Update: My full response to Holden is now here.
As Holden said, I generally think that Holden's objections for SI "are either correct (especially re: past organizational competence) or incorrect but not addressed by SI in clear argumentative writing (this includes the part on 'tool' AI)," and we are working hard to fix both categories of issues.
In this comment I would merely like to argue for one small point: that the Singularity Institute is undergoing comprehensive changes — changes which I believe to be improvements that will help us to achieve our mission more efficiently and effectively.
Holden wrote:
I'm aware that SI has relatively new leadership that is attempting to address the issues behind some of my complaints. I have a generally positive impression of the new leadership; I believe the Executive Director and Development Director, in particular, to represent a step forward in terms of being interested in transparency and in testing their own general rationality. So I will not be surprised if there is some improvement in the coming years...
Louie Helm was hired as Director of Development in September 2011. I was hired as a Research Fellow that same month, and ma...
...which is not to say, of course, that things were not improving before September 2011. It's just that the improvements have accelerated quite a bit since then.
For example, Amy was hired in December 2009 and is largely responsible for these improvements:
Our bank accounts have been consolidated, with 3-4 people regularly checking over them.
In addition to reviews, should SI implement a two-man rule for manipulating large quantities of money? (For example, over 5k, over 10k, etc.)
note that these improvements would not and could not have happened without more funding than the level of previous years
Really? That's not obvious to me. Of course you've been around for all this and I haven't, but here's what I'm seeing from my vantage point...
Recent changes that cost very little:
Stuff that costs less than some other things SI had spent money on, such as funding Ben Goertzel's AGI research or renting downtown Berkeley apartments for the later visiting fellows:
A lot of charities go through this pattern before they finally work out how to transition from a board-run/individual-run tax-deductible band of conspirators to being a professional staff-run organisation tuned to doing the particular thing they do. The changes required seem simple and obvious in hindsight, but it's a common pattern for it to take years, so SIAI has been quite normal, or at the very least not been unusually dumb.
(My evidence is seeing this pattern close-up in the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK (the first attempt at which died before managing it, the second making it through barely) and the West Australian Music Industry Association, and anecdotal evidence from others. Everyone involved always feels stupid at having taken years to achieve the retrospectively obvious. I would be surprised if this aspect of the dynamics of nonprofits had not been studied.)
edit: Luke's recommendation of The Nonprofit Kit For Dummies looks like precisely the book all the examples I know of needed to have someone throw at them before they even thought of forming an organisation to do whatever it is they wanted to achieve.
Things that cost money:
I don't think this response supports your claim that these improvements "would not and could not have happened without more funding than the level of previous years."
I know your comment is very brief because you're busy at minicamp, but I'll reply to what you wrote, anyway: Someone of decent rationality doesn't just "try things until something works." Moreover, many of the things on the list of recent improvements don't require an Amy, a Luke, or a Louie.
I don't even have past management experience. As you may recall, I had significant ambiguity aversion about the prospect of being made Executive Director, but as it turned out, the solution to almost every problem X has been (1) read what the experts say about how to solve X, (2) consult with people who care about your mission and have solved X before, and (3) do what they say.
When I was made Executive Director and phoned our Advisors, most of them said "Oh, how nice to hear from you! Nobody from SingInst has ever asked me for advice before!"
That is the kind of thing that makes me want to say that SingInst has "tested every method except the method of trying."
Donor database, strategic plan, s...
Luke has just told me (personal conversation) that what he got from my comment was, "SIAI's difficulties were just due to lack of funding" which was not what I was trying to say at all. What I was trying to convey was more like, "I didn't have the ability to run this organization, and knew this - people who I hoped would be able to run the organization, while I tried to produce in other areas (e.g. turning my back on everything else to get a year of FAI work done with Marcello or writing the Sequences) didn't succeed in doing so either - and the only reason we could hang on long enough to hire Luke was that the funding was available nonetheless and in sufficient quantity that we could afford to take risks like paying Luke to stay on for a while, well before we knew he would become Executive Director".
Update: I came out of a recent conversation with Eliezer with a higher opinion of Eliezer's general rationality, because several things that had previously looked to me like unforced, forseeable mistakes by Eliezer now look to me more like non-mistakes or not-so-forseeable mistakes.
You're allowed to say these things on the public Internet?
Well, at our most recent board meeting I wasn't fired, reprimanded, or even questioned for making these comments, so I guess I am. :)
I just fell in love with SI.
It's Luke you should have fallen in love with, since he is the one turning things around.
It's Luke you should have fallen in love with, since he is the one turning things around.
On the other hand I can count with one hand the number of established organisations I know of that would be sociologically capable of ceding power, status and control to Luke the way SingInst did. They took an untrained intern with essentially zero external status from past achievements and affiliations and basically decided to let him run the show (at least in terms of publicly visible initiatives). It is clearly the right thing for SingInst to do and admittedly Luke is very tall and has good hair which generally gives a boost when it comes to such selections - but still, making the appointment goes fundamentally against normal human behavior.
(Where I say "count with one hand" I am not including the use of any digits thereupon. I mean one.)
...and admittedly Luke is very tall and has good hair which generally gives a boost when it comes to such selections...
It doesn't matter that I completely understand why this phrase was included, I still found it hilarious in a network sitcom sort of way.
Well, all we really know is that he chose to. It may be that everyone he works with then privately berated him for it.
That said, I share your sentiment.
Actually, if SI generally endorses this sort of public "airing of dirty laundry," I encourage others involved in the organization to say so out loud.
The largest concern from reading this isn't really what it brings up in management context, but what it says about the SI in general. Here an area where there's real expertise and basic books that discuss well-understood methods and they didn't do any of that. Given that, how likely should I think it is that when the SI and mainstream AI people disagree that part of the problem may be the SI people not paying attention to basics?
