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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Again I have to quote Boaz Barak (currently OpenAI): AI will change the world, but won’t take it over by playing “3-dimensional chess”.

Consider the task of predicting the consequences of a particular action in the future. In any sufficiently complex real-life scenario, the further away we attempt to predict, the more there is inherent uncertainty. For example, we can use advanced methods to predict the weather over a short time frame, but the further away the prediction, the more the system “regresses to the mean”, and the less advantage that highly complex models have over simpler ones (see Figure 4). As in meteorology, this story seems to play out similarly in macroeconomic forecasting. In general, we expect prediction success to behave like Figure 1 below—the error increases with the horizon until it plateaus to a baseline level of some simple heuristic(s). Hence while initially highly sophisticated models can beat simpler ones by a wide margin, this advantage eventually diminishes with the time horizon.

Tetlock’s first commandment to potential superforecasters is to triage: “Don’t waste time either on “clocklike” questions (where simple rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer) or on impenetrable “cloud-like” questions (where even fancy statistical models can’t beat the dart-throwing chimp). Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most.” Another way to say it is that outside of the Goldilocks zone, more effort or cognitive power does not give much returns.

Rather, based on what we know, it is likely that AI systems will have a “sweet spot” of a not-too-long horizon in which they can provide significant benefits. For strategic and long-term decisions that are far beyond this sweet spot, the superior information processing skills of AIs will give diminishing returns. (Although AIs will likely supply valuable input and analysis to the decision makers.). An AI engineer may well dominate a human engineer (or at least one that is not aided by AI tools), but an AI CEO’s advantage will be much more muted, if any, over its human counterpart. Like our world, such a world will still involve much conflict and competition, with all sides aided by advanced technology, but without one system that dominates all others.

In essence, irreducible error and chaotic events blunt the edge of any superintelligent predictor in a sufficiently high-dimensional environment.

What remains to be answered for me:

  1. Can AI planners interfere in the events with enough frequency and precision to proactively suppress chaos and reduce the world to a game of chess they can model to the draw?
  2. Is a decently superhuman prediction and execution not enough to eliminate warm, simply because humans are already close to this level and only initiate wars they won't win (instead of pragmatically retreating to some defensible compromise) in feats of retardation (see: Russia)?

This is definitely where I start to quibble with the concept of "superintelligence" as synonymous with "omniscient."

Irreducible error because your sensors aren't precise enough to resolve every single detail you need to make 'perfect' decisions and chaotic events that can't be predicted without spending WAY too much effort.

ALL THAT SAID, I do think that an AI that is able to formulate a long term goal will be RIDICULOUSLY effective at achieving it, even amidst chaos.

One thing I can imagine is if the superintelligence wants a particular person dead it could do something 'basic' like a genetically targeted bioweapon, or something more creative like getting the person to consume two separate substances each of which is individually innocuous or even beneficial, but have a fatal interaction effect if they are both introduced to the human body in a short period of time.

So in the morning, the AI ensures that the target consumes a dose of substance A, then later in the day gets them to consume substance B, and they die in a way that looks very accidental, or maybe even natural, and thus it would be hard to detect how it was achieved.

Maybe the AI is even able to design novel substances that will achieve this goal so there'd be no real way for the individual to defend against this approach.

Now, the next step that is harder for me to buy is that they could use this sort of precisely targeted, nigh-undetectable interventions to guide all events towards their preferred state, avoiding wars but never overtly showing their hand, even if people suspect some given event was due to its meddling.

Not sure what you suggest here is really new to AI, humans are pretty good at killing human beings (a state agency such as the KGB or CIA can kill anyone who wishes to remain relevant with around 100% certainty if they really want to, although making it ~undetectable is slightly less efficient and slower, and more likely to fail) and they are kinda iffy at using those sorts of interventions to guide events towards their preferred state.

I mean, I ignored that the AI would have a plethora of ways to kill a person directly.

Fly a drone in through a window and spray any given toxin in their face, then fly it out.

Hijack their car's software, disable the brakes at an opportune time.

I'm sort of gesturing at the fact that a superintelligent AI can probably carry out Rube-Goldberg-esque plans with enough precision to hit multiple targets at once, with the aim of achieving multiple goals at once, all without immediately tipping any observers off as to their ultimate plans.

So assuming their ultimate plan isn't to just kill humanity as a whole, there is an 'interesting' world that emerges that ultimately bends towards the AI's preferences but doesn't necessarily require omniscience and 'solving' the game. The AI still has to adjust the plan in progress, might miss some of its targets, and unforeseen events can still surprise it, but nonetheless, the state of the world ticks inexorably towards the outcome it wants.

