I've written several posts about the plausible implications of "evidential cooperation in large worlds" (ECL), on my newly-revived blog. This is a cross-post of the first. If you want to see the rest of the posts, you can either go to the blog or click through the links in this one.
All of the content on my blog, including this post, only represent my own views — not those of my employer. (Currently Open Philanthropy.)
“ECL” is short for “evidential cooperation in large worlds”. It’s an idea that was originally introduced in Oesterheld (2017) (under the name of “multiverse-wide superrationality”). This post will explore implications of ECL, but it won’t explain the idea itself. If you haven’t encountered it before, you can read the paper linked above or this summary written by Lukas Gloor.[1]
This post lists all candidates for decision-relevant implications of ECL that I know about and think are plausibly important.[2] In this post, I will not describe in much depth why they might be implications of ECL. Instead, I will lean on the principle that ECL recommends that we (and other ECL-sympathetic actors) act to benefit the values of people whose decisions might correlate with our decisions.
As described in this appendix, this relies on you and others having particular kinds of values. For one, I assume that you care about what happens outside our light cone. But more strongly, I’m looking at values with the following property: If you could have a sufficiently large impact outside our lightcone, then the value of taking different actions would be dominated by the impact that those actions had outside our lightcone. I’ll refer to this as “universe-wide values”. Even if all your values aren’t universe-wide, I suspect that the implications will still be relevant to you if you have some universe-wide values.
This is speculative stuff, and I’m not particularly confident that I will have gotten any particular claim right.
For at least two reasons, future actors will be in a better position to act on ECL than we are. Firstly, they will know a lot more about what other value-systems are out there. Secondly, they will be facing immediate decisions about what to do with the universe, which should be informed by what other civilizations would prefer.[3] This suggests that it could be important for us to Affect whether (and how) future actors do ECL. This can be decomposed into two sub-points that deserve separate attention: how we might be able to affect Futures with aligned AI, and how we might be able to affect Futures with misaligned AI.
But separately from influencing future actors, ECL also changes our own priorities, today. In particular, ECL suggests that we should care more about other actors’ universe-wide values. When evaluating these implications, we can look separately at three different classes of actors and their values. I’ll separately consider how ECL suggests that we should…
(For more details on the split between humans/evolved-aliens/misaligned-AI and why I chose it, see this appendix.)
If we take ECL seriously,[6] I think it’s really important that humanity eventually understands these topics deeply, and can make wise decisions about them. But for most questions about what humanity should eventually do, I’m inclined to defer them to the future. I’m interested in whether there’s anything that urgently needs to be done.
One way to affect things is to increase the probability that humanity ends up building a healthy and philosophically competent civilization. (But we already knew that was important.)
There might also be ways in which humanity could irreversibly mess up in the near-term that are unique to decision theory. For example, people could make unwise commitments if they perceive themselves to be in commitment races.[7] Or there might be ways in which people could learn too much information, too early. (We don’t currently have any formalized decision theories that can’t be harmed by learning information. For example, people who use evidential decision theory can only influence things that they haven’t yet learned about — which means that information can make them lose power.) (C.f. this later post on when EDT seeks out or avoids certain information.) It’s possible that careful thinking could reduce such risks.[8] (For example, perhaps it would be good to prevent early AI systems from thinking about these topics until they and we are more competent.)
How is ECL relevant for this? Broadly, it seems like ECL is an important part of the puzzle for what various decision theories recommend. So learning more about ECL seems like it could help clarify the picture, here, and clarify what intervention points exist. (This also applies to futures with misaligned AI.)
(For related discussion in Oesterheld (2017), see section 4.5 on researching and promoting ECL and 4.6.3 on making AI act according to ECL.)
Affecting how misaligned AI does ECL is also an intervention point.
I think ECL could play a couple of different roles, here:
Let’s temporarily assume that humanity will avoid both near-term extinction and AI takeover. Even then, the value of the future could depend a lot on which human values will be empowered to decide what’s to be done with all the matter, space, and time in our lightcone.
If someone had an opportunity to influence this (e.g. by promoting certain values), ECL would generally be positive on empowering universe-wide values (that are compatible with good decision-theoretic reasoning), since for any such values:
If you were previously concerned about promoting any particular universe-wide values, this means that you should now be somewhat less fussed about promoting those values in particular, as opposed to any other universe-wide values. In struggles for influence that are mainly a struggle about universe-wide values, you should care less about who wins.