This makes me wonder... What "for dummies" books should I be using as checklists right now? Time to set a 5-minute timer and think about it.
these are all literally from the Nonprofits for Dummies book. [...] The history I've heard is that SI [...]
\
failed to read Nonprofits for Dummies,
I remember that, when Anna was managing the fellows program, she was reading books of the "for dummies" genre and trying to apply them... it's just that, as it happened, the conceptual labels she accidentally happened to give to the skill deficits she was aware of were "what it takes to manage well" (i.e. "basic management") and "what it takes to be productive", rather than "what it takes to (help) operate a nonprofit according to best practices". So those were the subjects of the books she got. (And read, and practiced.) And then, given everything else the program and the organization was trying to do, there wasn't really any cognitive space left over to effectively notice the possibility that those wouldn't be the skills that other people afterwards would complain that nobody acquired and obviously should have known to. The rest of her budgeted self-improvement effort mostly went toward overcoming self-defeating emotional/social blind spots and motivated cognition. (And I remember...
Note that this was most of the purpose of the Fellows program in the first place -- [was] to help sort/develop those people into useful roles, including replacing existing management
FWIW, I never knew the purpose of the VF program was to replace existing SI management. And I somewhat doubt that you knew this at the time, either. I think you're just imagining this retroactively given that that's what ended up happening. For instance, the internal point system used to score people in the VFs program had no points for correctly identifying organizational improvements and implementing them. It had no points for doing administrative work (besides cleaning up the physical house or giving others car rides). And it had no points for rising to management roles. It was all about getting karma on LW or writing conference papers. When I first offered to help with the organization directly, I was told I was "too competent" and that I should go do something more useful with my talent, like start another business... not "waste my time working directly at SI."
Obviously we need How to be Lukeprog for Dummies. Luke appears to have written many fragments for this, of course.
Beating oneself up with hindsight bias is IME quite normal in this sort of circumstance, but not actually productive. Grilling the people who failed makes it too easy to blame them personally, when it's a pattern I've seen lots and lots, suggesting the problem is not a personal failing.
Agreed entirely - it's definitely not a mark of a personal failing. What I'm curious about is how we can all learn to do better at the crucial rationalist skill of making use of the standard advice about prosaic tasks - which is manifestly a non-trivial skill.
just spouting off Deep Wisdom that he did not benefit from spouting
Indeed. The proper response, which is surely worth contemplation, would have been:
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Sun Tzu
I'm pretty sure their combined salaries are lower than the cost of the summer fellows program that SI was sponsoring four or five years ago. Also, if you accept my assertion that Luke could find a way to do it on a limited budget, why couldn't somebody else?
Givewell is interested in finding charities that translate good intentions into good results. This requires that the employees of the charity have low akrasia, desire to learn about and implement organizational best practices, not suffer from dysrationalia, etc. I imagine that from Givewell's perspective, it counts as a strike against the charity if some of the charity's employees have a history of failing at any of these.
I'd rather hear Eliezer say "thanks for funding us until we stumbled across some employees who are good at defeating their akrasia and care about organizational best practices", because this seems like a better depiction of what actually happened. I don't get the impression SI was actively looking for folks like Louie and Luke.
This level of freedom is the dream of every researcher on the planet. Yet, it's unclear why these resources should be devoted to your projects.
Because some people like my earlier papers and think I'm writing papers on the most important topic in the world?
It's impressive that you all have found a way to hack the system and get paid to develop yourselves as researchers outside of the academic system...
Note that this isn't uncommon. SI is far from the only think tank with researchers who publish in academic journals. Researchers at private companies do the same.
First, let me say that, after re-reading, I think that my previous post came off as condescending/confrontational which was not my intent. I apologize.
Second, after thinking about this for a few minutes, I realized that some of the reason your papers seem so fluffy to me is that they argue what I consider to be obvious points. In my mind, of course we are likely "to develop human-level AI before 2100." Because of that, I may have tended to classify your work as outreach more than research.
But outreach is valuable. And, so that we can factor out the question of the independent contribution of your research, having people associated with SIAI with the publications/credibility to be treated as experts has gigantic benefits in terms of media multipliers (being the people who get called on for interviews, panels, etc). So, given that, I can see a strong argument for publication support being valuable to the overall organization goals regardless of any assessment of the value of the research.
Note that this isn't uncommon. SI is far from the only think tank with researchers who publish in academic journals. Researchers at private companies do the same.
My only point was that,...
This topic is something I've been thinking about lately. Do SIers tend to have superior general rationality, or do we merely escape a few particular biases? Are we good at rationality, or just good at "far mode" rationality (aka philosophy)? Are we good at epistemic but not instrumental rationality? (Keep in mind, though, that rationality is only a ceteris paribus predictor of success.)
Or, pick a more specific comparison. Do SIers tend to be better at general rationality than someone who can keep a small business running for 5 years? Maybe the tight feedback loops of running a small business are better rationality training than "debiasing interventions" can hope to be.
Of course, different people are more or less rational in different domains, at different times, in different environments.
This isn't an idle question about labels. My estimate of the scope and level of people's rationality in part determines how much I update from their stated opinion on something. How much evidence for Hypothesis X (about organizational development) is it when Eliezer gives me his opinion on the matter, as opposed to when Louie gives me his opinion on the matter? When Person B proposes to take on a totally new kind of project, I think their general rationality is a predictor of success — so, what is their level of general rationality?
