Linda Linsefors

Hi, I am a Physicist, an Effective Altruist and AI Safety student/researcher.

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Not with out spending more time than I want on this. Sorry.

I admit that I did not word that very well. Honestly don't know how to concisely express how much Copenhagen interpretation makes no sese at all, not even as an interpretation. 

I would expect LTFF to still to upskilling-grants, but I also expect that the bar is higher than it used to be. But this is just me making guesses. 

I really wish you get the funding you need to at least take some extended leave from your day-job, to see what you can do when you get to sleep at what ever time you want, and also devote your mind to AI Safety full time. 

Like others have said, this sounds like something you might potentially get a grant for. 

However, you should know that unfortunately money is tight for most project since the FTX crash. I just got another reminder of this, seeing this post

I still think you should apply! It's worth a try. But don't take it too hard if you get rejected.

I think this is an interesting post, and I think Forest is at least pointing to an additional AI risk, even if I'm not yet convinced it's not solvable.

However this post has one massive weakness, which it shares with "No people as pets". 

You are not addressing the possibility or impossibility of alignment. Your argument is based on the fact that we can't provide any instrumental value to the AI. This is just a re-phrasing of the classical alignment problem. I.e. if we don't specifically program the AI to care about us and our needs, it won't. 

I think if you are writing for the LW crowd, it will be much more well received if you directly adress the possibility or impossibility of building an aligned AI.

> Self-agency is defined here as having no limits on the decisions the system makes (and thus the learning it undergoes).

I find this to be an odd definition. Do you mean "no limits" as in the system is literally stochastic and every action has >0 probability? Probably not, because that would be a stupid design. So what do you mean? Probably that we humans can't predict it's action to rule out any specific action. But there is no strong reason we have to build an AI like that. 

It would be very useful if you could clarify this definition, as to clarify what class of AI you think is impossible to make safe. Otherwise we risk just talking past each other. 

Most of the post seems to discuss an ecosystem of competing silicon based life forms. I don't think anyone believe that setup will be safe for us. This is not where the interesting disagreement lies.

On the other hand, pragmatically speaking, pilot wave theory does give the same predictions as other QM interpretation. So it's probably fine use this interpretation if it simplifies other things. 

I have a background in physics, and I don't like pilot wave theory, because the particle configuration is completely epi-phenomenal. And by the way, I also don't like Copenhagen interpretation, because it's not even a theory. 

Also, last I heard, they had not figured out how to multiple particles, let alone field theory. But that was almost a decade ago, so there has probably been some progress. 

Regarding explaining the Born's rule. You have a point that many words leave something to be explained here. On the other hand there is no other alternative. There is no other choice that preserves probability over time. 

The boring technical answer is that any policy can be described as a utility maximiser given a contrived enough utility function.

The counter argument to that if the utility function is as complicated as the policy, then this is not a useful description. 

Todays thoughts: 

I suspect it's not possible to build autonomous aligned AIs (low confidence). The best we can do is some type of hybrid humans-in-the-loop system. Such a system will be powerful enough to eventually give us everything we want, but it will also be much slower and intellectually inferior to what is possible with out humans-in-the-loop. I.e. the alignment tax will be enormous. The only way the safe system can compete, is by not building the unsafe system. 

Therefore we need AI Governance. Fortunately, political action is getting a lot of attention right now, and the general public seems to be positively inclined to more cautious AI development. 

After getting an immediate stop/paus on larger models, I think next step might be to use current AI to cure aging. I don't want to miss the singularity because I died first, and I think I'm not the only one who feels this way. It's much easier to be patient and cautious in a world where aging is a solved problem. 

We probably need a strict ban on building autonomous superintelligent AI until we reached technological maturity. It's probably not a great idea to build them after that either, but they will probably not pose the same risk any longer. This last claim is not at all obvious. The hardest attack vector to defend against would be manipulation. I think reaching technological maturity will make us able to defend against any military/hard-power attack. This includes for example having our own nano-bot defence system, to defend against hostile nanobots. Manipulation is harder, but I think there are ways to solve that, with enough time to set up our defences.

An important crux for what there end goal is, including if there is some stable end where we're out of the danger, is to what extent technological maturity also leads to a stable cultural/political situation, or if that keeps evolving in ever new directions. 

Recently an AI safety researcher complained to me about some interaction they had with an AI Safety communicator. Very stylized, there interaction went something like this:

(X is some fact or topic related to AI Safety

Communicator: We don't know anything about X and there is currently no research on X.

Researcher: Actually, I'm working on X, and I do know some things about X.

Communicator: We don't know anything about X and there is currently no research on X.

 

I notice that I semi-frequently hear communicators saying things like the thing above. I think what they mean is that our our understanding of X is far from the understanding that is needed, and the amount of researchers working on this is much fewer than what would be needed, and this get rounded off to we don't know anything and no one is doing anything about it. If this is what is going on then I think this is bad. 

I think that is some cases when someone says "We don't know anything about X and there is currently no research on X." they probably literally mean it. There are some people who think that approximately no-one working on AI Safety is doing real AI Safety researchers. But I also think that most people who are saying "We don't know anything about X and there is currently no research on X." are doing some mixture of rounding off, some sort of unreflexively imitation learning, i.e. picking up the sentence structure from others, especially from high status people. 

I think using a language that hides the existence of the research that does exist is bad. Primarily because it's misinformative. Do we want all new researchers to start from scratch? Because that is what happens if you tell them there is no pre-existing research and they believe you. 

I also don't think this exaggeration will help with recruitment. Why do you think people would prefer to join a completely empty research field instead of a small one? From a personal success perspective (where success can mean either impact or career success) a small research field is great, lots if low-hanging fruit around. But a completely untrodden research direction is terrible, you will probably just get lost, not get anything done, and even if you fid something, there's nowhere to publish it.

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