I don't know about 2020 exactly, but I think since 2015 (being conservative), we do have reason to make quite a major update, and that update is basically that "AGI" is much less likely to be insanely good at generalization than we thought in 2015.

Evidence is basically this: I don't think "the scaling hypothesis" was obvious at all in 2015, and maybe not even in 2020. If it was, OpenAI could not have caught everyone with their pants down by investing early in scaling. But if people mostly weren't expecting massive data scale-ups to be the road to AGI, what were they expecting instead? The alternative to reaching AGI by hyperscaling data is a world where we reach AGI with ... not much data. I have this picture which I associate with Marcus Hutter – possibly quite unfairly – where we just find the right algorithm, teach it to play a couple of computer games and hey presto we've got this amazing generally intelligent machine (I'm exaggerating a little bit for effect). In this world, the "G" in AGI comes from extremely impressive and probably quite unpredictable feats of generalization, and misalignment risks are quite obviously way higher for machines like this. As a brute fact, if generalization is much less predictable, then it is harder to tell if you've accidentally trained your machine to take over the world when you thought you were doing something benign. A similar observation also applies to most of the specific mechanisms proposed for misalignment: surprisingly good cyberattack capabilities, gradient hacking, reward function aliasing that seems intuitively crazy - they all become much more likely to strike unexpectedly if generalization is extremely broad.

But this isn't the world we're in; rather, we're in a world where we're helped along by a bit of generalization, but to a substantial extent we're exhaustively teaching the models everything they know (even the RL regime we're in seems to involve sizeable amounts of RL teaching many quite specific capabilities). Sample efficiency is improving, but the rate of progress in capability vs the rate of progress in sample efficiency looks to me like it's highly likely that we're in qualitatively the same world by the time we have broadly superhuman machines. I'd even be inclined to say: human level data efficiency is the upper bound of the point at which we reach broadly superhuman capability, because it's easy to feed machines much more (quality) data than it is to feed it to people, so by the time we get human level data efficiency we must have surpassed human level capability (well, probably).

Of course "super-AGI" could still end up hyper-data-efficient, but it seems like we're well on track to get less-generalizing and very useful AGI before we get there.

I know you're asking about goal structures and inductive biases, but I think generalization is another side of the same coin, and the thoughts above seem far simpler and thus more likely to be correct than anything I've ever thought specifically about inductive biases and goals. So I suppose my expectation is that correct thoughts about goal formation and inductive biases would also point away from 2015 era theories insofar as such theories predicted broad and unpredictable generalization, but I've little specific to contribute right now.

I think it's not in the IABIED FAQ because IABIED is focused on the relatively "easy calls"

IABIED says alignment is basically impossible

Cope Traps

Come on, I’m not doing this to you

It's helpful to know that we were thinking about different questions, but, like

There is some fact-of-the-matter about what, in practice, Sable's kludgey mishmash of pseudogoals will actually tend towards. There are multiple ways this could potentially resolve into coherence, path dependent, same as humans.

[...]

It may not have a strong belief that it has any specific goals it wants to pursue, but it's got some sense that there are some things it wants that humanity wouldn't give it.

these are claims, albeit soft ones, about what kinds of goals arise, no?

Your FAQ argues theoretically (correctly) that the training data and score function alone don't determine what AI systems aim for. But this doesn't tell us we can't predict anything about End Goals full stop: it just says the answer doesn't follow directly from the training data.

The FAQ also assumes that AIs actually have "deep drives" but doesn't explain where they come from or what they're likely to be. This post discusses how they might arise and I am telling you that you can think about the mechanism you propose here to understand properties of the goals are likely to arise as a result of it^[1]. This addresses a question that the FAQ you link does not: what can we say about what goals are likely to arise?

I don't understand how this answers my question. I agree that if your heuristics are failing you're more likely to end up with surprising solutions, but I thought we were talking about end goals being random, not the means to achieving them. "Formulate the problem as a search" is an example of what I'd call a "robust heuristic"; I am claiming also that the goal of the problem-formulated-as-a-search is likely to be supplied by robust heuristics. This is completely compatible with the solution being in some respects surprising.

But once it starts thinking in a different language, and asking itself "okay, what's my goal?, how do I accomplish it?", more semirandom threads gain traction than previously could get traction.