Wow, I'm blown away by Holden Karnofsky, based on this post alone. His writing is eloquent, non-confrontational and rational. It shows that he spent a lot of time constructing mental models of his audience and anticipated its reaction. Additionally, his intelligence/ego ratio appears to be through the roof. He must have learned a lot since the infamous astroturfing incident. This is the (type of) person SI desperately needs to hire.
Emotions out of the way, it looks like the tool/agent distinction is the main theoretical issue. Fortunately, it is much easier than the general FAI one. Specifically, to test the SI assertion that, paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke,
Any sufficiently advanced tool is indistinguishable from an agent.
one ought to formulate and prove this as a theorem, and present it for review and improvement to the domain experts (the domain being math and theoretical computer science). If such a proof is constructed, it can then be further examined and potentially tightened, giving new insights to the mission of averting the existential risk from intelligence explosion.
If such a proof cannot be found, this will lend further weight to the HK's assertion that SI appears to be poorly qualified to address its core mission.
Any sufficiently advanced tool is indistinguishable from agent.
I shall quickly remark that I, myself, do not believe this to be true.
It's complicated. A reply that's true enough and in the spirit of your original statement, is "Something going wrong with a sufficiently advanced AI that was intended as a 'tool' is mostly indistinguishable from something going wrong with a sufficiently advanced AI that was intended as an 'agent', because math-with-the-wrong-shape is math-with-the-wrong-shape no matter what sort of English labels like 'tool' or 'agent' you slap on it, and despite how it looks from outside using English, correctly shaping math for a 'tool' isn't much easier even if it "sounds safer" in English." That doesn't get into the real depths of the problem, but it's a start. I also don't mean to completely deny the existence of a safety differential - this is a complicated discussion, not a simple one - but I do mean to imply that if Marcus Hutter designs a 'tool' AI, it automatically kills him just like AIXI does, and Marcus Hutter is unusually smart rather than unusually stupid but still lacks the "Most math kills you, safe math is rare and hard" outlook that is implicitly denied by the idea that once you're trying to design a tool, safe math gets easier somehow. This is much the same problem as with the Oracle outlook - someone says something that sounds safe in English but the problem of correctly-shaped-math doesn't get very much easier.
Though it's not as detailed and technical as many would like, I'll point readers to this bit of related reading, one of my favorites:
Yudkowsky (2011). Complex value systems are required to realize valuable futures.
The real danger of Oracle AI, if I understand it correctly, is the nasty combination of (i) by definition, an Oracle AI has an implicit drive to issue predictions most likely to be correct according to its model, and (ii) a sufficiently powerful Oracle AI can accurately model the effect of issuing various predictions. End result: it issues powerfully self-fulfilling prophecies without regard for human values. Also, depending on how it's designed, it can influence the questions to be asked of it in the future so as to be as accurate as possible, again without regard for human values.
My understanding of an Oracle AI is that when answering any given question, that question consumes the whole of its utility function, so it has no motivation to influence future questions.
It could acausally trade with its other instances, so that a coordinated collection of many instances of predictors would influence the events so as to make each other's predictions more accurate.
Even if we accepted that the tool vs. agent distinction was enough to make things "safe", objection 2 still boils down to "Well, just don't build that type of AI!", which is exactly the same keep-it-in-a-box/don't-do-it argument that most normal people make when they consider this issue. I assume I don't need to explain to most people here why "We should just make a law against it" is not a solution to this problem, and I hope I don't need to argue that "Just don't do it" is even worse...
More specifically, fast forward to 2080, when any college kid with $200 to spend (in equivalent 2012 dollars) can purchase enough computing power so that even the dumbest AIXI approximation schemes are extremely effective, good enough so that creating an AGI agent would be a week's work for any grad student that knew their stuff. Are you really comfortable living in that world with the idea that we rely on a mere gentleman's agreement not to make self-improving AI agents? There's a reason this is often viewed as an arms race, to a very real extent the attempt to achieve Friendly AI is about building up a suitably powerful defense against unfriendly AI before ...
Wow, I'm blown away by Holden Karnofsky, based on this post alone. His writing is eloquent, non-confrontational and rational. It shows that he spent a lot of time constructing mental models of his audience and anticipated its reaction. Additionally, his intelligence/ego ratio appears to be through the roof.
Agreed. I normally try not to post empty "me-too" replies; the upvote button is there for a reason. But now I feel strongly enough about it that I will: I'm very impressed with the good will and effort and apparent potential for intelligent conversation in HoldenKarnofsky's post.
Now I'm really curious as to where things will go from here. With how limited my understanding of AI issues is, I doubt a response from me would be worth HoldenKarnofsky's time to read, so I'll leave that to my betters instead of adding more noise. But yeah. Seeing SI ideas challenged in such a positive, constructive way really got my attention. Looking forward to the official response, whatever it might be.
I think the correct objection is something you can't quite see in google maps. If you program an AI to do nothing but output directions, it will do nothing but output directions. If those directions are for driving, you're probably fine. If those directions are big and complicated plans for something important, that you follow without really understanding why you're doing (and this is where most of the benefits of working with an AGI will show up), then you could unknowingly take over the world using a sufficiently clever scheme.
Also note that it would be a lot easier for the AI to pull this off if you let it tell you how to improve its own design. If recursively self-improving AI blows other AI out of the water, then tool AI is probably not safe unless it is made ineffective.
This does actually seem like it would raise the bar of intelligence needed to take over the world somewhat. It is unclear how much. The topic seems to me to be worthy of further study/discussion, but not (at least not obviously) a threat to the core of SIAI's mission.
Then it's running in agent mode? My impression was that a tool-mode system presents you with a plan, but takes no actions. So all tool-mode systems are basically question-answering systems.
