Programme Director at UK Advanced Research + Invention Agency focusing on safe transformative AI; formerly Protocol Labs, FHI/Oxford, Harvard Biophysics, MIT Mathematics And Computation.
Nice, thanks for the pointer!
Paralysis of the form "AI system does nothing" is the most likely failure mode. This is a "de-pessimizing" agenda at the meta-level as well as at the object-level. Note, however, that there are some very valuable and ambitious tasks (e.g. build robots that install solar panels without damaging animals or irreversibly affecting existing structures, and only talking to people via a highly structured script) that can likely be specified without causing paralysis, even if they fall short of ending the acute risk period.
"Locked into some least-harmful path" is a potential failure mode if the semantics or implementation of causality or decision theory in the specification framework are done in a different way than I hope. Locking in to a particular path massively reduces the entropy of the outcome distribution beyond what is necessary to ensure a reasonable risk threshold (e.g. 1 catastrophic event per millennium) is cleared. A FEEF objective (namely, minimize the divergence of the outcomes conditional on intervention from the outcomes conditional on filtering for the goal being met) would greatly penalize the additional facts which are enforced by the lock-in behaviours.
As a fail-safe, I propose to mitigate the downsides of lock-in by using time-bounded utility functions.
It seems plausible to me that, until ambitious value alignment is solved, ASL-4+ systems ought not to have any mental influences on people other than those which factor through the system's pre-agreed goals being achieved in the world. That is, ambitious value alignment seems like a necessary prerequisite for the safety of ASL-4+ general-purpose chatbots. However, world-changing GDP growth does not require such general-purpose capabilities to be directly available (rather than available via a sociotechnical system that involves agreeing on specifications and safety guardrails for particular narrow deployments).
It is worth noting here that a potential failure mode is that a truly malicious general-purpose system in the box could decide to encode harmful messages in irrelevant details of the engineering designs (which it then proves satisfy the safety specifications). But, I think sufficient fine-tuning with a GFlowNet objective will naturally penalise description complexity, and also penalise heavily biased sampling of equally complex solutions (e.g. toward ones that encode messages of any significance), and I expect this to reduce this risk to an acceptable level. I would like to fund a sleeper-agents-style experiment on this by the end of 2025.
Re footnote 2, and the claim that the order matters, do you have a concrete example of a homogeneous ultradistribution that is affine in one sense but not the other?
The "random dictator" baseline should not be interpreted as allowing the random dictator to dictate everything, but rather to dictate which Pareto improvement is chosen (with the baseline for "Pareto improvement" being "no superintelligence"). Hurting heretics is not a Pareto improvement because it makes those heretics worse off than if there were no superintelligence.
Yes. You will find more details in his paper, Provably safe systems with Steve Omohundro, in which I am listed in the acknowledgments (under my legal name, David Dalrymple).
Max and I also met and discussed the similarities in advance of the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley.
I agree that each of and has two algebraically equivalent interpretations, as you say, where one is about inconsistency and the other is about inferiority for the adversary. (I hadn’t noticed that).
The variant still seems somewhat irregular to me; even though Diffractor does use it in Infra-Miscellanea Section 2, I wouldn’t select it as “the” infrabayesian monad. I’m also confused about which one you’re calling unbounded. It seems to me like the variant is bounded (on both sides) whereas the variant is bounded on one side, and neither is really unbounded. (Being bounded on at least one side is of course necessary for being consistent with infinite ethics.)
These are very good questions. First, two general clarifications:
A. «Boundaries» are not partitions of physical space; they are partitions of a causal graphical model that is an abstraction over the concrete physical world-model.
B. To "pierce" a «boundary» is to counterfactually (with respect to the concrete physical world-model) cause the abstract model that represents the boundary to increase in prediction error (relative to the best augmented abstraction that uses the same state-space factorization but permits arbitrary causal dependencies crossing the boundary).
So, to your particular cases:
For the record, as this post mostly consists of quotes from me, I can hardly fail to endorse it.
Yes, I am indeed thinking about this.