I was hoping someone would go ahead and try this. Great work, love it.

I think Eliezer Yudkowsky’s argument still has some merit, even if some people actually enjoy bear fat with honey and salt flakes more than ice cream

Hm, I think that specific argument falls through in that case. Suppose humans indeed like BFWHASF more than ice cream, but mostly eat the latter due to practical constraints. That means that, once we become more powerful and those constraints fall away, we would switch over to BFWHASF. But that's actually the regime in which we're not supposed to be able to predict what an agent would do!

As the argument goes, in a constrained environment with limited options (such as when a relatively stupid AGI is still trapped in our civilization's fabric), an agent might appear to pursue values it was naively shaped to have. But once it grows more powerful, and gets the ability to take what it really wants, it would go for some weird unpredictable edge-instantiation thing. The suggested "BFWHASF vs. ice cream" case would actually be the inverse of that.

The core argument should still hold:

• For one, BFWHASF is surely not the optimal food. Once we have the ability to engineer arbitrary food items, and also modify our taste buds how we see fit, we would likely go for something much more weird.
• The quintessential example would of course be us getting rid of the physical implementation of food altogether, and instead focusing on optimizing substrate-independent (e. g., simulated) food-eating experiences (ones not involving even simulated biology). That maps to "humans are killed and replaced with chatbots (not even uploaded humans) babbling nice things" or whatever.
• Even people who prefer "natural" food would likely go for e. g. the meat of beasts from carefully designed environments with very fast evolutionary loops set up to make their meat structured for maximum tastiness.^[1] Translated to ASI and humans, this suggests an All Tomorrows kind of future (except without Qu going away).

But I do think BFWHASF doesn't end up as a very good illustration of this point, if humans indeed like it a lot.

1. ^{^}

   Just tune the implementation details of all of this such that the pipeline still meets those people's aesthetic preferences for "natural-ness". E. g., note that people who want "real meat" today are perfectly fine with eating the meat of selectively bred beasts.

I've been recently irritated at something that feels vaguely similar with regards to research loops. Walking through this example... 

I note that most of those problems have little to do with the printing technology, and mostly about poor organization around that technology.

What common threads can we see?:

• Systems are not optimized to make it easy to interface with by someone who is using them the first time; someone with zero local tacit knowledge.
  • Printer/room/paper locations, printer choice, print dialogue.
  • Arguably (9) fits too: probably the different behaviors were due to some peculiarity of the printing algorithms in different software that someone very familiar with that software would know about.
• No affordances for easily recovering from common failure modes/errors/hiccups, or even for quickly learning about them.
  • Paper in a different room from the printer, printer in a different room from where you control it, no feedback on printer behavior from where you control it.

I see a few directions we can take it.

• Direction #1: No affordances for one-time users.
  • People who set up/modify systems are usually people who work with those systems a lot. They have tons of tacit knowledge about where things are, how to use them, how to avoid and recover from failures, etc. Modeling the mental state of someone who doesn't have your tacit knowledge is notoriously hard, and even when it isn't ("a random person wouldn't know where I moved the paper"), there are no established societal norms/organizational standards regarding making things frictionlessly easy for first-time users.
  • Even when there are manuals/instructions/etc., they usually assume that you're going to be thoroughly figuring out how to work with that system, as if you aimed to become a frequent user, rather than doing a specific thing once and never interacting with it again.
  • The problem is that "a person interacts with a system once and then never again" is a very common occurrence. For some systems (e. g., specific bureaucratic procedures), this is potentially the bulk of user experience; and on the flipside, "interacting with a system for the first time and never again" is a significant fraction of any given person's life experience.
• Direction #2: Systemic accumulation of small friction sources.
  • All of those individual sources of friction were annoying, but ultimately not that time-consuming (figuring out things' locations, how to install/locate a printer, replacing paper, re-printing things).
  • What made the whole experience miserable is that there were tons of those sources of minor friction which came into effect simultaneously.
  • Thus, it's easy to see why the person responsible for creating each bit of friction didn't think of it as a big deal, or why we don't have societal/organizational standards regarding not creating such minor friction. (Consider that making a big deal of complaining about any given bit of friction in isolation would make you look like a loon/a "Karen".)
  • But the problem is that tons of systems you interact with end up with these small bits of friction cropping up, so your ability to move forward is constantly mired down by that stuff.
• Direction #3: No affordances for quickly recovering from small failures.
  • Some sort of default assumptions that things will go as intended, with no minor errors, hiccups, need to fix problems/iterate, etc.
  • And as long as things-going-wrong doesn't create a big incident (e. g., someone dying with that as the clear leading cause), nobody is particularly incentivized to think about that and prevent that.
  • So there are no affordances for easily recovering from them.
  • But this pattern reoccurs everywhere, so a large fraction of the human experience involves dealing with them.

In what other situations does this show up? An obvious example are various bureaucratic procedures, which require some research to make sense of, and where a small typo/mistake in your documents might lead to having to schedule another appointment next hour/day/month. That is: a procedure you'd plausibly interact with only one/a few times in your life is managed by people who interact with it constantly, and the bits of friction you run into are not obviously catastrophic, so those people are not forced to make things easy for first/imperfect/inexperienced users.

Note that the full thing is not necessarily easy to fix, much like e. g. technical debt isn't^[1]. The work to keep systems easy-to-interface-with is, as usual, a battle against entropy. Overall, I feel this problem is just another manifestation of that one.

Things could certainly be made much better, though, by both:

• Establishing high-level organizational standards/policies (e. g., keeping printer paper in the printing room).
• Creating low-level societal norms (if you moved paper somewhere, leave a post-it about that).