I'm a sysadmin. When I want to get something done, I routinely come up with something that answers the question, and when it does that reliably I give it the power to do stuff on as little human input as possible. Often in daemon mode, to absolutely minimise how much it needs to bug me. Question-answerer->tool->agent is a natural progression just in process automation. (And this is why they're called "daemons".)
It's only long experience and many errors that's taught me how to do this such that the created agents won't crap all over everything. Even then I still get surprises.
They may act according to various parameters they read in from the system environment. I expect they will be developed to a level of complication where they have something that could reasonably be termed a model of the world. The present approach is closer to perceptual control theory, where the sysadmin has the model and PCT is part of the implementation. 'Cos it's more predictable to the mere human designer.
Capacity for self-improvement is an entirely different thing, and I can't see a sysadmin wanting that - the sysadmin would run any such improvements themselves, one at a time. (Semi-automated code refactoring, for example.) The whole point is to automate processes the sysadmin already understands but doesn't want to do by hand - any sysadmin's job being to automate themselves out of the loop, because there's always more work to do. (Because even in the future, nothing works.)
I would be unsurprised if someone markets a self-improving system for this purpose. For it to go FOOM, it also needs to invent new optimisations, which is presently a bit difficult.
Edit: And even a mere daemon-like automated tool can do stuff a lot of people regard as unFriendly, e.g. high frequency trading algorithms.
Is it just me, or do Luke and Eliezer's initial responses appear to send the wrong signals? From the perspective of an SI critic, Luke's comment could be interpreted as saying "for us, not being completely incompetent is worth bragging about", and Eliezer's as "we're so arrogant that we've only taken two critics (including Holden) seriously in our entire history". These responses seem suboptimal, given that Holden just complained about SI's lack of impressive accomplishments, and being too selective about whose feedback to take seriously.
While I have sympathy with the complaint that SI's critics are inarticulate and often say wrong things, Eliezer's comment does seem to be indicative of the mistake Holden and Wei Dai are describing. Most extant presentations of SIAI's views leave much to be desired in terms of clarity, completeness, concision, accessibility, and credibility signals. This makes it harder to make high quality objections. I think it would be more appropriate to react to poor critical engagement more along the lines of "We haven't gotten great critics. That probably means that we need to work on our arguments and their presentation," and less along the lines of "We haven't gotten great critics. That probably means that there's something wrong with the rest of the world."
This. I've been trying to write something about Eliezer's debate with Robin Hanson, but the problem I keep running up against is that Eliezer's points are not clearly articulated at all. Even making my best educated guesses about what's supposed to go in the gaps in his arguments, I still ended up with very little.
I'm in the process of writing a summary and analysis of the key arguments and points in that debate.
The most recent version runs at 28 pages - and that's just an outline.
This post presents thoughts on the Singularity Institute from Holden Karnofsky, Co-Executive Director of GiveWell. Note: Luke Muehlhauser, the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, reviewed a draft of this post, and commented: "I do generally agree that your complaints are either correct (especially re: past organizational competence) or incorrect but not addressed by SI in clear argumentative writing (this includes the part on 'tool' AI). I am working to address both categories of issues." I take Luke's comment to be a significant mark in SI's favor, because it indicates an explicit recognition of the problems I raise, and thus increases my estimate of the likelihood that SI will work to address them.
September 2012 update: responses have been posted by Luke and Eliezer (and I have responded in the comments of their posts). I have also added acknowledgements.
The Singularity Institute (SI) is a charity that GiveWell has been repeatedly asked to evaluate. In the past, SI has been outside our scope (as we were focused on specific areas such as international aid). With GiveWell Labs we are open to any giving opportunity, no matter what form and what sector, but we still do not currently plan to recommend SI; given the amount of interest some of our audience has expressed, I feel it is important to explain why. Our views, of course, remain open to change. (Note: I am posting this only to Less Wrong, not to the GiveWell Blog, because I believe that everyone who would be interested in this post will see it here.)
I am currently the GiveWell staff member who has put the most time and effort into engaging with and evaluating SI. Other GiveWell staff currently agree with my bottom-line view that we should not recommend SI, but this does not mean they have engaged with each of my specific arguments. Therefore, while the lack of recommendation of SI is something that GiveWell stands behind, the specific arguments in this post should be attributed only to me, not to GiveWell.
Summary of my views
Intent of this post
I did not write this post with the purpose of "hurting" SI. Rather, I wrote it in the hopes that one of these three things (or some combination) will happen:
Which one of these occurs will hopefully be driven primarily by the merits of the different arguments raised. Because of this, I think that whatever happens as a result of my post will be positive for SI's mission, whether or not it is positive for SI as an organization. I believe that most of SI's supporters and advocates care more about the former than about the latter, and that this attitude is far too rare in the nonprofit world.
Does SI have a well-argued case that its work is beneficial and important?
I know no more concise summary of SI's views than this page, so here I give my own impressions of what SI believes, in italics.
From the time I first heard this argument, it has seemed to me to be skipping important steps and making major unjustified assumptions. However, for a long time I believed this could easily be due to my inferior understanding of the relevant issues. I believed my own views on the argument to have only very low relevance (as I stated in my 2011 interview with SI representatives). Over time, I have had many discussions with SI supporters and advocates, as well as with non-supporters who I believe understand the relevant issues well. I now believe - for the moment - that my objections are highly relevant, that they cannot be dismissed as simple "layman's misunderstandings" (as they have been by various SI supporters in the past), and that SI has not published anything that addresses them in a clear way.
Below, I list my major objections. I do not believe that these objections constitute a sharp/tight case for the idea that SI's work has low/negative value; I believe, instead, that SI's own arguments are too vague for such a rebuttal to be possible. There are many possible responses to my objections, but SI's public arguments (and the private arguments) do not make clear which possible response (if any) SI would choose to take up and defend. Hopefully the dialogue following this post will clarify what SI believes and why.
