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Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

AI control is a false hope I'm afraid.

"Still, some AI researchers are exploring ways of ensuring that the technology does not behave in unintended ways."

There are two threats that are both problematic.

First is exploiting an AI's weakness, just like an SQL injection on the web currently. Then a powerful AI can behave in unpredictable ways because we trust the trained models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA4YEAWVpbk

The second is far greater. If we find a safeguard that will protect AGI-s from behaving in unwanted ways then there always will be someone out there who will just turn it off for profit.

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I am not sure why this point is not considered more seriously (maybe it is and I have just missed it). I feel that this article and most of the literature being written around this topic is skating around the issue without naming it. The real question here is what are we going to do when the AI we create begins to self replicate/augment their code/control logic? What are we going to do when the AI decides that in order to reduce the loss function they must act outside of the control scope and simply makes changes to it?

Some will say "not possible, how will the code recompile?" to which this article clearly answers...another AI will do it. We have to be honest with humanity here and say that we are seeking to create artificial life of which we will have no more control over than we do any other human. Oh and this new artificial life will be orders of magnitude more physically and mentally robust than us.

I think it's because there is only one obvious solution:

prevent AI from ever being developed

And how we could do that is too pessimistic to talk about.

> Some will say "not possible, how will the code recompile?"

Read own code, make changes, recompile, redeploy and replace self (or not, just start new fork) with newly upgraded mind.

Is there any consensus on whether we can sandbox AGI-s even in theory?

In practice, they'll probably be smart enough to convince us to turn off the sandboxing anyway, of course.

You could just not include any network capability, put them in a Faraday cage, and don't provide them with actuators capable of breaking out. Tada, a safe sandbox.

That said, there is no reason to believe an AGI would have a desire to break out of its sandbox (or any other desire). Why not provide them with the digital equivalent of agoraphobia?

> You could just not include any network capability, put them in a Faraday cage, and don't provide them with actuators capable of breaking out. Tada, a safe sandbox.

And remove all I/O capabilities to prevent them from convincing you to do their bidding.

What's the point of having an intelligence that cannot interact with the outside world though?

Only torture

If a super-intelligence can interact with you, it can manipulate you; removing some but not all ways it can interact with the outside world is only incremental security. On the other hand, as you say, if it can't interact with the world, there's no point.

So we might as well give direct control over nuclear missiles from the start /s

Do you supply it power? Then you it could induce feedback over the cable which triggers new programming in nearby electronics.

Does it have any means of creating sparks/heat would could be used to make a hole in the faraday cage?

What about neutrinos or gravity waves? How would you stop those?

If we're talking control over neutrinos and gravity waves and such, then it could potentially just re-write your neurons and make you want to help it.

> Do you supply it power? Then you it could induce feedback over the cable which triggers new programming in nearby electronics.

We could feed it through power a little solar panel. Or just give it batteries and accept that it will run out of power eventually. There are plenty of ways to power a computer without allowing it to connect back.

> Does it have any means of creating sparks/heat would could be used to make a hole in the faraday cage?

Assuming it has no access to electronics other than the ones that it needs to function, I don't see how it could overheat one of those parts to over 1811 Kelvin (the melting point of iron) to destroy its Faraday cage without destroying itself. Or we could just cut the power when it tries to mess with the cage, or does anything else that we don't understand.

> What about neutrinos or gravity waves? How would you stop those?

Why would we? We need very expensive detectors to even measure those. How much damage could it do using neutrinos and gravity waves?

> We could feed it through power a little solar panel.

A solar panel seems 1-way, but it isn't totally. Fewer photons would be absorbed if say, higher resistance would be applied. By modulating that resistance, it could sent messages to the outside.

> we could just cut the power when it tries to mess with the cage, or does anything else that we don't understand

If we understand everything it's doing, it's not more intelligent than us. It must be incredibly stupid because we can't even understand a worm.

>> What about neutrinos or gravity waves? How would you stop those?

> Why would we?

Because otherwise it can establish 2-way communication with the outside world and possible nefarious actors.

