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Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

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First of all, I was talking the language, not the work. It makes sense to study AI as it does many other subjects, but we don't know that it will "have consequences that dwarf everything else" because we don't know what it will be able to do and when (we think that it could but so could, say, a supervirus, or climate change, or the return of fascism). People hang all sort of dreams on AI precisely because of that. That cult I mentioned, The Rationalists, basically imagined AI to be a god of sorts, and then you can say "wouldn't you want to build a god?" But we don't know if AI could be a god. Maybe an intelligent being that thinks faster than humans goes crazy? Of course, we don't know that, but my point is that the main reason we think so much of AI is that at this time, we don't know what it is and what it could do.

> Why would it make sense to wait?

Again, that's a separate discussion, but if we don't know what something is or when it could arrive, it may make more sense to think about things we know more about and are already here or known to be imminent. Anyway, anyone is free to work on what they like, but OpenAI does not know that they're "building artificial general intelligence."

> I think you're way too overconfident to be as sure as you are that they're not.

I don't know that they're not, but they don't know that they are, and that means they're not "building AGI."

I can understand your point about the language, but I guess I think it's reasonable to set the goal for what you actually want and work towards it. It may turn out to be unattainable, but I think generally you need to at least set it as the goal. It also seems less clear to me that they are close or far from it (I don't think it's on the same level as warp drive).

I don't know about the god thing you mention and the rationalist stuff I've read hasn't been about that. The main argument as I understand it is:

1. AGI is possible

2. Given AGI is possible if it's created without the ability to align its goals to human goals we will lose control of it.

3. If we lose control of it, it will have unknown outcomes which are more likely to be bad than benign or good.

Therefore we should try and figure out a way to make it safe before AGI exists.

Maybe humans just happen to be an intelligence upper bound and anything operating at a higher level goes crazy? That seems unlikely to me given that humans have a lot of biological constraints (heads have to fit out of birth canals, have to be able to run on energy from food, selective pressure for other things besides just intelligence). You could be right, but I'd bet on the other side.

The last bit is if we can solve this in a way that aligns the goals with human goals (open question since humans themselves are not really aligned) we could solve most problems we need to solve.

I think discussions of AI safety at this stage -- when we're already having problems with what passes for AI these days that we're not handling well at all -- is a bit silly, but I don't have something particularly intelligent to say on the matter, and neither, it seems, does anyone else, except maybe for this article that shows that the AGI paranoia (as opposed to the real threats from "AI" we're already facing, like YouTube's recommendation engine) may be a result of a point of view peculiar to Silicon Valley culture: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-dang...

I agree with you in a way, if AGI ends up being 300yrs out then work on safety now is likely not that important since whatever technology is developed in that time will probably end up being critical to solving the problem.

My main issue personally is that I'm not confident if it's really far out or not and people seem bad at predicting this on both sides. Given that, it probably makes sense to start the work now since goal alignment is a hard problem and it's unknown when it'll become relevant.

I read the BuzzFeed article and I think the main issue with it is he assumes that an AGI will be goal aligned by the nature of being an AGI:

"In psychology, the term “insight” is used to describe a recognition of one’s own condition, such as when a person with mental illness is aware of their illness. More broadly, it describes the ability to recognize patterns in one’s own behavior. It’s an example of metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, and it’s something most humans are capable of but animals are not. And I believe the best test of whether an AI is really engaging in human-level cognition would be for it to demonstrate insight of this kind."

Humans have general preferences and goals built in that have been selected for for thousands of years. An AGI won't have those by default. I think people often think that something intelligent will be like human intelligence, but the entire point of the strawberry example is that an intelligence with different goals that's very good at general problem solving will not have 'insight' that tells it what humans think is good (that's the reason for trying to solve the goal alignment problem - you don't get this for free).

He kind of argues for the importance of AGI goal alignment which he calls 'insight', but doesn't realize he's doing so?

The comparison to Silicon Valley being blinded by the economies of their own behavior is just weak politics that's missing the point.