(This is related to discussion about moral advocacy in section 4.2 of Oesterheld (2017); especially 4.2.7.)
Here’s a slightly more worked-out gesture at why ECL would recommend this.
(In order to work out how much less you’d want to invest in the 0-sum fight, you’d want to think about the ratio between “how much evidence am I providing that supporters of faction A will invest in the public good” to “how much evidence am I providing that supports of faction B will invest in the public good”.[9] I’m only illustrating the directional argument, here.)
While I believe the ECL argument works here, it doesn’t currently seem very decision-relevant to me. Competitions that could be important for the future (e.g. competition between AI labs or between US and China) don’t seem well-characterized as conflicts between universe-wide value-systems. At least my personal opinions about them are mostly about who’s more/less likely to cause an (uncontroversial) x-risk along the way; and perhaps about who’s more/less likely to help create a society that adopts reasonably impartial values and become sufficiently philosophically sophisticated to enact the best version of them.
That said, for someone who was previously obsessed with boosting a particular value-system (e.g. spreading hedonistic utilitarianism, or personally acquiring power for impartial ends), I think ECL should nudge that motivation toward being somewhat more inclusive of other universe-wide values.
(Terms are defined as here: “Upside-focused values” are values that in our empirical situation recommend focusing on bringing about lots of positive values. “Downside-focused values” are values that in our empirical situation recommend working on interventions that make bad things less likely, typically reducing suffering.)
If we look beyond struggles for influence and resources, and instead look for any groups of humans who have different universe-wide values, and where this leads to different real-world priorities, the two groups that stand out are upside-focused and downside-focused longtermists. For these groups, we also have actual examples of both upside- and downside-focused people thinking about ECL-considerations in a similar way. Which makes the ECL-argument more robust.
It seems good for people to know about and bear this in mind. For example, it means that upside- and downside-focused people should:
As usual, the ECL-argument here is: If you choose to take any of these actions, then that’s evidence that distant people with the other value-system will choose to take analogous actions to benefit your favorite value-system.
How strong is this effect? I’m not sure. What follows is a few paragraphs of speculation. (Flag: These paragraphs rely even more on pre-existing knowledge about ECL than the rest of the post.)
Ultimately, it depends on the degree to which humans correlate relatively more with the decisions of people with shared values vs. different values, on this type of decision.
I.e., the question is: If someone with mostly upside-focused values decides to do something that benefits downside-focused values, how much evidence is this that (i) distant upside-focused people will help out people with downside-focused values, vs. (ii) distant downside-focused people will help out people with upside-focused values. (From the perspective of the person who makes the decision.)
If it’s similarly much evidence for both propositions, then upside-focused and downside-focused people should be similarly inclined to benefit each others’ values as to benefit their own values.[10]
Here’s an argument in favor of this: Regardless of whether you have upside-focused or downside-focused values, the ECL argument (that you should care about the others’ values) is highly similar. So it seems like there’s no large dependence on what values you have. Accordingly, it seems like your decision should be equally much evidence for how other people act, regardless of what values they have.
Here’s a counter-argument: When you’re making any particular decision, perhaps you are getting disproportionately much evidence about how actors that are especially similar to you tend to feel about ECL-based cooperation-arguments in especially similar situations. (After all: Most of your evidence about how likely people are to act on ECL-arguments in general will come from observations about what decisions other people make.) And perhaps an important component of “especially similar” is that those actors would share your values.[11]
(For some more of my speculation, including some counter-arguments to that last paragraph, see the post Are our choices analogous to AI choices?, which discusses a similar question but with regards to correlating with AI instead of with humans. A relatively less likely proposition. Nevertheless — similar considerations come up. See also section 3.1 in Oesterheld (2017) on orthogonality of rationality and values.)
Overall, I feel quite uncertain here. This uncertainty corresponds to a sense that my actions are somewhat less evidence for the decisions of people who don’t share my values, but not a huge amount less. Summing over my uncertainty, I feel like my decisions are ≥10% as much evidence for the decisions of people who don’t share my value (as they are evidence for the decisions of people who share my values) — which would imply that I should care ≥10% as much about their values as I care about my own.[12]
ECL also recommends caring more about alien civilizations. Here are three different implications of this.
