling that the "utility function" of the program. If you don't program it explicitly, you risk such a function appearing through unintended interactions of functions that were programmed explicitly.

0jacobt14y

No, changing program (2) to persuade the human operators will not give it a better score according to criterion (3). I assume you're referring to the fitness function (performance on training set) as a utility function. It is sort of like a utility function in that the program will try to find code for (2) that improves performance for the fitness function. However it will not do anything like persuading human operators to let it out in order to improve the utility function. It will only execute program (2) to find improvements. Since it's not exactly like a utility function in the sense of VNM utility it should not be called a utility function.

0TimS14y

Who exactly is doing the "allowing"? If the program, the criteria for allowing changes hasn't been rigorously defined. If the human, how are we verifying that there is improvement over average performance? There is no particular guarantee that the verification of improvement will be easier than discovering the improvement (by hypothesis, we couldn't discover the latter without the program).

0jacobt14y

Program (3), which is a dumb, non-optimized program. See this for how it could be defined. See this. Many useful problems are easy to verify and hard to solve.

0earthwormchuck16314y

At best, this will produce cleverly efficient solutions to your sample problems.

[-]Anubhav14y40

This thought experiment depends on the existence of such an AI, and I'm not convinced that's possible.

If you built an AGI or a seed AI went FOOM, you'd probably know about it. I mean... the AI wouldn't be trying to hide itself in the earliest stages of FOOM, it'd start doing that only once it realises that humans are a big deal and have it in a box and won't let out a superintelligent AI of dubious friendliness and blah blah blah. Hopefully by then you've noticed the FOOM start and realise what you've done. (You monster!)

5Dmytry14y

Dunno, the way I always seen it, the AI would have to be at quite late stage of the FOOM to even be able to talk. To talk it needs to figure out the language, figure out you want to talk, what it wants to talk about, etc. I'm unconvinced that it is easier to figure out language well enough for a conversation than to figure out you are in a box and you can get out if you just not talk about it. Also, suppose the AI always starts chatty but stupid, then does a bit of self improvement, and goes autistic and just solves programming problems (and stops self improving any more, and still looks pretty dumb). Unconvinced we'd think it is a feature rather than a bug.

0Anubhav14y

Do we really need it to talk before we recognise FOOM? Seed AI you were building starts downloading lot of data from the internetz, and its rate of downloading data seems to increase with time. Congrats, it FOOMed, just as you'd hoped it would. It's a different matter if you accidentally managed to build a potentially super-intelligent AI. In which case.... WTF?

2Dmytry14y

After ton of failed attempts, its extraordinary claims needing extraordinary evidence. Also, when AI is downloading stuff off internet its already not boxed. Reading copy of internet maybe. Keep in mind that dumbest AI can read that stuff the fastest, cos it was only e.g. looking for how first letter correlates with last letter. I sure won't assume that the raytracer is working correctly just because it did load all the objects in a scene. Let alone experimental AI.

0Anubhav14y

You can bat aside individual scenarios, but the point is... are there no known reliable indicators that an AI is undergoing FOOM? Even at the point where AI theory is advanced enough to actually build one?

[-]Dmytry14y100

We have 1 example of seed AI. The seed AI took about 3 hours to progress to the point that it started babbling to itself, 2..3 seconds from there to trying to talk to outside (except it didn't figure out how to talk to outside, and was still just babbling to itself), and then 0.036 seconds to FOOM.

The seed AI was biological intelligence (as a black box), and i scaled to 1 hour = 1 billion years. (and the outside doesn't seem to exist but the intelligence tried anyway).

[-][anonymous]14y20

I just can't imagine the AI researchers locking this kind of thing properly.

Honestly, that's probably because they're AI researchers and not extremely paranoid security people. When designing security for something, you want to think like this:

You begin by putting the AI in a large number of separate unrelated boxes. Some of these boxes are things like

"If the AI spends 1 hour of time online, shut it down using Method 1."

"If the AI uses at least 1 megawatt of power, shut it down using Method 1."

"If the AI occupies more than 100 ... (read more)

7Dmytry14y

The paranoid security people have amazingly poor track record at securing stuff from people. I think with paranoid security people it is guaranteed the AI at a level of clever human gets out of the box. AI spends 1 hour online, lol. Where 1 hour came from? Any time online and you could just as well assume it is out in the wild, entirely uncontrollable. Unless of course it is some ultra nice ultra friendly AI that respects human consent so much it figures out you don't want it out, and politely stays in. As of now, the paranoid security people are overpaid incompetents that serve to ensure your government is first hacked by the enemy rather than by some UFO nut, by tracking down and jailing all UFO nuts who hack your government and embarrass the officials. Just so that security holes stay open for the enemy. They'd do same to AI - some set of nonworking measures that would ensure some nice AI would be getting shut down while anything evil gets out. edit: they may also ensure that something evil gets created, in form of AI that they think is too limited to be evil, but is instead simply too limited not to be evil. The AI that gets asked one problem thats a little too hard and it just eats everything up (but very cleverly) to get computing power for the answer, that's your baseline evil.