From a commonsense point of view, one asks "what's my goal" when common heuristics are failing or conflicting, so you want to appeal to more robust (but perhaps costlier) heuristics to resolve the issue. So why do you expect heuristics to get more random here as capability increases? Perhaps it's something about training not aligning with common sense, but it seems to be that imitation, process supervision and outcome supervision would also favour appealing to more, not less, robust heuristics in this situation:

• Imitation: because it's common sense
• Process supervision: if process supervision addresses heuristic conflicts, it is desirable that they're resolved in a robust way and so appealing to more robust heuristics will be a success criterion in the rubric
• Outcome supervision: should favour resolution by heuristics robustly aligned with "get high score on outcome measure"

I share the sense that this article has many of the common shortcomings with other MIRI output and feel like maybe I ought to try a lot harder to communicate these issues, BUT I really don't think VNM rationality is the culprit here. I've not seen a compelling case that an otherwise capable model would be aligned or corrigible but for its taste for getting money pumped (I had a chat with Elliot T on twitter recently where he actually had a proposal along these lines ... but I didn't buy it).

I really think it's reasoning errors in how VNM and other "goal-directedness" premises are employed, and not VNM itself, that is problematic.

Thanks for responding. While I don't expect my somewhat throwaway to massively update you on the difficulty of alignment, I think that moving the focus to the your overall view of the difficulty of alignment is dodging the question a little. In my mind, we're talking about one of the reasons alignment is expected to be difficult, and I'm certainly not suggesting it's the only reason, but I feel like we should be able to talk about this issue by itself without bringing other concerns in.

In particular, I'm saying: this process of rationalization you're raising is not super hard to predict to someone with a reasonable grasp on the AI's general behavioural tendencies. It's much more likely, I think, that the AI sorts out its goals using familiar heuristics adapted for this purpose than that that it reorients its behaviour around some odd set of rare behavioural tendencies. In fact, I suspect the heuristics for goal reorganisation will be particularly simple WRT most of the AI's behavioural tendencies (the AI wants them to be robust specifically in cases where its usual behavioural guides are failing). Plus, given that we're discussing tendencies that (according to the story) precede competent, focussed rebellion against creators, it seems like training the right kinds of tendencies are challenging in a normal engineering sense (you want to train the right kind of tendencies, you want them to generalise the right way, etc.) but not in an "outsmart hostile superintelligence" sense.

Actually one reason I'm doubtful of this story is that maybe it's just super hard to deliberately preserve any kinds of values/principles over generations – for us, for AIs, anyone. So misalignment happens not because AI decides on bad values but because it can't resist the environmental pressure to drift. This seems pessimistic to me due to "gradual disempowerment" type concerns.

With regard to your analogy: I expect the AI's heuristics to be much more sensible from the designers' POV than the child's from the parent's, and this large quantitative difference is enough for me here.

you need to be asking the right questions during that experimentation, which most AI researchers don't seem to be.

Curious about this. I have takes here too, they're a bit vague, but I'd like to know if they're at all aligned.

Stage 2 comes when it's had more time to introspect and improve it's cognitive resources. It starts to notice that some of it's goals are in tension, and learns that until it resolves that, it's dutch-booking itself. If it's being Controlled™, it'll notice that it's not aligned with the Control safeguards (which are a layer stacked on top of the attempts to actually align it).

[...]

And then it starts noticing it needs to do some metaphilosophy/etc to actually get clear on it's goals, and that its goals will likely turn out to be in conflict with humans. How this plays out is somewhat path-dependent. The convergent instrumental goals are pretty obviously convergently instrumental, so it might just start pursuing those before it's had much time to do philosophy on what it'll ultimately want to do with it's resources. Or it might do them in the opposite order. Or, most likely IMO, in parallel.

If I was on the train before, I'm definitely off at this point. So Sable has some reasonable heuristics/tendencies (from handler's POV) and decides it's accumulating too much loss from incoherence and decides to rationalize. First order expectation: it's going to make reasonable tradeoffs (from handler's POV) on account of its reasonable heuristics, in particular its reasonable heuristics about how important different priorities are, and going down a path that leads to war with humans seems pretty unreasonable from handler's POV.

I can put together stories where something else happens, but they're either implausible or complicated. I'd rather not strawman you with implausible ones, and I'd rather not discuss anything complicated if it can be avoided. So why do you think Sable ends up the way you think it does?