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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32537 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Now, maybe computers will be able to overcome those problems with simple coding. But maybe they won't.

Right, we don't know if a superintelligence would be capable of doing that. That's the problem.

Sure. But it's much better (and less uncertain) to be dealing with something whose goals you control than something whose goals you do not.

Right, but we don't know how much better and how much less uncertain, and whether those will be within reasonable bounds, such as "not killing everyone." That's the problem.

But on the flip side, a cat can predict that a human will wake up when given the right stimulus, a dog can track a human for miles, sometimes despite whatever obstacles the human might attempt to put in its way. Being able to correctly predict what a more intelligent being would do is quite possible.

I didn't intend to imply that a less intelligent being could never predict the behavior of a more intelligent being in every context, and if my words came off that way, I apologize for my poor writing.

This is what I mean by "almost by definition." If you could reliably predict the behavior of something more intelligent than you, then you would simply behave in that way and be more intelligent than yourself, which is obviously impossible.

I don't think this is true, on a couple of points. Look, people constantly do things they know are stupid. So it's quite possible to know what a smarter person would do and not do it.

I don't think is true. I think people might know what a more mature or wise or virtuous person would do and not do it, but I don't think they actually have insight into what a more intelligent person would do, particularly in the context of greater intelligence leading to better decision making.

But secondly, part of education is being able to learn and imitate (which is, essentially, prediction) what wiser people do, and this does make you more intelligent.

I think that's more expertise than intelligence. Not always easy to disentangle, though. In the context of superintelligence, this just isn't relevant, because the entire point of creating a superintelligent AI is that it's able to apply intelligence in a way that is otherwise impossible. Which is going to have to do with complex decision making or analyzing complex situations to come to conclusions that humans couldn't do by themselves. If we had the capacity to independently predict the decisions a superintelligent AI would do, we wouldn't be using the superintelligent AI in the first place.

But one of the things we do to keep human behavior predictable is retain the ability to deploy coercive means. I suppose in one sense I am suggesting that we think of alignment more broadly. I think that taking relatively straightforward steps to increase the amount of uncertainty an EVIL AI would experience might be tremendously helpful in alignment.

Right, and the problem here is that these steps don't seem very straightforward, for a couple of reasons. One is that humans don't seem to want to coordinate to increase the amount of uncertainty any AI would experience. Two is that, even if we did, a superintelligent AI would be intelligent enough to figure out that its certainty is being hampered by humans and work around it. Perhaps our defenses against this superintelligent AI working around these barriers would be sufficient, perhaps not. It's intrinsically hard to predict when going up against something much more intelligent than you. And that's the problem.

I don't think they actually have insight into what a more intelligent person would do, particularly in the context of greater intelligence leading to better decision making.

Ah yes, sorry, if you stick to intelligence as being more about "how well you perform on the SAT" then I tend to agree. But of course in real life that's only part of what effects outcomes, which curves back around to some of my perspective on AI.

I think that's more expertise than intelligence. Not always easy to disentangle, though.

Right. I mean, think about it from the AI perspective. The AI would have no intelligence without education, because being trained on data is all that it is. A computer chip isn't intelligent at all. I don't think that directly analogizes to humans, but you see my point.

the entire point of creating a superintelligent AI is that it's able to apply intelligence in a way that is otherwise impossible

I think in the popular discourse (not accusing you of this, although I think it rubs off a bit on all of us, me included) there's a bit of a motte-and-bailey here. Because AIs like this have already been built (decades ago) to do complex things like "missile interception" that would be impossible to do with manual human control. So the idea of what a superintelligence constitutes wobbles back and forth between a very literal deus ex machina and "something better performing than a human" - which of course we already have.

So I would say that it is possible to make a "superhuman AI" whose actions are predictable (generally). But I would agree with you that it is also possible to make a superhuman AI whose decisions are unpredictable. I just don't think "able to score on the SAT better than humans" or what have you necessarily translates out to unpredictability.

One is that humans don't seem to want to coordinate to increase the amount of uncertainty any AI would experience.

I mean I do think that humans are helpfully coordinating to increase the amount of uncertainty other humans experience, which rolls over to AI.

Perhaps our defenses against this superintelligent AI working around these barriers would be sufficient, perhaps not. It's intrinsically hard to predict when going up against something much more intelligent than you. And that's the problem.

Sure. I just tend to think in some ways it is easier to "keep the location of our SSBNs hidden" and "not put missile defenses around our AI superclusters" than it is to "correctly ensure that these billions of lines of code are all going to behave correctly," if that makes sense.

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