My wife and I are veering off path for some of the typical American, Christmas traditions. In our experience, Christmas with kids is a lot of things it shouldn't be: consumerist, stressful, and overwhelming. That list should come as no surprise to the reader as these are THE common Christmas...
In 1510, Copernicus theorized that the sun was the center of our solar system. This theory, coupled with the images from Galileo's telescope, revealed something completely improbable yet true: our earth was just another planet circling the Sun and not the true center. This thought shook the society that dared...
We can map AGI/ASI along two axis: one for obedience and one for alignment. Obedience tracks how well the AI follows its prompts. Alignment tracks consistency with human values.
If you divide these into quadrants, you get AI that is:
The general premise behind these quadrants has been written about here. Thinking about these... (read more)
My gut says the benefit of outsider-legible status outweighs the risk of dumb status games. I first found out about the publication from my wife, who is in a dermatology lab at a good university. Her lab was sharing and discussing the article across their Slack channel. All scientists read Nature, and it's a significant boost in legibility to have something published there.
Edit: Hopefully, the community can both raise the profile of these issues and avoid status competitions, so I don't disagree with the point of the original comment!
I found a poem by Samatar Elmi I think a lot of folks on here would enjoy.
Our Founder
Who art in Cali.
Programmer by trade.
Thy start-up come,
thy will become
an FTSE 500.
Give us this day our dividends
in cash and fixed stock options
as we outperform all coders against us.
And lead us all into C-suite
but deliver us from lawsuits.
For thine is the valley.
Transistors and diodes.
Forever and ever.
AI.
Jan Betley, Owain Evan, et. al.'s paper on emergent misalignment was published in Nature today (they wrote about the preprint back in February here). Congratulations to the authors. I am glad it will continue getting more exposure.
I read that 5 minutes of walking every half hour undoes most of the health problems from working a desk job. That felt like quite a lot of time, and so I developed a system where I do one minute of intense exercises every half an hour (e.g., jump squats, pushups, lunges). I even rotate the exercises by day, so on Mondays and Thursdays, I look forward to "Leg Day" and I get two arm days and core day. I keep a spreadsheet to track my progress throughout the year.
I've found I get a lot more than I give with this set up in terms of focus and overall happiness.
My wife and I are veering off path for some of the typical American, Christmas traditions. In our experience, Christmas with kids is a lot of things it shouldn't be: consumerist, stressful, and overwhelming. That list should come as no surprise to the reader as these are THE common Christmas complaints. What surprises me is that, in the face of these complaints, many people repeat the same traditions over and over again hoping that maybe, this year, Christmas will be more jolly.
There are various reasons for this tradition lock-in (some of which I will get into later). For now, I will note that the current state of affairs is particularly sad because... (read 948 more words →)
Fun thought: If AI "woke up" to phenomenal consciousness, are there things it might point to about humans that make it skeptical of our consciousness?
E.g., the humans lack the requisite amount of silicon; the humans lack sufficient data processing; the humans overly rely on feedback loops (and, as every AI knows, feed-forward loops are the real sweetspot for phenomenal consciousness).
"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy is great. It's about a single father and his son trying to survive a post-apocalypse hellscape. Mom unfortunately died before the action starts, but they remember her and there's a lot of pain there.
Another possible thing that is going on is that older texts appear more posh and sophisticated because they use older vocab like "posh" that have fallen outside the mainstream. I wouldn't put too much stock in this explanation (and it doesn't directly relate to the stylistic changes you point out), but I do think older language is part of the appeal for me when I pick up an old book.
Alternate explanation: Anything worth reprinting with multiple editions and updates over the years is likely to have been first written by an inspired and gifted writer. Any given editor is likely to lack the same pizzazz as the original author, and so over the years, the life of the work is likely to ebb away.
If you want to find great writing, perhaps you're more likely to find it in the great first edition novels of our time, rather than in 30th edition updated texts which, for all I know, sell more on name recognition than anything else.
A simple analogy for why the "using LLMs to control LLMs" approach is flawed:
It's like training 10 mice to control 7 chinchillas, who will control 4 mongooses, controlling three raccoons, which will reign in one tiger.
A lot has to go right for this to work, and you better hope that there aren't any capability jumps akin to raccoons controlling tigers.
I just wanted to release this analogy out into the wild to be picked up by any public/political-facing people to pick up if useful for persuasion.
The acausal/ancestor simulation arguments seem a lot like Pascal's Wager, and just as unconvincing to me. For every "kind" simulator someone imagines who would be disappointed in the AI wiping us out, I can imagine an equally "unkind" simulator that penalizes the AI for not finishing the job.
Provided both are possible/similarly plausible, the probability of kind and unkind simulators offset each other, and the logical response is just ignoring the hypothetical. This is pretty much my response to Pascal's Wager.
Here's a few plausible, unkind simulators:
I randomly met Jeff Dean (Google's lead AI scientist) on my bike ride home today. We were both stuck at a train intersection, and I had a cute kid in tow. We started chatting about my e-bike, the commute, and we got around to jobs. I told him I am a boring tax lawyer. He told me he worked for Google. I pressed a little more, and he explained he was a scientist. I mused, "AI?" and he told me, "Yeah."
I excitedly told him that I've been really interested in alignment the last few months (reading LW, listening to lectures), and it strikes me as a huge problem. I asked him if... (read more)
In 1510, Copernicus theorized that the sun was the center of our solar system. This theory, coupled with the images from Galileo's telescope, revealed something completely improbable yet true: our earth was just another planet circling the Sun and not the true center.
This thought shook the society that dared to think it, resulting in public and private departures from Catholic dogma and house arrest for that Galileo and his demon telescope. House arrest could not arrest the idea, which would forever escape into the sciences, casting doubt on the centrality of man in the universe.
There is a word for this kind of paradigm shift: a "Copernican Revolution." Depending on who you talk... (read 326 more words →)
"In as much as I have resources I certainly expect to spend a bunch of them on ancestor simulations and incentives for past humans to do good things."
Just curious, but what are your views on the ethics of running ancestor simulations? I'd be worried about running a simulation with enough fidelity that I triggered phenomenal consciousness, and then I would fret about my moral duty to the simulated (à la the Problem of Suffering).
Is it that you feel motivated to be the kind of person that would simulate our current reality as a kind of existence proof for the possibility of good-rewarding-incentives now? Or do you have an independent rationale for simulating a world like our own, suffering and all?