Some of my views are discussed at greater length (though with less clarity) in a public transcript of a conversation I had with SI supporter Jaan Tallinn. I refer to this transcript as "Karnofsky/Tallinn 2011."
Objection 1: it seems to me that any AGI that was set to maximize a "Friendly" utility function would be extraordinarily dangerous.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that SI manages to create what it believes to be an FAI. Suppose that it is successful in the "AGI" part of its goal, i.e., it has successfully created an intelligence vastly superior to human intelligence and extraordinarily powerful from our perspective. Suppose that it has also done its best on the "Friendly" part of the goal: it has developed a formal argument for why its AGI's utility function will be Friendly, it believes this argument to be airtight, and it has had this argument checked over by 100 of the world's most intelligent and relevantly experienced people. Suppose that SI now activates its AGI, unleashing it to reshape the world as it sees fit. What will be the outcome?
I believe that the probability of an unfavorable outcome - by which I mean an outcome essentially equivalent to what a UFAI would bring about - exceeds 90% in such a scenario. I believe the goal of designing a "Friendly" utility function is likely to be beyond the abilities even of the best team of humans willing to design such a function. I do not have a tight argument for why I believe this, but a comment on LessWrong by Wei Dai gives a good illustration of the kind of thoughts I have on the matter:
I think this comment understates the risks, however. For example, when the comment says "the formalization of the notion of 'safety' used by the proof is wrong," it is not clear whether it means that the values the programmers have in mind are not correctly implemented by the formalization, or whether it means they are correctly implemented but are themselves catastrophic in a way that hasn't been anticipated. I would be highly concerned about both. There are other catastrophic possibilities as well; perhaps the utility function itself is well-specified and safe, but the AGI's model of the world is flawed (in particular, perhaps its prior or its process for matching observations to predictions are flawed) in a way that doesn't emerge until the AGI has made substantial changes to its environment.
By SI's own arguments, even a small error in any of these things would likely lead to catastrophe. And there are likely failure forms I haven't thought of. The overriding intuition here is that complex plans usually fail when unaccompanied by feedback loops. A scenario in which a set of people is ready to unleash an all-powerful being to maximize some parameter in the world, based solely on their initial confidence in their own extrapolations of the consequences of doing so, seems like a scenario that is overwhelmingly likely to result in a bad outcome. It comes down to placing the world's largest bet on a highly complex theory - with no experimentation to test the theory first.
So far, all I have argued is that the development of "Friendliness" theory can achieve at best only a limited reduction in the probability of an unfavorable outcome. However, as I argue in the next section, I believe there is at least one concept - the "tool-agent" distinction - that has more potential to reduce risks, and that SI appears to ignore this concept entirely. I believe that tools are safer than agents (even agents that make use of the best "Friendliness" theory that can reasonably be hoped for) and that SI encourages a focus on building agents, thus increasing risk.
Objection 2: SI appears to neglect the potentially important distinction between "tool" and "agent" AI.
Google Maps is a type of artificial intelligence (AI). It is far more intelligent than I am when it comes to planning routes.
Google Maps - by which I mean the complete software package including the display of the map itself - does not have a "utility" that it seeks to maximize. (One could fit a utility function to its actions, as to any set of actions, but there is no single "parameter to be maximized" driving its operations.)
Google Maps (as I understand it) considers multiple possible routes, gives each a score based on factors such as distance and likely traffic, and then displays the best-scoring route in a way that makes it easily understood by the user. If I don't like the route, for whatever reason, I can change some parameters and consider a different route. If I like the route, I can print it out or email it to a friend or send it to my phone's navigation application. Google Maps has no single parameter it is trying to maximize; it has no reason to try to "trick" me in order to increase its utility.
In short, Google Maps is not an agent, taking actions in order to maximize a utility parameter. It is a tool, generating information and then displaying it in a user-friendly manner for me to consider, use and export or discard as I wish.
Every software application I know of seems to work essentially the same way, including those that involve (specialized) artificial intelligence such as Google Search, Siri, Watson, Rybka, etc. Some can be put into an "agent mode" (as Watson was on Jeopardy!) but all can easily be set up to be used as "tools" (for example, Watson can simply display its top candidate answers to a question, with the score for each, without speaking any of them.)
The "tool mode" concept is importantly different from the possibility of Oracle AI sometimes discussed by SI. The discussions I've seen of Oracle AI present it as an Unfriendly AI that is "trapped in a box" - an AI whose intelligence is driven by an explicit utility function and that humans hope to control coercively. Hence the discussion of ideas such as the AI-Box Experiment. A different interpretation, given in Karnofsky/Tallinn 2011, is an AI with a carefully designed utility function - likely as difficult to construct as "Friendliness" - that leaves it "wishing" to answer questions helpfully. By contrast with both these ideas, Tool-AGI is not "trapped" and it is not Unfriendly or Friendly; it has no motivations and no driving utility function of any kind, just like Google Maps. It scores different possibilities and displays its conclusions in a transparent and user-friendly manner, as its instructions say to do; it does not have an overarching "want," and so, as with the specialized AIs described above, while it may sometimes "misinterpret" a question (thereby scoring options poorly and ranking the wrong one #1) there is no reason to expect intentional trickery or manipulation when it comes to displaying its results.