And its moves can occur on such a high dimension that no single human, even given access to all the necessary information, could see what its doing or even hope to outsmart it.

Yes, it's an interesting theory. I guess my point is that due to information friction I think humans can carry out plans - perhaps ones that might not be as good as those of a theoretical superintelligence, but still plans that confound observers. I mean shoot there's still (good faith?) arguments about whether COVID-19 was a lab leak or not despite all the evidence there.

Now, and I apologize for the tangent, but if the scenario you describe came about (or even became plausible) it would be unfalsifiable, leading to a world where Superintelligence replaces the Illuminati as the hidden hand behind world events.

Yes, exactly.

And then we're living in a world where even our own motivations for taking a given action could be the result of an upstream manipulation.

I think the best illustration of this principle lies in the downfall of Kodak. Their bankruptcy is often cited as a cautionary tale of what happens when you obstinately stick to old technology in the midst of a changing landscape. But that it were true! Yes, Kodak was synonymous with film in the early 2000s, but, while digital cameras existed, they were expensive and people were still buying a ton of film. So they weren't going to just stop producing it (and they still haven't). But the idea that they didn't see the writing on the wall and failed to embrace digital photography is a myth. They wholeheartedly threw most of their effort into what they perceived the transition to digital would look like. They manufactured inexpensive digital cameras and supplies for making prints at home, and they put kiosks in stores and malls for people without the equipment to make prints. What they failed to anticipate was a world where the market for cheap cameras would move to smartphones, and where social media would replace the need to get prints of everything.

And the reason they didn't anticipate it was because they couldn't anticipate it. No one could. Digital cameras started gaining market share before the rise of social media and phones with acceptable cameras. If you told someone in 2003 what the low end of the photographic world would look like 5 years later, they'd tell you you were nuts.

Point and shoot digital cameras killed mass market film well before the iphone age. If Kodak made inexpensive digital cameras, then where are all of them today?

Maybe they got their arse handed to them by the Japanese, but that would be a failure to compete, not a failure to anticipate.

They did pretty well through the point and shoot era, and their cameras were everywhere if you cared to look; in 2005 they led the market in camera sales. They just weren't involved in the pro market the way their competitors were, so when that market died they had nothing to fall back on.

then where are all of them today?

In the recycling bin, or at the back of a drawer unused. Displaced in everyday use by phone cameras, just as physical prints have largley been replaced by Facebook and instagram.

The only people who use a seperate (non-phone) camera these day are professional photographers and high-end hobbiests who are looking for quality over price. This (not the ultimate shift to digital) is the shift that kodak failed to anticipate.

I've never held my hobby of photography highly enough to splurge for a DSLR.

My brother did his, and now it collects dust with the bulk of his photography done with his iPhone 15 Pro Max.

My family splurged for a DSLR a decade or more ago, but now it basically only gets pulled out when we need the 50-300mm lens for distant shots, or maybe once or twice a year when a few shots are so important that they're worth the extra hassle. We used to pull it out for low-light photography too, but at some point phone image sensors got so sensitive that it makes up for not having half a pound of glass in front of them.

Oh - I do still use the DSLR body with a telescope adapter. I tried an eyepiece-to-phone adapter for that, but the quality wasn't nearly as high. Maybe I just need to find a better one.

At this point, I'm not sure what utility a DSLR offers over a newer mirrorless camera. If you already own one, great, but they're a dying breed.

Frankly speaking, the computational photography that phone cameras pull of is nigh magical (though some of it is plain hallucinations of non-existent details), and I wish dedicated camera manufacturers took more inspiration from them rather than vice versa.

IMHO the mechanical mirrors are pointless; large lenses are really the only things phones lack. My DSLR is just old enough that mirrorless options were still kind of new. We also got a Nikon 1 around the same time, for portability, but unlike the DSLR that one's been completely obsoleted by our phones.

I'm not a fan of the current state of computational "photography", though. Detecting motion between multiple frames and trying to stack and deconvolve to get a sharp still image, that's fantastic, but when we reached the point where there's a "upsample moon photos using a neural net trained on moon photos" step, we'd lost the plot. If I wanted data from existing photos rather than my own photos then I'd be using the web browser, not the camera.

My Kodak DC220 sits unused on my bookcase, only barely hidden by my untidiness :-)

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