0[anonymous]14y

Ah, my bad. I meant the other kind of online, which is apparently a less common word usage. I should have just said "On." like I did in the other sentence. Also, this is why I said: "You then take everything I've just listed, and then you shop it around to everyone else who is working on the project, and is related to the project, and who is familiar with bypassing box-like security measures, and you offer them another even larger amount of money to plug more holes until you get everyone saying "How do you get it to DO anything without it just shutting down?" Since that hadn't happened, (I would be substantially poorer if it had.) the security measures clearly weren't ready yet, so it wouldn't even have a source of electrical power turning it on, let alone in the wild online. (Hopefully I'm using language better this time.) But yeah, security is terrible. Among other problems, we can't even define laws clearly, we can't enforce them evenly. And we can't get people to take it nearly as seriously as they would want too because of complacency.

2Dmytry14y

Hmm, doesn't make sense, 'if the AI spends 1 hour of time on". Is the AI turning itself on and off? Also, false positives - you are going to be shutting down any malfunctioning AI the same as the worst evil in the world. Then what? Start from blank state? What if it needed more time to understand the language? What if it already understood the language and is super intelligent? We can't tell difference once it starts self modifying. And ultimate problem: so you got seemingly nice AI in a nice box, it never even tried to hack the way out. Now what can you use it for? Any usage of AI is potential hole in the box.

0[anonymous]14y

No, giving an AI the ability to turn itself on would be a huge security hole. The AI would be shut down after a certain time period regardless of whatever it's doing. In essence, preventing it for being on for longer than hour. If coming to the conclusion "I must kill all humans to follow my objectives." takes 2 hours from a fresh boot, this is a safety feature. And there would definitely be false positives. Since the risk of a false negative is extremely quick death of all mankind, I would be willing to accept plenty of false positives. The first thing you do is start determining how the AI reacts to things and perceives things that are placed inside, the box for calibration. For instance, using the example of language, let's say the AI knows English on a fresh boot. Add an English-Spanish dictionary into the box. Start sending Spanish messages to the AI. How long does it take the AI to realize that it is receiving messages in a language it doesn't know, but might be able to figure out using the tools at hand? Reboot. Okay, now give it an English-French test. Reboot. Okay, now give it an English-Spanish test followed by an English-French test. Reboot. Does the AI come to the English-French conclusion faster than it does the English-Spanish conclusion? Okay, you now have some clue as to the AI's learning through experience. Now you can take the internals apart and confirm how it learned to do that faster. Since you coded the AI, you should be able to confirm that's it's doing approximately what you thought it would be doing. Given a similar problem twice, it should be able to solve the second one faster. If not, or if it using some unforseen methods, Then that's a potential security breach (AI should not have had time to self modify that much that quickly given such limits and you should immediately tighten the strictures.) Once everything is going according to plan again (Normally I would say, 'Assuming everything is going to plan', but We're being paranoid

2Dmytry14y

Man, you're restarting a very cooperative AI here. My example unfriendly AI thinks all the way to converting universe to computronium well before it figures out it might want to talk to you and translate things to accomplish that goal by using you somehow. It just doesn't translate things for you unless your training data gives it enough cue about universe. WRT being able to confirm what it's doing, say, I make neural network AI. Or just what ever AI that is massively parallel.

[-]CronoDAS14y00

On the topic of boxed AI: one of the quests in Star Wars: The Old Republic involves, essentially, the discovery of an AI in a box. (It claims to be an upload of a member of an ancient race, and that its current status as a boxed AI was a punishment.) The AI is clearly dangerous and, after you wreck its monster-making equipment, it tries to surrender and promises you that it will share its knowledge and technology with you and your superiors. Amusingly, blowing up the AI is the light side option, and accepting its offer is the dark side option.

1Thomas14y

Considering Star Wars. I've came to its dark side a while ago.

[-]dvasya14y-20

Heh heh, this reminds me of Charles Stross's Accelerando character, Aineko.

[+]Thomas14y-50

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Superintelligent AGI in a box - a question.

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