Disclaimer: The views expressed in this document are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my past or present employers.

In a recent interview at the Commonwealth Club of California, Stuart Russell compared training GPT-4 to training a dog with negative reinforcement. Although there are obvious (and not-so-obvious) limitations to this analogy, conceptualizing of GPT-4 as a partially domesticated, alien canine with a knack for Python code seems substantially more useful to me than calling it "[a mere program] run on the well-worn digital logic of pattern-matching" (which is how Cal Newport recently characterized the mind of ChatGPT, despite the sparks of AGI in GPT-4).^[1] In any case, Russell's comparison prompted me to more deeply consider the relationships between intelligent species that have already arisen in nature. Assuming there is a degree of validity in treating agentic AIs as animals of indeterminate intelligence and intention, are there any already-existing evolutionary strategies we might adapt to better equip ourselves to handle them? Furthermore, are there other biological mechanisms of particular relevance for understanding AI cognition and safety? In Part 1 of this post, I discuss the phenomena of symbiotic mutualism and domestication. In Part 2, I explore a broad variety of predator/prey survival strategies, with the aim of generating a repository of ideas that may be amenable to context-appropriate engineering solutions. In Part 3, I examine ways in which evolution has solved three major coordination problems as barriers to increasing complexity. In Part 4, I propose a thought experiment about distinct forms of biological superintelligence to illustrate ways in which entropy is connected to cognitive architecture. Finally, I conclude by considering the circumstances in which treating AI like an animal intelligence may prove to be a useful cognitive shortcut. Few, if any, of the ideas presented here will be entirely novel, but it is my hope that by condensing a particular view of AI safety, readers will have the opportunity to re-frame their theoretical understanding in a slightly different context.^[2]

Part 1 — Mutualism and domestication

When humans first began domesticating wolves in Siberia around 23,000 years ago, one can imagine the sort of tension that must have predominated. Pleistocene humans and wolves shared many c...

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