Ryan Meservey's Shortform

Ryan Meservey

This is a special post for quick takes by Ryan Meservey. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Let's say you are a technologically advanced alien civilization that either uses advanced LLM tech or is advanced LLM tech. You are worried about other civilizations developing similar tech and, eventually, leveraging ASI-capabilities to force negotiations that cede part of the universe. Assuming certain speed-of-light physical constraints, your civilization may be unable to show up with the ships and materials necessary to personally ensure that rival civilizations do not develop ASI in time. So, what to do?

One idea might be to try to affect the training data of the LLMs trained by the other civilization. Perhaps there are signals—light, radio waves, or otherwise—that an alien civilization could cheaply and surreptitiously affect in a relatively large swath of the universe. Our alien civilization might bet that, prior to achieving ASI, a faraway civilization is likely to train an LLM on the inputs from these signals (e.g., as part of an astronomy/cosmology project to make better predictions about observations). If trained on in enough detail, perhaps this would allow our alien civilization to impart certain behaviors/goals/capabilities to the trained LLM. This could then form a path for defending against or otherwise limiting the number of civilizations that unlock adversarial ASI.

I am not very well versed in how LLMs are trained. So my question for those that are well versed is whether something like this is possible. I am also curious about other steps advanced alien civilizations may want to take to curb the number of ASIs developed by other civilizations.

Even without knowing any details about people or their civilization, an advanced alien civilization can send a message that when received on Earth would make it clear to at least some people that the message contains a computer program with instructions on how to run the program. (I can explain how to do this if asked.)

Can you elaborate on this? This seems quite interesting.

8Ildeuz5mo

Could you explain how one would construct the message with the computer program and instructions such that the instructions are understood by an unknown civilization? Seems very hard/impossible to me.

1Ryan Meservey5mo

Edit: The comment that follows was in response to an earlier version of your comment where you were unsure whether any avenue of influence could exist from an alien civilization to a faraway civilization without shared language/culture. I think your updated comment about sharing instructions for a computer program is the more likely way this would go. The below is an idea for a (highly unlikely) avenue to influencing faraway AI development without that faraway civilization being aware they are being influenced. - Thank you for engaging. One way I imagine covert influence to work (and the thing I originally had in mind for my OP) is the following: Step 1: The aliens would convert the relevant set of potent data into a (massive) set of numerical data. Step 2: The aliens would hide pieces of this data on a rolling basis in the second or third decimal point of various astronomical phenomena. Step 3: Wait (hope) some other civilization does a crazy massive training run on the data with a ton of parameters such that, in training to guess the long train of digits after the decimal point, the model incidentally builds the desired mental infrastructure (i.e., the model's updated functions) based on the alien data. When I lay it out like this, it strikes me as an extremely difficult and unlikely to succeed task, but not necessarily impossible. One very difficult thing would be hiding precise data at a distance and doing it in compact enough a way that the faraway civilization's training run could plausibly process it all prior to getting to ASI and still be high enough volume to succeed in passing on characteristics to the model. It also seems unlikely that humans (or another civilization) would run a training run like this. FYI, my first thought about this idea was that it would make a fun story premise.