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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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A part of the problem is that some of the AI safety crowd are the victims of the Behavioral_sink. Leading way to comfortable lives that they even claim that 'words are violence'. It was 'safety' concerns that shutdown the Stanfords public Alpaca demo. They are stuck in a local maxima for their likes and retweets, claiming that FN Meka isn't allowed to rap about police violence because it isn't a lived experience, or that virtual Seinfeld jokes are harmful to the trans community. But the biggest danger is what they are themselves trapped in.... the behavioral sink and that more people will be stuck in digital quicksand because of AI.

These aren't the same people. You can think Yud is wrong, but Yud is not remotely related to "make AI woke or else it is biased" people.

I don't understand what Calhoun's "behavioral sink" has to do with this, never mind the validity of his rat experiments. If anything, wouldn't overcrowding make things too uncomfortable?

The reason I introduced it has nothing do with overcrowding, it is the observed results of behavior change when they where given everything that they ever could want. Some populations just exploded and then collapsed because overemphasis of a single behavior like eating, because infant rats aren't taken care of. So I use it as an analogy of modern life where we have everything to make us comfortable but some people have adopted behaviors which doesn't take society forward, like pushing junk science on potential existential risks.

I think you're letting the SJW crowd conflate things in your mind. The existential risk people are mostly libertarian types aside from this issue.

The existential risk people are mostly libertarian types

Bullshit. They're "liberals" who think unlimited amounts of power are legitimate when it comes to their pet issue.

They're "libertarians" only in the sense of being Californians who think of themselves as enlightened because they have nontraditional social mores. Put them in front of someone like Hoppe and the veneer will melt away instantly to reveal monstrous totalitarianism.

Libertarians don't advocate to ban the sale of GPUs or censor all of society based on the potential risks of individual freedom. They order you to live free, or die.

For me more likely there is an overcrowding in the AI-safety where you have libertarians and wokies trying to panic with different implausible scenarios.

Okay, but I'm trying to say that the x-risk people don't care about LLMs saying bad words.

They don't care about wokeness in LLMs as a terminal value, but they do see failures to RLHF the model into politically correct speak (or otherwise constrain its outputs into an arbitrary morally laden subset) as an alignment failure and an indication in favor of x-risk. E.g. this is the tenor of comments on Bing Chat/Sydney and I've seen more direct «if we can't get it to not say the N-word, we won't stop its descendant from paperclipping our asses» elsewhere, probably in Yud's timeline.

Fair point. But I think that is a reasonable test-case for alignment, and I maintain that most of the x-risk people think that beyond that, this sort of thing is merely a distraction.

I'm with them on that conclusion tbh. There ain't a snowball's chance in hell of us correctly aligning these things when they grow exponentially more powerfull. Hell, we can't align our damned selves and our own children and we've been trying to do this shit since we've existed, why should we expect any difference with our capability to align AGI.

This is still a bait and switch with definitions of alignment. Yud's whole thing is fearing an AI that optimizes for a certain goal – becoming extremely effective at something we actually don't want it to do. This is qualitatively different from an AI that consistently fails to follow an instruction. It's not a question of momentary capability but of direction and mode of operation.

LeCun, for example, is both an alignment skeptic and an AI risk skeptic, he thinks LLMs are fundamentally prone to fail, but on the other hand they pose no X-risk. This is due to him distinguishing those failure modes. As he puts it, LLMs «exponentially diverge». This is fixable but still won't bring them all the way to Yud-style fooming agent of increasing self-coherence.

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