Or even that iterative garbage gets progressively worse.
This is a particularly head-slapping genre of posting. “The experts are so deep in their norms that it takes an outsider like me with literally no knowledge or understanding to explain that they are actually discussing nothing at all.”
It’s very effective because if you tell someone they need to have a tiny bit of an idea what they are talking about, they can just say they don’t want to take on the mistaken framing.
Yeah there was a time when many of them at least *tried* to pretend that they weren't just bigots dressed in pseudo-intellectual language, but that time seems to have passed. The more insular and irrelevant they become the less they feel the need to hide it.
EDIT: [aaaaaaaaaaaand there it is](https://i.imgur.com/w99wUYB.png)
This has nothing to do with the alignment problem, he’s complaining
that AI ethicists are too woke and biased towards the left. He’s a
right-wing crank but he has a bit of a point.
AI, left to its own devices, will be biased towards (a) the interests
of the big corporation that fund it and (b) whatever random crap it
hoovers up from the internet as training data. AI ethicists are alarmed
by this and want to move the bias settings to something more pro-social.
Since this guy is a wingnut, he thinks that’s bad.
That *is* the alignment problem though. Saying AI will be misaligned is just saying "AI will be imperfectly coded and end up doing things we don't want". There is another word for this: A software bug. Obviously Ai won't be bug-free, so it will inevitably be "misaligned".
The trick is that this misalignment (aka bugginess) is then equated with misalignment in the sense of "single minded goal-seeking demon that will inevitably take over the world", based on a series of highly flimsy and questionable assumptions.
It's a bit deeper than software bugs since most bugs come about by accident and there exists a bug-free version of the program that implements your specification in theory.
In the case of AI alignment we don't even know if a "bug free" implementation of it is possible in principle as that basically requires you to find a way to code human ethics in a rigorous and absolutely air tight way.
This is a false dichotomy. Regular code *also* has negative externalities that make it impossible to be perfect. for example if you make a search engine, people could use it to get radicalised, to find terrorist partners, etc. You could also say that to make a search engine you need to "code human ethics in a rigorous and air tight way".
Preventing serious damage from AI does not require you to "solve all of human ethics", the same way you don't need to do that when you make a search engine. You just need to make it good enough that the damage from resulting bugs or externalities is minimal.
Fair enough. I guess you could say that misalignment incorporates both bugs and negative externalities, with the former describing behaviour against the wishes of the coders, and latter describing behaviour against the wishes of society in general.
An example of the former would be if you put out a robot vacuum cleaner with rewards for cleaning mess that starts smashing things in order to make messes. Describing this as a software bug is entirely accurate.
I think it's not. It may seem that way because it looks like a very simple situation that we can phrase in a sort of algorithmic way ("if future().dirt < now.dirt: do ") but if the actual mapping of sensory data to concepts like "dirty" and the planning algorithm are learned rather than coded I don't see a sharp line separating this from an AI interacting with any other kind of real world situation and acting in an unpredicted and bad manner because the humans who made it could not possibly have predicted every possible situation - and not having to do that is the whole point of machine learning, otherwise you could just hard code every action.
When I program a roomba with regular non-AI techniques, it *also* gets confronted with real world, unknown, unpredicted situtations, and can go wrong in unexpected ways. All you're doing with ML is making the code behind it more complicated and harder to "debug".
The difference is that when you program the Roomba you are trying to think of every possible situation it could end up in - at least grouped in roughly appropriate categories like "hit an obstacle" or "jammed the front wheel" whereas in machine learning the "developer" offloads that intellectual labor to the machine and just checks if it behaves appropriately in test cases. In case of the programmed Roomba you could come up with an imagined scenario and ask the dev what it'd do in that case and the dev, knowing their code, could answer you. In case of the machine learning robot noone could really give you that answer, you have to test it.
>you could come up with an imagined scenario and ask the dev what it'd do in that case and the dev, knowing their code, could answer you.
This is not always true. For example, if the roomba is solving a series of complex equations to implement a travelling salesman algorithm, then the dev won't be able to predict it's actions, because he can't do those calculations himself. The only way to know if it works is to test it, then tweak it if the initial parameters cause issues. An ML system is similar, just with more complicated and opaque algorithmic methods.
I'm not denying that there is a smooth transition for how much thinking is happening in the machine vs. in the person who programmed it. But the whole point of machine learning as a field is to push it into the former as far as possible.
I understood his point to be "the woke researchers are targeting bad standards for their AI."
IMO it's fair to call the alignment problem tangential to this point—this is a person strictly complaining about the set of human standards being used to judge AIs.
You could have a "bug-free" (aligned) AI from the point of view of its creators, and this person would still be complaining because that AI doesn't match his biases.
>That *is* the alignment problem though.
Not really. The alignment problem and the bias problem are two very different things.
"Alignment" is the sort of thing we should be sneering at. The term was invented by LessWrong types, and presupposes a superpowerful intelligence that can have arbitrary goals. It's basically imaginary, since we don't have AIs like that yet. People who talk about alignment worry that soon we will create an AI that will blithely destroy humanity in the service of some inhuman goal.
The AI bias problem, by contrast, is very real in the present day. We don't have destroy-the-world AI, but we do have compute-all-kinds-of-spurious-correlation AI that is used for real decision making.
These aren't *entirely* unrelated things, but they are very different sorts of concerns.
"alignment" is a spooky word that was made up to make the concept of bugs and negative externalities seem like a mysterious, unsolvable problem. I'm pointing out that it's not spooky, that their definition of misalignment applies to present day "dumb AI" as well, with examples such as AI bias. Badly designed AI systems absolutely will continue to do damage to society in the future! Theres just no reason to assume there will suddenly be a step change where the damage is world-ending.
You’d think a rationalist would be able to understand the concept of “garbage in, garbage out”, but I guess not
This has nothing to do with the alignment problem, he’s complaining that AI ethicists are too woke and biased towards the left. He’s a right-wing crank but he has a bit of a point.
AI, left to its own devices, will be biased towards (a) the interests of the big corporation that fund it and (b) whatever random crap it hoovers up from the internet as training data. AI ethicists are alarmed by this and want to move the bias settings to something more pro-social. Since this guy is a wingnut, he thinks that’s bad.
roko in the quote-tweets like he doesn’t know exactly what he did
“When these people say harm they don’t mean scientists have quantified the lost QALYs, they mean the evil eye”
Why do these people keep reminding me of that “I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people” editorial?
Lol, this point would be bullshit, even if google hnd not fired their AI people who were worried about this thing.
Anyway love his source