All of Roko's Comments + Replies

Great post. Personally I think the "computational social choice" angle is unerexplored.

I think CSC can gradually morph itself into CEV and that's how we solve AI Goalcraft.

2Steve Byrnes
That sounds lovely if it’s true, but I think it’s a much more ambitious vision of CSC than people usually have in mind. In particular, CSC (as I understand it) usually takes people’s preferences as a given, so if somebody wants something they wouldn’t want upon reflection, and maybe they’re opposed to doing that reflection because their preferences were always more about signaling etc., well then that’s not really in the traditional domain of CSC, but CEV says we ought to sort that out (and I think I agree). More discussion in the last two paragraphs of this comment of mine.

"If the world were unified around the priority of minimizing global catastrophic risk, I think that we could reduce risk significantly further by implementing a global, long-lasting, and effectively enforced pause on frontier AI development—including a moratorium on the development and production of some types of computing hardware"

This really needs to be shouted from the rooftops. In the public sphere, people will hear "responsible scaling policy" as "It's maximally safe to keep pushing ahead with AI" rather than "We are taking on huge risks because politicians can't be bothered to coordinate".

This really needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

I disagree. I think it's important that we shout from the rooftops that the existential risk from AI is real, but I disagree that we should shout from the rooftops that a sufficiently good pause would solve it (even though I agree with Paul that it is true). I talk about this in this comment.

Historically, I think that a lot of causes have been hurt by a sort of purity-testing where scientists are forced to endorse the most extreme policy, even if it's not the best policy, on the idea that it would solve ... (read more)

It seems to me that using a combination of execution time, memory use and program length mostly kills this set of arguments.

Something like a game-of-life initial configuration that leads to the eventual evolution of intelligent game-of-life aliens who then strategically feed outputs into GoL in order to manipulate you may have very good complexity performance, but both the speed and memory are going to be pretty awful. The fixed cost in memory and execution steps of essentially simulating an entire universe is huge.

But yes, the pure complexity prior certai... (read more)

3Tomáš Gavenčiak
Complexity indeed matters: the universe seems to be bounded in both time and space, so running anything like Solomonoff prior algorithm (in one of its variants) or AIXI may be outright impossible for any non-trivial model. This for me significantly weakens or changes some of the implications. A Fermi upper bound of the direct Solomonoff/AIXI algorithm trying TMs in the order of increasing complexity: even if checking one TM took one Planck time on one atom, you could only check cca 10^250=2^800 machines within a lifetime of the universe (~10^110 years until Heat death), so the machines you could even look at have description complexity a meager 800 bits. * You could likely speed the greedy search up, but note that most algorithmic speedups do not have a large effect on the exponent (even multiplying the exponent with constants is not very helpful). * Significantly narrowing down the space of TMs to a narrow subclass may help, but then we need to take look at the particular (small) class of TMs rather than have intuitions about all TMs. (And the class would need to be really narrow - see below). * Due to the Church-Turing thesis, any limiting the scope of the search is likely not very effective, as you can embed arbitrary programs (and thus arbitrary complexity) in anything that is strong enough to be a TM interpreter (which the universe is in multiple ways). * It may be hypothetically possible to search for the "right" TMS without examining them individually (witch some future tech, e.g. how sci-fi imagined quantum computing), but if such speedup is possible, any TMs modelling the universe would need to be able to contain this. This would increase any evaluation complexity of the TMs, making them more significantly costly than the Planck time I assumed above (would need a finer Fermi estimate with more complex assumptions?).