Another way of putting this is that a "tool" has an underlying instruction set that conceptually looks like: "(1) Calculate which action A would maximize parameter P, based on existing data set D. (2) Summarize this calculation in a user-friendly manner, including what Action A is, what likely intermediate outcomes it would cause, what other actions would result in high values of P, etc." An "agent," by contrast, has an underlying instruction set that conceptually looks like: "(1) Calculate which action, A, would maximize parameter P, based on existing data set D. (2) Execute Action A." In any AI where (1) is separable (by the programmers) as a distinct step, (2) can be set to the "tool" version rather than the "agent" version, and this separability is in fact present with most/all modern software. Note that in the "tool" version, neither step (1) nor step (2) (nor the combination) constitutes an instruction to maximize a parameter - to describe a program of this kind as "wanting" something is a category error, and there is no reason to expect its step (2) to be deceptive.
I elaborated further on the distinction and on the concept of a tool-AI in Karnofsky/Tallinn 2011.
This is important because an AGI running in tool mode could be extraordinarily useful but far more safe than an AGI running in agent mode. In fact, if developing "Friendly AI" is what we seek, a tool-AGI could likely be helpful enough in thinking through this problem as to render any previous work on "Friendliness theory" moot. Among other things, a tool-AGI would allow transparent views into the AGI's reasoning and predictions without any reason to fear being purposefully misled, and would facilitate safe experimental testing of any utility function that one wished to eventually plug into an "agent."
Is a tool-AGI possible? I believe that it is, and furthermore that it ought to be our default picture of how AGI will work, given that practically all software developed to date can (and usually does) run as a tool and given that modern software seems to be constantly becoming "intelligent" (capable of giving better answers than a human) in surprising new domains. In addition, it intuitively seems to me (though I am not highly confident) that intelligence inherently involves the distinct, separable steps of (a) considering multiple possible actions and (b) assigning a score to each, prior to executing any of the possible actions. If one can distinctly separate (a) and (b) in a program's code, then one can abstain from writing any "execution" instructions and instead focus on making the program list actions and scores in a user-friendly manner, for humans to consider and use as they wish.
Of course, there are possible paths to AGI that may rule out a "tool mode," but it seems that most of these paths would rule out the application of "Friendliness theory" as well. (For example, a "black box" emulation and augmentation of a human mind.) What are the paths to AGI that allow manual, transparent, intentional design of a utility function but do not allow the replacement of "execution" instructions with "communication" instructions? Most of the conversations I've had on this topic have focused on three responses:
Conventional wisdom says it is extremely dangerous to empower a computer to act in the world until one is very sure that the computer will do its job in a way that is helpful rather than harmful. So if a programmer chooses to "unleash an AGI as an agent" with the hope of gaining power, it seems that this programmer will be deliberately ignoring conventional wisdom about what is safe in favor of shortsighted greed. I do not see why such a programmer would be expected to make use of any "Friendliness theory" that might be available. (Attempting to incorporate such theory would almost certainly slow the project down greatly, and thus would bring the same problems as the more general "have caution, do testing" counseled by conventional wisdom.) It seems that the appropriate measures for preventing such a risk are security measures aiming to stop humans from launching unsafe agent-AIs, rather than developing theories or raising awareness of "Friendliness."
One of the things that bothers me most about SI is that there is practically no public content, as far as I can tell, explicitly addressing the idea of a "tool" and giving arguments for why AGI is likely to work only as an "agent." The idea that AGI will be driven by a central utility function seems to be simply assumed. Two examples:
The closest thing I have seen to a public discussion of "tool-AGI" is in Dreams of Friendliness, where Eliezer Yudkowsky considers the question, "Why not just have the AI answer questions, instead of trying to do anything? Then it wouldn't need to be Friendly. It wouldn't need any goals at all. It would just answer questions." His response:
This passage appears vague and does not appear to address the specific "tool" concept I have defended above (in particular, it does not address the analogy to modern software, which challenges the idea that "powerful optimization processes" cannot run in tool mode). The rest of the piece discusses (a) psychological mistakes that could lead to the discussion in question; (b) the "Oracle AI" concept that I have outlined above. The comments contain some more discussion of the "tool" idea (Denis Bider and Shane Legg seem to be picturing something similar to "tool-AGI") but the discussion is unresolved and I believe the "tool" concept defended above remains essentially unaddressed.
In sum, SI appears to encourage a focus on building and launching "Friendly" agents (it is seeking to do so itself, and its work on "Friendliness" theory seems to be laying the groundwork for others to do so) while not addressing the tool-agent distinction. It seems to assume that any AGI will have to be an agent, and to make little to no attempt at justifying this assumption. The result, in my view, is that it is essentially advocating for a more dangerous approach to AI than the traditional approach to software development.
Objection 3: SI's envisioned scenario is far more specific and conjunctive than it appears at first glance, and I believe this scenario to be highly unlikely.
SI's scenario concerns the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI): a computer that is vastly more intelligent than humans in every relevant way. But we already have many computers that are vastly more intelligent than humans in some relevant ways, and the domains in which specialized AIs outdo humans seem to be constantly and continuously expanding. I feel that the relevance of "Friendliness theory" depends heavily on the idea of a "discrete jump" that seems unlikely and whose likelihood does not seem to have been publicly argued for.
One possible scenario is that at some point, we develop powerful enough non-AGI tools (particularly specialized AIs) that we vastly improve our abilities to consider and prepare for the eventuality of AGI - to the point where any previous theory developed on the subject becomes useless. Or (to put this more generally) non-AGI tools simply change the world so much that it becomes essentially unrecognizable from the perspective of today - again rendering any previous "Friendliness theory" moot. As I said in Karnofsky/Tallinn 2011, some of SI's work "seems a bit like trying to design Facebook before the Internet was in use, or even before the computer existed."
