[xpost from my blog]

In discussions of existential risk from AI, it is often assumed that the existential catastrophe would follow an intelligence explosion, in which an AI creates a more capable AI, which in turn creates a yet more capable AI, and so on, a feedback loop that eventually produces an AI whose cognitive power vastly surpasses that of humans, which would be able to obtain a decisive strategic advantage over humanity, allowing it to pursue its own goals without effective human interference. Victoria Krakovna points out that many arguments that AI could present an existential risk do not rely on an intelligence explosion. I want to look in sightly more detail at how that could happen. Kaj Sotala also discusses this.

An AI starts an intelligence explosion when its ability to create better AIs surpasses that of human AI researchers by a sufficient margin (provided the AI is motivated to do so). An AI attains a decisive strategic advantage when its ability to optimize the universe surpasses that of humanity by a sufficient margin. Which of these happens first depends on what skills AIs have the advantage at relative to humans. If AIs are better at programming AIs than they are at taking over the world, then an intelligence explosion will happen first, and it will then be able to get a decisive strategic advantage soon after. But if AIs are better at taking over the world than they are at programming AIs, then an AI would get a decisive strategic advantage without an intelligence explosion occurring first.

Since an intelligence explosion happening first is usually considered the default assumption, I'll just sketch a plausibility argument for the reverse. There's a lot of variation in how easy cognitive tasks are for AIs compared to humans. Since programming AIs is not yet a task that AIs can do well, it doesn't seem like it should be a priori surprising if programming AIs turned out to be an extremely difficult task for AIs to accomplish, relative to humans. Taking over the world is also plausibly especially difficult for AIs, but I don't see strong reasons for confidence that it would be harder for AIs than starting an intelligence explosion would be. It's possible that an AI with significantly but not vastly superhuman abilities in some domains could identify some vulnerability that it could exploit to gain power, which humans would never think of. Or an AI could be enough better than humans at forms of engineering other than AI programming (perhaps molecular manufacturing) that it could build physical machines that could out-compete humans, though this would require it to obtain the resources necessary to produce them.

Furthermore, an AI that is capable of producing a more capable AI may refrain from doing so if it is unable to solve the AI alignment problem for itself; that is, if it can create a more intelligent AI, but not one that shares its preferences. This seems unlikely if the AI has an explicit description of its preferences. But if the AI, like humans and most contemporary AI, lacks an explicit description of its preferences, then the difficulty of the AI alignment problem could be an obstacle to an intelligence explosion occurring.

It also seems worth thinking about the policy implications of the differences between existential catastrophes from AI that follow an intelligence explosion versus those that don't. For instance, AIs that attempt to attain a decisive strategic advantage without undergoing an intelligence explosion will exceed human cognitive capabilities by a smaller margin, and thus would likely attain strategic advantages that are less decisive, and would be more likely to fail. Thus containment strategies are probably more useful for addressing risks that don't involve an intelligence explosion, while attempts to contain a post-intelligence explosion AI are probably pretty much hopeless (although it may be worthwhile to find ways to interrupt an intelligence explosion while it is beginning). Risks not involving an intelligence explosion may be more predictable in advance, since they don't involve a rapid increase in the AI's abilities, and would thus be easier to deal with at the last minute, so it might make sense far in advance to focus disproportionately on risks that do involve an intelligence explosion.

It seems likely that AI alignment would be easier for AIs that do not undergo an intelligence explosion, since it is more likely to be possible to monitor and do something about it if it goes wrong, and lower optimization power means lower ability to exploit the difference between the goals the AI was given and the goals that were intended, if we are only able to specify our goals approximately. The first of those reasons applies to any AI that attempts to attain a decisive strategic advantage without first undergoing an intelligence explosion, whereas the second only applies to AIs that do not undergo an intelligence explosion ever. Because of these, it might make sense to attempt to decrease the chance that the first AI to attain a decisive strategic advantage undergoes an intelligence explosion beforehand, as well as the chance that it undergoes an intelligence explosion ever, though preventing the latter may be much more difficult. However, some strategies to achieve this may have undesirable side-effects; for instance, as mentioned earlier, AIs whose preferences are not explicitly described seem more likely to attain a decisive strategic advantage without first undergoing an intelligence explosion, but such AIs are probably more difficult to align with human values.

If AIs get a decisive strategic advantage over humans without an intelligence explosion, then since this would likely involve the decisive strategic advantage being obtained much more slowly, it would be much more likely for multiple, and possibly many, AIs to gain decisive strategic advantages over humans, though not necessarily over each other, resulting in a multipolar outcome. Thus considerations about multipolar versus singleton scenarios also apply to decisive strategic advantage-first versus intelligence explosion-first scenarios.