A minor consequence of this is: You might want to prioritize non-AI extinction risk slightly less highly than before. Because if Earth doesn’t colonize the universe, some of that space will (in expectation) get colonized by alien civilizations instead, to their benefit.
If we were to trade like-for-like, the story would be: If we prioritize non-AI extinction risk slightly less highly (and put higher priority on making sure that space colonization is good if it does happen), then that’s evidence that distant aliens also prioritize non-AI extinction risk slightly less highly. If this leads to their extinction, and their neighbors share our values, then civilizations with our values will recover some of that empty space.[13]
I think this effect seems minor (unlikely to make non-AI extinction less than half as useful as you previously thought).
This is mainly because ECL doesn’t recommend us to care as much about alien values as we care about human values.[14] I would be surprised if ECL recommended that we prioritize random alien values more than half as much as our own, which suggests that even if aliens were guaranteed to colonize space in our place, at least ½ of value would be lost from our failure to do so.
An additional consideration is that aliens are (probably) not common enough to take over all space that we would have missed. I think the relevant comparison is between “space we could get to before aliens” (i.e. the total amount of space that humanity would get access to if space is defense-dominant) vs. “space that only we could get to” (i.e. the space that humanity would get access to without excluding any aliens from it, such that we would want to get there even if we cared just as much about alien’s values as our own values).
Also, as I discuss below, ECL might similarly motivate us to prioritize AI takeover less highly. Since this is the most salient alternative priority to “non-AI extinction risk” on a longtermist view, they partly cancel out.
A different way in which we could benefit aliens is to increase the probability that Earth-originating intelligence benefits them (if Earth-originating intelligence doesn’t go extinct). This could apply to either aliens that we physically meet in space, or to distant aliens that we can’t causally interact with.
I typically think about such interventions as a special kind of “cooperative AI”-intervention — increasing the probability that AIs are inclined to seek out win-win opportunities with other value systems. See this post for more discussion of this. The brief summary is: ECL could plausibly increase the value of interventions that aim to make misaligned AI treat alien civilizations better by ~1.5-10x.
This is the item on the list that I’ve thought the least about. But I recently realized that it passes my bar of being a “plausibly important implication”, so I’ll briefly mention it.
As argued in section 4.1.1 of Oesterheld (2017), ECL suggests that we should give greater weight to “universalist values” over idiosyncratic concerns. (Note that “universalist values” does not mean the same thing as universe-wide values. Universalist values are values that are highly common across the universe.)
While I but the basic argument for this principle, I didn’t initially see any decision-relevant applications of this.
For example, one idiosyncratic value is to care especially much about yourself, and less about others. But in order for the argument to apply here, we require that the tradeoff rate between altruistic values and selfish values is sensitive to abstract arguments about the altruistic stakes involved. At least for me personally, I intuitively feel like learning about the potential size of the far future should have ~“maxed out” the degree to which abstract knowledge of high altruistic stakes will compel me to act more altruistically and less selfishly. Such that there’s not a lot of room left for ECL to move me.
Another example is that it affects what precise form of moral advocacy we should be interested in, insofar as we’re pursuing moral advocacy to influence long-term values. But I don’t currently think that it seems like a high-priority intervention to advocate for highly specific values, with the purpose of influencing long-term values. (I think it’s relatively more promising to do “moral advocacy to change near-term behavior” or “advocating for good principles of ethical deliberation”. But I don’t think that the value of those interventions are very sensitive to whether ECL recommends universal values over idiosyncratic values.)
But here’s a scenario where this consideration might matter. Some people’s views on ethics has an asymmetry between positive visions of the future and negative visions of the future. Where positive visions need to get a lot of complex, human-specific things right, in order to satisfy human’s highly contingent, highly complex values. Whereas negative visions only need suffering — and then that’s already bad.[15]
If this is your view, then a plausible corollary could be: there are many more aliens across the universe who share your concern for suffering, then who share your vision for a positive future.
And if that’s true, then you could potentially get gains-from-trade from everyone putting relatively more attention into reducing suffering (which is appreciated by everyone) and relatively less attention on bringing about highly complex positive future visions (which is only appreciated by a relatively small fraction).
