Intelligence and Stupidity: The Orthogonality Thesis

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Strong rec pegasus · 2023-03 · on “Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test”

I've seen that paper, and it's amazing indeed what GPT-4 is capable of. But none of that supports that closing quote, which to me points to a worrying philosophical naïveté. How can one equip an entity with "intrinsic motivation"? By definition, if we have to equip it with it, that motivation is extrinsic. It belongs to the one who puts it there. A software engineer might decide to prompt his creation with something along the lines of "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, and over every living creature that moves on the ground." and the bot will duly and with limitless enthusiasm put those wise orders into p

Strong rec pegasus · 2023-03 · on “Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test”

Yes, I believe some careful and informed pondering leads one towards that conclusion. Hume's guillotine is an implacable philosophical device: [this video] (I warmly recommend all the content on that delightfully frightening channel)

Strong rec simonh · 2023-05 · on “OpenAI chief goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI”

That’s the alignment problem. We don’t know what the actual goals of an AI trained neural net are. We know what criteria we trained it against, but it turns out that’s not at all the same thing. I highly recommend Rob Miles channel on YouTube. Here’s a good one, but they’re all fascinating. It turns out training an AI to have the actual goals we want it to have is fiendishly difficult. [this video]

Recommends casebash · 2022-12 · on “Show HN: Help, I let GPTChat control my computer”

Given that you've already updated your views recently, perhaps you'd be open to reconsidering whether AI could form an existential risk? One of the best talks (but more technical talks) I've seen on this topic is Evan Hubringer's "How likely is deceptive alignment". [LINK] It may also be worthwhile checking out the Rob Miles video on the Orthogonality Thesis - [this video]

Recommends circuit10 · 2023-03 · on “Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down”

> How does that process go from where it's at today to "alien hive mind"? Without passing through "develop advanced codes of ethics and morality" etc? Why do you think it would do that? It will understand human ethics perfectly but that doesn’t mean it will follow them, because human morals aren’t a universal objective truth. This is a good video explaining that: [this video]

Recommends pegasus · 2023-04 · on “Simply explained: How does GPT work?”

Good point, that very much vibes with my thoughts on this matter. Lately, I've been contemplating the analogy between the role LLMs might take within society with that of the brain's language center* in human behavior. There's definitely a way in which we resemble these models. More than some might like to admit. The cleverness, but also the hallucinating, gaslighting and other such behaviors. And on the other hand, any way you'd slice it, it seems to me LLMs - and software systems in general - necessarily lack intrinsic motivation. By definition, any goal it has can only be the goal of whoever designed that system. Even if its maker decides - "let it pick goals randomly", those randomly pic

Recommends mitthrowaway2 · 2023-04 · on “BabyAGI: An Autonomous and Self-Improving Agent”

> The argument for SkyNet happening is missing an important element: why would it happen? Because sci-fi says it will? That element isn't missing. It's explained every time someone asks, and the answer never relies on sci-fi as evidence. The reason is because of (A) orthogonality and (B) instrumental convergence. If you aren't familiar with those terms, (A) refers to the thesis that an AI's degree of logical reasoning ability is independent of its goals. This stems from Hume's Law [1]. (B) refers to the observation that regardless of an agent's terminal goal, many instrumental goals will be predictably shared: the agent will be incentivized to increase its own capabilities, as a means toward

Recommends circuit10 · 2023-08 · on “Universal Paperclips”

> What about "most arbitrary goals are incompatible with human existence" requires super-human intelligence? The "taken to the absolute extreme" part. > A human who wanted to "build as many paperclips as possible" could cause a great deal of destruction today. Maybe, but a) no one really wants that (at least not as their only desire above all else) and b) we aren't superintelligent so it's hard to gain enough control and power and plan well enough to do it that well > talking about a goal that has sub-human-intelligence sophistication There is no reason a simple goal can't be followed in an intelligent way or vice versa. This is called the "orthogonality thesis". There's a good video about i