Perhaps there will be a discrete jump to AGI, but it will be a sort of AGI that renders "Friendliness theory" moot for a different reason. For example, in the practice of software development, there often does not seem to be an operational distinction between "intelligent" and "Friendly." (For example, my impression is that the only method programmers had for evaluating Watson's "intelligence" was to see whether it was coming up with the same answers that a well-informed human would; the only way to evaluate Siri's "intelligence" was to evaluate its helpfulness to humans.) "Intelligent" often ends up getting defined as "prone to take actions that seem all-around 'good' to the programmer." So the concept of "Friendliness" may end up being naturally and subtly baked in to a successful AGI effort.
The bottom line is that we know very little about the course of future artificial intelligence. I believe that the probability that SI's concept of "Friendly" vs. "Unfriendly" goals ends up seeming essentially nonsensical, irrelevant and/or unimportant from the standpoint of the relevant future is over 90%.
Other objections to SI's views
There are other debates about the likelihood of SI's work being relevant/helpful; for example,
Unlike the three objections I focus on, these other issues have been discussed a fair amount, and if these other issues were the only objections to SI's arguments I would find SI's case to be strong (i.e., I would find its scenario likely enough to warrant investment in).
Wrapup
For a long time I refrained from engaging in object-level debates over SI's work, believing that others are better qualified to do so. But after talking at great length to many of SI's supporters and advocates and reading everything I've been pointed to as relevant, I still have seen no clear and compelling response to any of my three major objections. As stated above, there are many possible responses to my objections, but SI's current arguments do not seem clear on what responses they wish to take and defend. At this point I am unlikely to form a positive view of SI's work until and unless I do see such responses, and/or SI changes its positions.
Is SI the kind of organization we want to bet on?
This part of the post has some risks. For most of GiveWell's history, sticking to our standard criteria - and putting more energy into recommended than non-recommended organizations - has enabled us to share our honest thoughts about charities without appearing to get personal. But when evaluating a group such as SI, I can't avoid placing a heavy weight on (my read on) the general competence, capability and "intangibles" of the people and organization, because SI's mission is not about repeating activities that have worked in the past. Sharing my views on these issues could strike some as personal or mean-spirited and could lead to the misimpression that GiveWell is hostile toward SI. But it is simply necessary in order to be fully transparent about why I hold the views that I hold.
Fortunately, SI is an ideal organization for our first discussion of this type. I believe the staff and supporters of SI would overwhelmingly rather hear the whole truth about my thoughts - so that they can directly engage them and, if warranted, make changes - than have me sugar-coat what I think in order to spare their feelings. People who know me and my attitude toward being honest vs. sparing feelings know that this, itself, is high praise for SI.
One more comment before I continue: our policy is that non-public information provided to us by a charity will not be published or discussed without that charity's prior consent. However, none of the content of this post is based on private information; all of it is based on information that SI has made available to the public.
There are several reasons that I currently have a negative impression of SI's general competence, capability and "intangibles." My mind remains open and I include specifics on how it could be changed.
I have been pointed to Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil as examples of impressive SI supporters, but I have not seen any on-record statements from either of these people that show agreement with SI's specific views, and in fact (based on watching them speak at Singularity Summits) my impression is that they disagree. Peter Thiel seems to believe that speeding the pace of general innovation is a good thing; this would seem to be in tension with SI's view that AGI will be catastrophic by default and that no one other than SI is paying sufficient attention to "Friendliness" issues. Ray Kurzweil seems to believe that "safety" is a matter of transparency, strong institutions, etc. rather than of "Friendliness." I am personally in agreement with the things I have seen both of them say on these topics. I find it possible that they support SI because of the Singularity Summit or to increase general interest in ambitious technology, rather than because they find "Friendliness theory" to be as important as SI does.
Clear, on-record statements from these two supporters, specifically endorsing SI's arguments and the importance of developing Friendliness theory, would shift my views somewhat on this point.
SI's list of achievements is not, in my view, up to where it needs to be given (a) and (b). Yet I have seen no declaration that SI has fallen short to date and explanation of what will be changed to deal with it. SI's recent release of a strategic plan and monthly updates are improvements from a transparency perspective, but they still leave me feeling as though there are no clear metrics or goals by which SI is committing to be measured (aside from very basic organizational goals such as "design a new website" and very vague goals such as "publish more papers") and as though SI places a low priority on engaging people who are critical of its views (or at least not yet on board), as opposed to people who are naturally drawn to it.
I believe that one of the primary obstacles to being impactful as a nonprofit is the lack of the sort of helpful feedback loops that lead to success in other domains. I like to see groups that are making as much effort as they can to create meaningful feedback loops for themselves. I perceive SI as falling well short on this front. Pursuing more impressive endorsements and developing benign but objectively recognizable innovations (particularly commercially viable ones) are two possible ways to impose more demanding feedback loops. (I discussed both of these in my interview linked above).
Yet I'm not aware of any of what I consider compelling evidence that SI staff/supporters/advocates have any special insight into the nature of general rationality or that they have especially high general rationality.
I have been pointed to the Sequences on this point. The Sequences (which I have read the vast majority of) do not seem to me to be a demonstration or evidence of general rationality. They are about rationality; I find them very enjoyable to read; and there is very little they say that I disagree with (or would have disagreed with before I read them). However, they do not seem to demonstrate rationality on the part of the writer, any more than a series of enjoyable, not-obviously-inaccurate essays on the qualities of a good basketball player would demonstrate basketball prowess. I sometimes get the impression that fans of the Sequences are willing to ascribe superior rationality to the writer simply because the content seems smart and insightful to them, without making a critical effort to determine the extent to which the content is novel, actionable and important.
