AI "alignment" is a made up field ride with crackpots and charlatans.
The purpose of the course is to give people an introduction to AI risk so that they can start getting into the field. Some who take it have been ML engineers for a while and some are just learning about the field.
The expectation was never to consider yourself a full-fledged alignment researcher once you finish this course, but instead to get people started. Many people will spend a bunch of time doing things like implementing GPT from scratch and replicate papers after this to try to get an internship at one of the big orgs. And then do other things to slowly make their way to producing great research. Sometimes ya’ll just want to hate on this site.
https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/profile/in/jamie-bernardi/
The researcher who has apparently created the syllabus is also a fresh PhD with 3 years of work experience.
It's not taught by James solely, but there's weekly discussion groups on readings chosen by a mix of alums from OpenAI and Oxford's Future Of Humanity Institute.
"None of the material in this nuclear disarmament course even covers how to build a modern hypersonic missile!"
AI is the opposite of all these characteristics. Its access is nearly everyone. The technology is not understood and not predictable. It is a nuclear warhead that thinks for which we don't know what might make it explode.
AI is created and run on computers so AGI risk must by definition be a subset of computer proliferation risk
If there was no manhattan project and work towards that goal had been done in the open over a long period of time, I don't think people with safety concerns would be laughed out of the building.
In fact I think we got kinda lucky that it turns out to be so expensive to build nukes that only nation states can do it, and that the barriers are still prohibitive even then such that we can tell if a country is trying to gain that ability. I'm not sure we could have ruled out the possibility of individuals or small groups being in control of nukes.
This is something I've also realized. Nuclear weapons are undeniably an existential threat but they're in part mitigated because it's very very difficult to get the materials and assemble them. That was complete luck. We got lucky. That's all that saved(es) us.
Imagine if making a nuke was as easy as making a steel sword. Or perhaps, as easy as running Make-Me-Global-Dictator.exe
The problem is that the toolset available to someone who is much more intellectually capable is beyond what we can think of.
People are not afraid of AGI because it will behave like a very smart human, people are afraid of AGI because the capability gap will be more like the one we experience between humans and other animals.
The toolset available to humans when dealing with monkeys is literally incomprehensible to the monkeys.
The toolset available to AGI is similarly incomprehensible to humans.
For a nuclear approach, the AI would only have to hijack the least-hackproof of US, Russian, or Chinese arsenals in order to trigger an exchange from all sides. But it would probably opt for a different method that would do less collateral damage to its own resources.
This has been an issue raised since at least the early 2010s if not before, and so (arguably) predates the most recent round of US political polarization. The core arguments are unchanged, but became more urgent as AIs broke through several milestones thought to be decades out, such as defeating top human Go players, cracking the protein folding problem, and passing the Turing test with flying colors.
Is it possible that a new technology could destroy the world? Of course. It could've turned out that nuclear weapons would incinerate the atmosphere upon detonation, as some were worried they would. It could be that the next technological innovation will kill us, there's nothing prevent it in the laws of physics.
AGI is a specific technology we are worried about, because the whole premise is "once we build something that is extremely capable at a variety of things, one thing it will be capable of is destroying the world. Even by accident."
We're already using AI techniques to help with problems in biology like protein folding. Take it a few dozen iterations forward, and these systems will be helping design medicines and vaccines that no human can do by themselves. At that point, what's to stop the system from creating a super-flu that kills everyone? Forget about intent here, how about a bug?
ChatGPT often misunderstands queries, take something like ChatGPT but 100x more capable, do you really think people won't be using it to do things? And given that they will, it could easily have a bug that "oops, incinerates the atmosphere" as a side effect.
In 1900 there were massive rail stations and harbors. Just say it has to safely receive new train/ship every 10 minutes, and that very well describes the problem.
> better directed at making trains or cars safer.
In Greece there was train collision recently, somehow passenger and cargo train were on the same track. I doubt any advanced "lessons" were applied compared to 100 years earlier.
Most people are ignorant.
1. AI systems respond to incentives, not commands, including incentives you did not intend to be there.
2. The technology will eventually outsmart its creators, making the imposition of reactionary controls difficult or impossible.
#1 was a good bet, and has already been proven with existing ML systems. In fact, it's one of the most common training blunders you can do and there are countless examples of artificial stupidity coming about from poorly thought-out incentives. AI are ruthless optimizers that will find the loopholes in your systems and maximally exploit them[0].
#2 implies significant harm if we get it wrong (and according to #1, we will always get it wrong). It is very plausible that AI will exceed human capability in at least some tasks, since there are already problem domains where AI dominates (e.g. chess, Go, etc).
My main objection to #2 is that the idea of a new structure or machine that exceeds human intelligence is not novel. Humans evolved to live in small tribes of no more than 100 people and we have not exceeded that limitation. So we're already several nested singularities deep[1] and humanity has not yet been destroyed.
On the other hand, humanity itself is a singularity: the system that created us (genetic evolution) is not capable of effectively controlling us anymore. We control it, and have been doing so since the dawn of agriculture. And we can see the harms that we have done to nature in pursuit of our own goals. So it's not irrational to extrapolate and see how an AI with more intelligence than us can do more harm to us.
[0] So are human children, but they do not have the I/O capability of a data center full of A100s.
[1] Agriculture beget civilization, which beget nation-states, which beget corporations, which beget computers. Each one is a singularity unto it's creators.
This is a point I've made. We are playing with paradoxes that proponents tend to ignore. They won't be solvable. The more sophisticated AI becomes, the more non-deterministic behavior arises. The emergent deception has been very interesting.
https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/emergent-deception-optimizat...
I've elaborated on #2 much further here as well - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hubris-trap
We like to perscribe malice to the people spreading false news, but we forget that ultimately its often the recommendation engine that decides which things to highlight and which not to.
If you give an AI a value function that measures engagement perfectly well, and you get a recommendation algorithm that spreads false news and outrage inducing posts, the algorithm did exactly what you asked from it. The problem is that the optimizer didn't optimize for other implicit values you had in mind. (This is one of the key problems discussed in AI alignment)
Of course, this would be strongly contested by proponents of free speech who would say the AI gave us exactly what we wanted. But... did it? Or did the optimizer find a behavior that successfully manipulates people without taking into account the side-effect of radicalization of online discourse? Is that what we really want?
So, I'd say misaligned primitive AI might be already causing serious trouble in the world.
- unpenalized externalities, including carbon emissions, and other environmental effects
- clearly broken tax law which allows some enormously profitable companies to pay very low tax rates
- political donations protected as "speech"
- partisan gerrymandering
These are cases where we made systems with rules, in which agents have incentives, and where the combination of the design of the system and the incentives on participants can cause meaningful harm to the public. In many cases, transparency is meaningfully hindered, and "explanations" of particular outcomes are obscured. Several of the structural issues that AI alignment people care about are present, but the harms are already happening, and yet we seem unable (and AI alignment folk seem comparatively uninterested) in addressing them.
Aside from Basilisk cultists and people play-acting concern for safety and alignment as a PR tactic to push centralized control of AI in support of their own financial self interests (groups which have more overlap than one might expect), the main (non-academic) safety and alignment concerns are more about the kind of systems we do know how to build, and which are seeing increasing deployment deployment demonstrable severe biases that have significant impacts in application and other issues.
So I'm always a little surprised how seriously people take AI safety and alignment concerns about systems we don't yet know how to build, and how uninterested many of those same people are about 'alignment' issues with organizations and institutions we have today. And given our poor success in addressing our current issues, even where good policy proposals exist, why should we believe that technical solutions for AI alignment would be used even if they're researched and well-described?