Thanks for the post, I found it helpful! the "competent catastrophes" direction sounds particularly interesting.
This is extremely cool -- thank you, Peter and Owen! I haven't read most of it yet, let alone the papers, but I have high hopes that this will be a useful resource for me.
It didn't bug me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thanks for the post! FWIW, I found this quote particularly useful:
Well, on my reading of history, that means that all sorts of crazy things will be happening, analogous to the colonialist conquests and their accompanying reshaping of the world economy, before GWP growth noticeably accelerates!
The fact that it showed up right before an eye-catching image probably helped :)
This may be out-of-scope for the writeup, but I would love to get more detail on how this might be an important problem for IDA.
Thanks for the writeup! This google doc (linked near "raised this general problem" above) appears to be private: https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1vJhrol4t4OwDLK8R8jLjZb8pbUg85ELWlgjBqcoS6gs/edit
This seems like a useful lens -- thanks for taking the time to post it!
I do agree. I think the main reason to stick with "robustness" or "reliability" is that that's how the problems of "my model doesn't generalize well / is subject to adversarial examples / didn't really hit the training target outside the training data" are referred to in ML, and it gives a bad impression when people rename problems. I'm definitely most in favor of giving a new name like "hitting the target" if we think the problem we care about is different in a substantial way (which could definitely happen going forward!)
OK -- if it looks like the delay will be super long, we can certainly ask him how he'd be OK w/ us circulating / attributing those ideas. In the meantime, there are pretty standard norms about unpublished work that's been shared for comments, and I think it makes sense to stick to them.
Nice post! I see where you're coming from here.
(ETA: I think what I'm saying here is basically "3.5.3 and 3.5.4 seem to me like they deserve more consideration, at least as backup plans -- I think they're less crazy than you make them sound." So I don't think you missed these strategies, just that maybe we disagree about how crazy they look.)
I haven't thought this through all the way yet, and don't necessarily endorse these strategies without more thought, but:
It seems like there could be a category of strategies for players with "good" AGIs to prepare to salvage some long-term value when/if a war with "bad" AGIs does actually break out, because the Overton window will stop being relevant at that point. This prep might be doable without breaking what we normally think of as Overton windows*, and could salvage a percentage of the future light-cone, but would come at the cost of not preventing a huge war/catastrophe, and could cost a big percentage of the future light-cone (depending how "winnable" a war is from what starting points).
For example, a team could create a bunker that is well-positioned to be defended; or get as much control of civilization's resources as Overton allows and prepare plans to mobilize and expand into a war footing if "bad" AGI emerges; or prepare to launch von Neumann probes. Within the bubble of resources the "good" AGI controls legitimately before the war starts, the AGI might be able to build up a proprietary or stealthy technological lead over the rest of the world, effectively stockpiling its own supply of energy to make up for the fact that it's not consuming the free energy that it doesn't legitimately own.
Mnemonically, this strategy is something like "In case of emergency, break Overton window" :) I don't think your post really addresses these kinds of strategies, but very possible that I missed it (in which case my apologies).
*(We could argue that there's an Overton window that says "if there's a global catastrophe coming, it's unthinkable to just prepare to salvage some value, you must act to stop it!", which is why "prepare a bunker" is seen as nasty and antisocial. But that seems to be getting close to a situation where multiple Overton maxims conflict and no norm-following behavior is possible :) )