How can you be sure that there are no ways to invalidate your countermeasures regarding AGI if you aren't as intelligent as one? Comments like these make me think about a bunch of cavemen trying to contain the terminator in a wooden cage, except this terminator probably will have a gigantic intelligence and thus be incredibly persuasive amongst all the things we can't imagine.

In your example, the Terminator, though locked in a wooden cage, would have actuators (arms, legs, motion). The parent specifically proposes not to equip the AI with those.

The terminator is incredibly strong and could easily break out of a wooden cage. Like I said, don't give it powerful actuators. A more reasonable approximation would be a terminator head locked in a big metal cage. It might be incredibly intelligent (although there is really no reason to assume that an AGI would automatically be smarter than an ordinary human, especially the first few generation), but its persuasion and charm is limited by the fact that it is a detached metal skull with glowing red lights for eyes.

In addition, the cage could be design so that the power source for the AI is interrupted when the cage is opened, rendering it unconscious. Of course once you assume that it is arbitrarily more intelligent than the most intelligent humans, it might find a way to hypnotize people into doing its bidding just by winking in some magical pattern. But we don't see many dumb creatures being effectively mind controlled by smarter creatures in nature, so I doubt such flaws (if they even exist) are easy to exploit, even for a gigantic intelligence.

In nature, any given creature is only marginally smarter than any other.

Compared to a decent AGI, for instance, our level of intelligence is probably indistinguishable from that of your average bird or spider.

We're talking about birds getting together to design a system to contain a human, only on a much more extreme scale.

They'd try to contain us using bird-logic. Perhaps they'd ensure we don't attempt to flap our wings and fly away, since their experience tells them that might be an option.

It might never occur to them we could just kneel down and start a fire using the sticks we have lying around.

We keep getting back to the actuators. If the birds would "design" a human being with the intention to keep it in a cage, why would they provide functional arms and legs? Don't imagine a fit human being. Imagine Stephen Hawking in a bathtub. He's not going anywhere.

Besides, an untrained human won't just figure out how to make fire. Obviously we figured it out at some point, but if you were to raise a human without ever showing them how to make fire, they would probably never figure it out. Many of us know (in theory) how to make fire but probably couldn't do it in practice just by rubbing two sticks together. And even if you are an expert fire-maker the birds can easily claw out your eyes before you get a fire going. Or you'd die because you're locked in a cage that is on fire.

You make several assumptions that I disagree with:

1) That AGI will automatically be (much) smarter than a human 2) That AGI will be motivated to break out of its cage and/or do harm. 3) That sheer intelligence is sufficient to escape any trap.

Having said that, if you enjoy those assumptions I would recommend you read 'Blindsight' and 'Echopraxia' by Peter Watts if you haven't already, I think you would enjoy them :)

'Blindsight' was great. Probably in my top-5 Sci-Fi of all time.

I hadn't heard of 'Echopraxia'- thanks for the recommendation!

The main assumption I make with AGI is that we'll be very bad at hitting the sweet spot between 1) "toy", 2)"human-level intelligence", and 3) "beyond human-level intelligence".

I doubt we'll stop at any point between (1) and (2). And then by the time we get even a decimal point beyond (2) and toward (3), we're toast.

To follow your analogy, it would be like birds trying to make a bird-like creature and keep it contained, but overshooting. By the time they realize they've overshot, they've got a human in their cage, and that human has 10,000 bird generations of time to evaluate his environment and think about escaping.

We can guess pretty well that the birds are out of their depth, and were doomed from the start.

People underestimate MCTS greatly

It beat Rybka and every other bespoke chess program in existence

AlphaZero even beat the version of AlphaGo that was trained on existing data.

Point is — we have no idea what is possible when you unleash MCTS towards goals like persuasion, humor etc.

The ONLY constraint here is that feedback requires a human judge. If you can learn to simulate a human based on lots of data (this is a hard part) then you can finally have a two sided game playing each other and find the best diets, the best diagnoses utilizing symptoms, tests and big data around the world of incidence of outbreaks etc.

However it also means quickly finding the funniest jokes, most convincing but subtly flawed arguments, best artworks etc.

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