Alignment Newsletter #171: Disagreements between alignment "optimists" and "pessimists‪"‬ Alignment Newsletter Podcast

Recorded by Robert Miles: http://robertskmiles.com
More information about the newsletter here: https://rohinshah.com/alignment-newsletter/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfGGFXwKpr-TJ5HfxEFaFCg
 
HIGHLIGHTS Alignment difficulty (Richard Ngo and Eliezer Yudkowsky) (summarized by Rohin): Eliezer is known for being pessimistic about our chances of averting AI catastrophe. His argument in this dialogue is roughly as follows:
1. We are very likely going to keep improving AI capabilities until we reach AGI, at which point either the world is destroyed, or we use the AI system to take some pivotal act before some careless actor destroys the world.
2. In either case, the AI system must be producing high-impact, world-rewriting plans; such plans are “consequentialist” in that the simplest way to get them (and thus, the one we will first build) is if you are forecasting what might happen, thinking about the expected consequences, considering possible obstacles, searching for routes around the obstacles, etc. If you don’t do this sort of reasoning, your plan goes off the rails very quickly - it is highly unlikely to lead to high impact. In particular, long lists of shallow heuristics (as with current deep learning systems) are unlikely to be enough to produce high-impact plans.
3. We’re producing AI systems by selecting for systems that can do impressive stuff, which will eventually produce AI systems that can accomplish high-impact plans using a general underlying “consequentialist”-style reasoning process (because that’s the only way to keep doing more impressive stuff). However, this selection process does not constrain the goals towards which those plans are aimed. In addition, most goals seem to have convergent instrumental subgoals like survival and power-seeking that would lead to extinction. This suggests that we should expect an existential catastrophe by default.
4. None of the methods people have suggested for avoiding this outcome seem like they actually avert this story.
Richard responds to this with a few distinct points:
1. It might be possible to build AI systems which are not of world-destroying intelligence and agency, that humans use to save the world. For example, we could make AI systems that do better alignment research. Such AI systems do not seem to require the property of making long-term plans in the real world in point (3) above, and so could plausibly be safe.
2. It might be possible to build general AI systems that only state plans for achieving a goal of interest that we specify, without executing that plan.
3. It seems possible to create consequentialist systems with constraints upon their reasoning that lead to reduced risk.
4. It also seems possible to create systems with the primary aim of producing plans with certain properties (that aren't just about outcomes in the world) -- think for example of corrigibility (AN #35) or deference to a human user.
5. (Richard is also more bullish on coordinating not to use powerful and/or risky AI systems, though the debate did not discuss this much.)
Eliezer’s responses:
1. AI systems that help with alignment research to such a degree that it actually makes a difference are almost certainly already dangerous.
2. It is the plan itself that is risky; if the AI system made a plan for a goal that wasn’t the one we actually meant, and we don’t understand that plan, that plan can still cause extinction. It is the misaligned optimization that produced the plan that is dangerous.
3 and 4. It is certainly possible to do such things; the space of minds that could be designed is very large. However, it is difficult to do such things, as they tend to make consequentialist reasoning weaker, and on our current trajectory the first AGI that we build will probably not look like that.
This post has also been summarized by others here, though with different emphases than in my summary.