How large is this effect?
So for example: If you thought that 10x more actors shared your conception of suffering than your conception of a good future, but that those actors were less similar to you and therefore correlated with you 2x less on average, then that would increase the value of suffering-focused interventions by 5x.
More speculatively, ECL might recommend that we care more about the universe-wide values of distant misaligned AIs.[16] Why is this more speculative? In order for ECL to give us reason to benefit AIs, we would have to be similar enough to those AIs that our decisions have some acausal influence on their decisions. If we assume evidential decision theory, this means that our decision needs to give some evidence for what distant misaligned AIs choose to do. And intuitively, it seems less likely that our decisions provide evidence about distant misaligned AI’s actions than that it provides evidence about the actions of distant aliens. (Since AIs’ minds probably differ more from ours, and since the decision-situations they are likely to find themselves in differ more from ours.)
I feel uncertain about whether ECL says we should care more about the values of distant AIs. If it did, here are two conclusions.
One potential implication could be that we should prioritize AI takeover risk slightly less highly: Because although it would be bad for misaligned AI to seize power, it would at least be slightly good that the AI gets to implement its own values, as long as those values were endorsed by many distant ECL-sympathetic AIs. (Since us benefiting their values, in this way, would be evidence that they make decisions to benefit our values — or at least that’s the hypothetical we’re considering.)
However, this effect seems minor (unlikely to make misalignment reduction less than half as useful as you previously thought). Because:
Also, as discussed above, ECL might similarly motivate us to prioritize non-AI extinction less highly. (Which is the most salient alternative priority to misalignment risk, on a longtermist view.)
A different way in which we could benefit distant misaligned AIs’ universe-wide values is to adjust how we build AI so that if humanity ends up building AI that is misaligned with our own values, then it’s more likely to successfully optimize for values that distant misaligned AIs would approve of. Unfortunately, it seems very difficult to work out what sort of changes would be good and what sort of changes would be bad, here.
For more writing on this, see here.
I’m following up this post with two other posts:
I'd say this post is roughly: advice to people whose values are such that, if they were to grant that their actions acausally affected an enormous number of worlds quite different from their own, they would say that a large majority of the impact they cared about was impact on those distant worlds.
Importantly, it's also advice to people who endorse some type of moral uncertainty or pluralism, and have components of their values that behave like that. Then it's advice for what that value-component should advocate and bargain for. (I think this is probably a more realistic account of most humans’ values.)
(Though one of the many places where I haven't thought about the details is: If you are trying to acausally influence agents with universe-wide values, does it pose any extra troubles if you yourself only have partially universe-wide values and do some messy compromise thing?)
I’ll use “universe-wide” values as a shorthand for these types of values. (“Multiverse-wide” would also be fine terminology — but I think caring about a spatially large universe is sufficient.)
(For previous discussion of what values are necessary for ECL, see section 3.2 in Oesterheld (2017).)
Above, I separately consider how ECL suggests that we should care more about:
This raises two questions:
When I talk about benefiting other humans’ universe-wide values, I don’t mean to imply that we’re acausally cooperating with just the local humans on our own planet Earth. I think almost all the benefits come via evidence that very distant actors behave more cooperatively. Such actors could be either quite similar to humans or quite unlike humans (in at least some ways).
So why talk specifically about the universe-wide values of “other humans”, rather than the broader group of aliens?
The answer is that universe-wide values held by other humans has a number of unique properties:
This is quite different from non-human values, where we have to resort to more basic guesses about their preferences, like:
First, a terminological note: “Misaligned AI” refers to AI whose values are very different from what was intended by the evolved species that first created them. If a distant species has very different values from us, and successfully aligns AI systems that they create, I’d count those as “aligned” AIs.
(“Aligned AIs” themselves will, of course, have the same values as evolved aliens. Benefiting their values would be the same as benefitting the values of some evolved aliens, so they don’t need a separate category.)
Now, why do I separately consider the values of evolved aliens and misaligned AIs? There are two reasons.
Firstly, compared to AI, evolved aliens probably have minds that are more similar to ours, and face decisions that are more similar to ours. Thus, there’s a stronger case that our decisions correlate more with their decisions, making the case for ECL-based cooperation stronger.
