LESSWRONG
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All of markov's Comments + Replies

Is AI Safety dropping the ball on privacy?
markov6mo32

TOR is way too slow and google hates serving content to TOR users. I2P might be faster than TOR but the current adoption is way too low. Additionally, it doesn't help that identity persistence is a regulatory requirement in most jurisdictions because it helps traceability against identity theft, financial theft, fraud, etc... Cookie cleaning means they have to log in every time which for most people is too annoying.

I acknowledge that there are ways to technically poison existing data. The core problem though is finding things that both normal people and al... (read more)

Is AI Safety dropping the ball on privacy?
markov6mo30

I understand your original comment a lot better now. My understanding of what you said is that open source intelligence that anyone provides through their public persona is revealing more than enough information to be damaging. The little that is sent over encrypted channels is just cherries on the cake. So the only real way to avoid manipulation is to first hope that you have not been a very engaged member of the internet for the last decade, and also primarily communicate over private channels.

I suppose I just underestimated how much people actually post... (read more)

1mruwnik6mo
There are extensions like adnauseum which try to poison your data trace. Though it's dubious whether they help much. You could have some kind of crawler thingy which would pretend to be like 100 normal users so you get lost in the noise. But even that could probably be filtered out if someone really wanted to - it would be hard to accurately simulate a human (I also dimly recall reading an article about it?). Maybe something that records other peoples sessions and plays them back? Or a LLM doing it (hehe)? But even that wouldn't help in the case of being logged in to various services, and I'm guessing that most people don't automatically log out of gmail whenever they change tabs? One source of hope is that data gets stale quickly. People can change their minds (even if they don't), so just because you know what I thought a year ago doesn't mean that you know what I think now. Then again, most people don't care either way and it would be pretty simple to remove the small number of outliers who suddenly go dark. One possible way of cleaning up would be to spend a couple of months posting more and more radically strange posts (e.g. going all in on flat earthism) before going private in order to mislead any analysis. This is hard and requires passing an ITT. Tor + cleaning cookies + logging out of everything after using them + separate user profiles goes a long way. But it's very inconvenient. 
Is AI Safety dropping the ball on privacy?
markov6mo11

I am trying to be as realistic as I can while realizing that privacy is inversely proportional to convenience.

So no, of course you should not stop making lesswrong posts.

The main things I suggested were - removing the ability to use data by favoring E2EE, and additionally removing the ability to hoard data, by favoring decentralized (or local) storage and computation.

As an example just favor E2EE services for collaborating instead of drive, dropbox, or office suite if you have the ability to do so. I agree that this doesn't solve the problem but at least i... (read more)

5AnnoyedReader6mo
Let me explain my understanding of your model. An AI wants to manipulate you. To do that, it builds a model of you. It starts out with a probability distribution over the mind space that is its understanding of what human minds are like. Then, as it gathers information on you, it updates those probabilities. The more data it is given, the more accurate the model gets. Then it can model how you respond to a bunch of different stimuli and choose the one that gets the most desirable result. But if this model is like any learning process I know about, the chart of how much is learned over time will probably look vaguely logarithmic, so once it is through half of the data, it will be way more than halfway through the improvement on the model. So if you're thirty now, and have been using not end to end encrypted messaging your whole life and all that is on some server and ends up in an AI, you've probably already thrown away more than 90% of the game, whatever you do today. Especially since if you keep making public posts it can track changes in those to expect what changes are in you for its already good model anyway. I keep going back and forth about whether your point is a good one or not. (Your point being that it's useful to prevent non-public data about you from being easier to access by AIs on big server farms like Google's or whatever, even if you haven't been doing that so far, and you keep putting out public data.) Your idea sort of seems like a solution to another problem. I do think your public internet presence will reveal much more to a manipulative AI than a manipulative human. AIs can make connections we can't see. And a lot of AIs will be trained on just the internet as a whole, so while your private data may end up in a few AIs, or many if they gain the ability to hack, your public data will be in tons and tons of AIs. For say an LLM to work like this, it will have to be able to model your writing to optimize its reward. If you're sufficiently differe
Is AI Safety dropping the ball on privacy?
markov6mo31

I did consider the distinction between a model of humans vs. a model of you personally. But I can't really see any realistic way of stopping the models from having better models of humans in general over time. So yeah, I agree with you that the small pockets of sanity are currently the best we can hope for. It was mainly to spread the pocket of sanity from infosec to the alignment space is why I wrote up this post. Because I would consider the minds of alignment researchers to be critical assets.

As to why predictive models of humans in general seems unstop... (read more)

Is AI Safety dropping the ball on privacy?
markov6mo40

Thanks for pointing that out! It's embarrassing that I made a mistake, but it's also relieving in some sense to learn that the impacts were not as I had thought them to be.

I hope this error doesn't serve to invalidate the entire post. I don't really know what the post-publishing editing etiquette is, but I don't want to keep anything in the post that might serve as misinformation so I'll edit this line out.

Please let me know if there are any other flaws you find and I'll get them fixed.

8Karl von Wendt6mo
I don't think this invalidates the point that microtargeting can be very effective.
AGISF 2022 Summaries
markov7mo11

Hey, I just wanted to write a quick update. Since you mentioned you will be using the 2023 summaries around Feb. Unfortunately, it seems like the AGISF syllabus is still very fluid, and the readings are still changing as the current iteration of the course is progressing. Which basically means, that the only realistic target for getting those done, is by the end of this current AGISF iteration. Sorry if that causes inconvenience.

For the Record: DL ∩ ASI = ∅
markov8mo30

Can a DL-based system still end up causing catastrophic damage before we ever even manage to get to ASI?

AGISF 2022 Summaries
markov8mo73

Hey Dusan! Yes, Of course, you have permission to translate these summaries. It's awesome that you are doing that!

Thanks for your suggestion. Yeah, this comment serves as blanket permission to anyone who wants to translate to freely do so.

1markov7mo
Hey, I just wanted to write a quick update. Since you mentioned you will be using the 2023 summaries around Feb. Unfortunately, it seems like the AGISF syllabus is still very fluid, and the readings are still changing as the current iteration of the course is progressing. Which basically means, that the only realistic target for getting those done, is by the end of this current AGISF iteration. Sorry if that causes inconvenience.