1. ^{^}

   And indeed, technical debt is another instance, where, for programmers maintaining a codebase, it's no-one's first priority to make it easy to understand/modify/interface-with for a one-time user.

   Potentially the "inconsistent printer behavior" is downstream of that, by the way. Perhaps there's no obvious correct/convergent way to interact with low-level printer software, so each app's designers had to take their own approach, so there are inconsistent behaviors across apps.

My point is, that if you are a nascent super-villain, don't worry about telling people about your master plan. Almost no one will believe you. So the costs are basically non-existent.

Good try, but you won't catch me that easily!

Humans can't remember that many good passwords

I'd counter that you can in fact memorize ~arbitrarily many good passwords if you:

• Use a procedure that generates passwords that are high-entropy but memorable.
  • A memorability-enhancing improvement on the common "generate N random words" is "generate N random words, then add more words until the passphrase is grammatically correct". (Important: don't rearrange or change the initial random words in any way!)
    • E. g., "lamp naval sunset TV" → "the lamp allows the naval sunset to watch TV".
  • This doesn't reduce entropy, since this is at worst an injective approximately deterministic function of the initial string.^[1] But, for me at least, it makes it significantly easier to recall the password (since that makes it "roll off the tongue").
• Use spaced repetition on them. Like, literally put "recall the password for %website%" in an Anki deck. (Obviously don't put the actual password there! Just create a prompt to periodically remind yourself of it.)

I'm not actually doing that for all my passwords, only for a dozen to the more important stuff.^[2] But I expect this scales pretty well.

1. ^{^}

   Well, technically, this is only approximately injective:  the worst case is that adding words to two random sequences would map them to the same phrase. E. g.:

   • "lamp naval sunset TV" → "the lamp allows the naval sunset to watch TV"
   • "lamp naval watch TV" → "the lamp allows the naval sunset to watch TV"

   But I posit that this would never happen in practice.

2. ^{^}

   I also use KeePass for the rest, sync'd through ProtonDrive. The fewer cloud services you have to trust, the better.

My response here would be similar to this one. I think there's a kind of "bitter lesson" here: for particularly complex fields, it's often easier to solve the general problem of which that field is an instance of, rather than attempting to solve the field directly. For example:

• If you're trying to solve mechanistic interpretability, studying a specific LLM in detail isn't the way; you'd be better off trying to find methods that generalize across many LLMs.
• If you're trying to solve natural-language processing, turns out tailor-made methods are dramatically out-performed by general-purpose generative models (LLMs) trained by a general-purpose search method (SGD).
• If you're trying to advance bioscience, you can try building models of biology directly, or you can take the aforementioned off-the-shelf general-purpose generative model, dump biology data into it, and get a tool significantly ahead of your manual efforts.
• Broadly, LLMs/DL have "solved" or outperformed a whole bunch of fields at once, without even deliberately trying, simply as the result of looking for something general and scalable. 

Like, yeah, after you've sketched out your general-purpose method and you're looking for where to apply it, you'd need to study the specific details of the application domain and tinker with your method's implementation. But the load-bearing, difficult step is deriving the general-purpose method itself; the last-step fine-tuning is comparatively easy.

In addition, I'm not optimistic about solving e. g. interpretability directly, simply because there's already a whole field of people trying to do that, to fairly leisurely progress. On intelligence-enhancement front, there would be mountains of regulatory red tape to go through, and the experimental loops would be rate-limited by the slow human biology. Etc., etc.

Edited for clarity.

I'm curious, what's your estimate for how much resources it'd take to drive the risk down to 25%, 10%, 1%?

I can think of plenty of reasons, of varying levels of sensibility.

tl;dr:

• If we get alignment by default, some US-based actors winning may be more likely to lead to a good future than the Chinese actors winning.
• If on-paradigm ASI alignment is possible given some low-but-nontrivial resource expenditure, the US labs may be more likely to spend the resources on it than the Chinese ones.
• US AI Safety advocates may have more control over the US AGI labs and/or the USG. The more powerful those are relative to the foreign AGI researchers, the more leverage that influence provides, including for slowing down/banning AGI research.
• US AI Safety advocates may be at least partly motivated by dumb instincts for "my nation good, their nation bad", and therefore want the US to win even if it's winning a race-to-suicide.
• Keeping a compute lead may be geopolitically important even in non-ASI worlds.

1. ^{^}

   E. g., Ryan Greenblatt thinks that spending just 5% more resources than is myopically commercially expedient would drive the risk down to 50%. AI 2027 also assumes something like this.

2. ^{^}

   E. g., I think this is the position of Leopold Aschenbrenner.

Exhaustive Free Association is a step in a chain of reasoning where the logic goes "It's not A, it's not B, it's not C, it's not D, and I can't think of any more things it could be!"

Oh no, I wonder if I ever made that mistake.

Security Mindset

Hmm, no, I think I understand that point pretty well...

They listed out the main ways in which an AI could kill everyone (pandemic, nuclear war, chemical weapons) and decided none of those would be particularly likely to work

Definitely not it, I have a whole rant about it. (Come to think of it, that rant also covers the security-mindset thing.)

They perform an EFA to decide which traits to look for, and then they perform an EFA over different "theories of consciousness" in order to try and calculate the relative welfare ranges of different animals.

I don't think I ever published any EFAs, so I should be in the clear here.

The Fatima Sun Miracle

Oh, I'm not even religious.

Phew! I was pretty worried there for a moment, but no, looks like I know to avoid that fallacy.