Second, AI progress is currently fast, and I have less than perfect confidence in humanity’s ability to only create and empower aligned AI systems. This (ominously) suggests that we may soon have unique opportunities to benefit or harm the values of misaligned AI systems.
For helpful comments and suggestions on this and related posts, thanks to Caspar Oesterheld, Emery Cooper, Lukas Gloor, Tom Davidson, Joe Carlsmith, Linh Chi Nguyen, Daniel Kokotajlo, Jesse Clifton, Richard Ngo, Anthony DiGiovanni, Charlotte, Tristan Cook, Sylvester Kollin, and Alexa Pan.
For even more references, see all the content gathered on this page, and more recently, this post written by Paul Christiano and this paper by Johannes Treutlein.
If you know any plausible implication that I don’t list here — then either I don’t buy that it’s an implication of ECL, or it doesn’t seem sufficiently decision-relevant to me, or I haven’t thought about it / forgot about it and you should let me know.
Whereas today, we can focus on handing-off the future to a broadly competent and healthy civilization, and trust decisions about what to do with the future to them.
When I discuss how we should “care more about other humans’ universe-wide values”, I exclusively refer to universe-wide values held by humans on our current planet Earth, as opposed to values that might be held by distant human-like species. But the reason to benefit such values is to generate evidence that other people benefit our values on distant planets (not just here, on planet Earth). So why focus specifically on humans’ values? The reason is that we are more confident that some people treasure them, and it’s easy to benefit them via supporting humans who support them. For more, see here.
“Misaligned AI” refers to AI whose values are very different from what was intended by the evolved species that first created them. If a distant species has very different values from us, and successfully aligns AI systems that they create, I wouldn’t count those as “misaligned AIs”.
Or any other kind of acausal effects.
Premature commitments are often a gamble that might gain you a better bargaining position while carrying a risk of everyone getting a lower payoff. Since that’s quite uncooperative, it seems plausible that ECL could discourage premature commitments. So this might be a reason to spread knowledge about ECL.
Though also possible that uncareful thinking could increase them — given that they are by-their-nature caused by humanity making errors in what order they learn about and commit to doing certain things.
And ideally, you would also think about other opportunities that faction A and faction B would have of benefiting each other, since you might also be providing evidence about those. Even more ideally, you might think about possible gains from trades that involve even more factions.
Though the total effort that goes to each should perhaps still be allocated based on the number of people who support each set of values and who are sympathetic to ECL. Potentially adjusted by speculation about whether either set of values is underrepresented (among ECL-sympathizers) on Earth compared to the universe-at-large, in which case we should prioritize that set of values higher.
It will be the most evidence for the actions of people in exactly my position. But this is not where most of my acausal influence will come from, since even a small amount of evidence across a sufficiently larger number of actors will weigh higher. The hypothesis that I’m putting forward here is that there might be some fairly broad class of actors which still share some key similarities with you, whose decisions your decisions provide more evidence about. And that your values might be (or be correlated with) one of the key similarities.
Though I am personally somewhat sympathetic to both upside- and downside-focused values, so this doesn’t have a big impact on my all-things-considered view.
Even if the aliens who went extinct shared our values, their choice to prioritize non-AI extinction risk less could still have been net-positive ex-ante. For example, they might have reallocated resources in a way that reduced AI takeover risk by 0.1% and increased non-AI extinction risk by 0.1001%. The added 0.0001% of x-risk might have been worth the benefit of leaving behind empty space rather than AI-controlled space in 0.1% of worlds.
In particular, ECL suggests that we should discount benefits to aliens insofar as they on average correlate less strongly with us than the average civilizations-with-our-values do. (When making relevant decisions.)
As an example of someone with this view: This facebook post by Eliezer Yudkowsky starts “I think that I care about things that would, in your native mental ontology, be imagined as having a sort of tangible red-experience or green-experience, and I prefer such beings not to have pain-experiences. Happiness I value highly is more complicated.” Yudkowsky has also written about the complexity and fragility of value elsewhere, e.g. here.
“Misaligned AI” refers to AI whose values are very different from what was intended by the evolved species that first created them. If a distant species has very different values from us, and successfully aligns AI systems that they create, I wouldn’t count those as “misaligned AIs”.
In particular, ECL suggests that we should discount benefits to AI insofar as they correlate less strongly with us than actors-with-our-values do.