We don't know that "goal alignment" (to use the techo-cult name) is a hard problem; we don't know that it's an important problem; we don't even know what the problem is. We don't know that intelligence is "general problem solving." In fact, we can be pretty sure it isn't, because humans aren't very good at solving general problems, just at solving human problems.

> Therefore we should try and figure out a way to make it safe before AGI exists.

Makes no sense to me, how would you ever be able to figure out a way to make something safe before it even exists?

Someone who has never built a nuclear reactor most likely could not think of a way to prevent the Chernobyl disaster.

(OK, maybe this is a wrong example as someone who did couldn't do this either, but the point should be clear)

I think the argument is that decision theory and goal alignment can be worked on without knowing all the details about how an AGI will work.

https://intelligence.org/2016/12/28/ai-alignment-why-its-har...

ah yes Yudkowsky, the well established AI researcher & definitely not a crank

Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of whom you're attacking. Can you please not post like this to HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We don't know whether AGI is possible or even exactly what it is. However, if a form of intelligence where adding more hardware adds more capabilities in the fashion of present computing but where the capacities are robust and general purpose like humans rather than fragile and specialized like current software, then we'd have of amazing power - brilliant people can amazing things. A device that's akin to an army of well-organized brilliant people in a box clearly would many capacities. So it's reasonable to say that if that's possible, investing in it may have a huge payoff. (Edit: the "strong" "AGI is possible" would be that AGI is an algorithm that gives a computer human-like generality and robustness while having ordinary soft-like-abilities. There are other ideas of AGI, of course - say, a scheme that would simulate a person on such a high level that the simulated person had no access to the qualities of the software doing the simulation but that's different).

The problem, however, I think another gp's objection. OpenAI isn't really working on AGI, it's making incremental improvements on tech that's still fragile and specialized (maybe even more specialized and fragile), where the only advance of neural nets is that now they can be brute-force programmed.

> However, if a form of intelligence where adding more hardware adds more capabilities in the fashion of present computing but where the capacities are robust and general purpose like humans rather than fragile and specialized like current software, then we'd have of amazing power - brilliant people can amazing things.

That's a very big if... Also, I'd argue that most progress happens not because of some brilliant people, but because of many people working together... Then if your AGI only reaches the level of intelligence of humans and maybe a bit more (what does more even mean in terms of human intelligence? more emphatic? faster calculation ability? more memory? what would the use of this be? all things we can't really oversee), it raises the question whether this would ever be possible in a cost-efficient way (human intelligence seems like it is, in a certain way, "cheap").

>That's a very big if...

Oh, this is indeed a big if. A large, looming aspect of the problem is we don't anything like an exact characterization of "general intelligence" so what we're aiming for is very uncertain. But that uncertainty cuts multiple ways. Perhaps it would take 100K human-years to construct "it" and perhaps just a few key insights could construct "it".

> Also, I'd argue that most progress happens not because of some brilliant people, but because of many people working together...

The nature of a problem generally determines the sort of human-organization one needs to solve a problem. Large engineering problems are often solved by large teams, challenging math problems are generally solved by individuals, working with published results of other individuals. Given we're not certain of the nature of this problem, it's hard to be absolute here. Still, one could be after a few insights. If it's a huge engineering problem, you may have the problem "building an AGI is AGI-complete".

> Then if your AGI only reaches the level of intelligence of humans and maybe a bit more (what does more even mean in terms of human intelligence? more emphatic? faster calculation ability?

I've heard these "we'll get to human-level but it won't be that impressive" kinds of arguments and I find them underwhelming.

"What use would more memory be to an AGI that's 'just' at human level?"

How's this? Studying a hard problem? Fork your brain 100 times, with small variations and different viewpoints, to look at different possibilities, then combine the best solutions. Seems powerful to me. But that's just the most simplistic approach and it seems like an AGI with extra-memory could jump between the unity of an individual and the multiple views of work groups and such is multiple creative ways. The plus humans have a few quantifiable limits - human attention has been very roughly defined as being limited to "seven plus or minus two chunks". Something human-like but able to consider a few more chunks could possibly accomplish incredible things.

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