I endorse Eliezer Yudkowsky's statement, "Be careful … any time you find yourself defining the [rationalist] as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility." To me, the best evidence of superior general rationality (or of insight into it) would be objectively impressive achievements (successful commercial ventures, highly prestigious awards, clear innovations, etc.) and/or accumulation of wealth and power. As mentioned above, SI staff/supporters/advocates do not seem particularly impressive on these fronts, at least not as much as I would expect for people who have the sort of insight into rationality that makes it sensible for them to train others in it. I am open to other evidence that SI staff/supporters/advocates have superior general rationality, but I have not seen it.
Why is it a problem if SI staff/supporter/advocates believe themselves, without good evidence, to have superior general rationality? First off, it strikes me as a belief based on wishful thinking rather than rational inference. Secondly, I would expect a series of problems to accompany overconfidence in one's general rationality, and several of these problems seem to be actually occurring in SI's case:
A possible justification for these activities is that SI is seeking to promote greater general rationality, which over time will lead to more and better support for its mission. But if this is SI's core activity, it becomes even more important to test the hypothesis that SI's views are in fact rooted in superior general rationality - and these tests don't seem to be happening, as discussed above.
In addition, I have seen no public SI-authorized discussion of the matter that I consider to be satisfactory in terms of explaining what happened and what the current status of the case is on an ongoing basis. Some details may have to be omitted, but a clear SI-authorized statement on this point with as much information as can reasonably provided would be helpful.
A couple positive observations to add context here:
Wrapup
While SI has produced a lot of content that I find interesting and enjoyable, it has not produced what I consider evidence of superior general rationality or of its suitability for the tasks it has set for itself. I see no qualifications or achievements that specifically seem to indicate that SI staff are well-suited to the challenge of understanding the key AI-related issues and/or coordinating the construction of an FAI. And I see specific reasons to be pessimistic about its suitability and general competence.
When estimating the expected value of an endeavor, it is natural to have an implicit "survivorship bias" - to use organizations whose accomplishments one is familiar with (which tend to be relatively effective organizations) as a reference class. Because of this, I would be extremely wary of investing in an organization with apparently poor general competence/suitability to its tasks, even if I bought fully into its mission (which I do not) and saw no other groups working on a comparable mission.
But if there's even a chance …
A common argument that SI supporters raise with me is along the lines of, "Even if SI's arguments are weak and its staff isn't as capable as one would like to see, their goal is so important that they would be a good investment even at a tiny probability of success."
I believe this argument to be a form of Pascal's Mugging and I have outlined the reasons I believe it to be invalid in two posts (here and here). There have been some objections to my arguments, but I still believe them to be valid. There is a good chance I will revisit these topics in the future, because I believe these issues to be at the core of many of the differences between GiveWell-top-charities supporters and SI supporters.
Regardless of whether one accepts my specific arguments, it is worth noting that the most prominent people associated with SI tend to agree with the conclusion that the "But if there's even a chance …" argument is not valid. (See comments on my post from Michael Vassar and Eliezer Yudkowsky as well as Eliezer's interview with John Baez.)
Existential risk reduction as a cause
I consider the general cause of "looking for ways that philanthropic dollars can reduce direct threats of global catastrophic risks, particularly those that involve some risk of human extinction" to be a relatively high-potential cause. It is on the working agenda for GiveWell Labs and we will be writing more about it.
However, I don't think that "Cause X is the one I care about and Organization Y is the only one working on it" to be a good reason to support Organization Y. For donors determined to donate within this cause, I encourage you to consider donating to a donor-advised fund while making it clear that you intend to grant out the funds to existential-risk-reduction-related organizations in the future. (One way to accomplish this would be to create a fund with "existential risk" in the name; this is a fairly easy thing to do and one person could do it on behalf of multiple donors.)
For one who accepts my arguments about SI, I believe withholding funds in this way is likely to be better for SI's mission than donating to SI - through incentive effects alone (not to mention my specific argument that SI's approach to "Friendliness" seems likely to increase risks).
How I might change my views
My views are very open to revision.
However, I cannot realistically commit to read and seriously consider all comments posted on the matter. The number of people capable of taking a few minutes to write a comment is sufficient to swamp my capacity. I do encourage people to comment and I do intend to read at least some comments, but if you are looking to change my views, you should not consider posting a comment to be the most promising route.
Instead, what I will commit to is reading and carefully considering up to 50,000 words of content that are (a) specifically marked as SI-authorized responses to the points I have raised; (b) explicitly cleared for release to the general public as SI-authorized communications. In order to consider a response "SI-authorized and cleared for release," I will accept explicit communication from SI's Executive Director or from a majority of its Board of Directors endorsing the content in question. After 50,000 words, I may change my views and/or commit to reading more content, or (if I determine that the content is poor and is not using my time efficiently) I may decide not to engage further. SI-authorized content may improve or worsen SI's standing in my estimation, so unlike with comments, there is an incentive to select content that uses my time efficiently. Of course, SI-authorized content may end up including excerpts from comment responses to this post, and/or already-existing public content.
I may also change my views for other reasons, particularly if SI secures more impressive achievements and/or endorsements.
One more note: I believe I have read the vast majority of the Sequences, including the AI-foom debate, and that this content - while interesting and enjoyable - does not have much relevance for the arguments I've made.
Again: I think that whatever happens as a result of my post will be positive for SI's mission, whether or not it is positive for SI as an organization. I believe that most of SI's supporters and advocates care more about the former than about the latter, and that this attitude is far too rare in the nonprofit world.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following people for reviewing a draft of this post and providing thoughtful feedback (this of course does not mean they agree with the post or are responsible for its content): Dario Amodei, Nick Beckstead, Elie Hassenfeld, Alexander Kruel, Tim Ogden, John Salvatier, Jonah Sinick, Cari Tuna, Stephanie Wykstra.