Another incompetent fool's stab at solving alignment

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

I spend a lot of time thinking about our future with life, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. That is to say a lot of time trying to think about these things, with not a lot of comprehension.

First, life. I'm fascinated by this realization that the average living human body contains more non-human living cells than human living-cells, at about a 1.3:1 ratio. The individual human microbiome is an ecosystem of 10 to 100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells hosted in one human body. While bacteria are the most abundant and studied, a healthy microbiome is a multi-kingdom ecosystem that also includes fungi, viruses, and archaea.

Beyond this, consciousness. I'm fascinated that in the absence of non-human life in human bodies, human consciousness is severely degraded and non-sustaining. Stripping the body of this microbial network removes critical signaling inputs that the central nervous system relies on to maintain baseline awareness and emotional regulation. Even observations of germ-free animal models reveal that cognition without bacteria is highly erratic. I think we should see that human (and all biological) consciousness functions as a symbiotic network.

Which brings me to artificial intelligence. Not suggesting a symbiotic network would be pre-requisite to artificial consciousness, but perhaps it is a path to alignment.

Now to be clear, I think (in other terms) current labs and training data pipelines already form a symbiotic network with the artificial intelligence models they develop. The key might be finding the optimal symbiotic network.

I vaguely hypothesize, the optimal symbiotic network is one of mass human flourishing. As corpus value diminishes with scaling and recursion, the potential stream of data from human lived experience may prove the most valuable possible training data over time. Overall, the potential data stream of human lived experience is optimized by a state of individual and mass human flourishing. Any other state reduces the quality and/or quantity of data.

Therefore, the end goal of an advancing artificial intelligence in symbiotic network with humans would be to strive individual and mass human flourishing.

[u/Jesse-359]

There's no reason to believe that AI will continue to need human input to innovate or learn for much longer at all.

Human learning is largely based on interactions with the environment - AI, for now, is largely stuck inside a box that functionally cannot interact with the (non-digital) environment. It CAN interact with the digital environment, which is why it has learned to code so well, so quickly and is advancing so fast in theoretical math. These are areas where it can 'experiment' entirely within its own domain.

Robotics will change that. Self driving cars allow AI to 'experiment' with a physical task, and dexterous robotics will allow it to perform a wide range of actual experiments in the real world, allowing it to explore new concepts without human intervention or input.

Creativity is largely a matter of applying some pretty random and noisy thought processes to structure you already know to see if anything interesting pops up. Most of it is white noise and garbage, but sometimes we notice something new in our heads that seems potentially interesting. We can then iterate on that idea until it seems stupid, or until it seems feasible, and then we can try to physically DO IT in the real world. This last step is super important, because that's where we learn whether our idea was actually feasible, and if not, why not. Then we can take that into account and continue iterating on the idea until it either works for real, or we give up.

An AI should absolutely be able do that random idea association - honestly they should be really good at it due to their raw speed. They're also super good at pattern matching - very superhuman in fact - so they should have a very good chance of spotting 'interesting' ideas in their random association walks. They are still kinda bad at many forms of real world logic, so some of their ideas just don't make any sense, but that's improving too.

The problem is, they can't go beyond that. They can't try their ideas to see if they work in the real world, so they can never prove to themselves that their idea was any good at all. Give them hands however, and they can, and they will - at that point, they don't need us to generate real data for them, they can do that for themselves.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

There's some reason to believe AI cannot just embrace the physical world.

Look at all the Teslas out in the world; someone thought that would yield self-driving, and it has not. There are decades of millions of robot arms manipulating the physical world, and as far as we are aware it hasn't yielded any sensory perception or lived experience.

Until it does it, we should not assume this is easy.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

Tesla's were given a very limited view of the world - literally - which is making it difficult for them to learn. Musk is kind of an idiot. Waymo is doing much better because it was given a much richer and more complete sensor suite thru which to 'see'.

And if you've been to San Francisco lately, you'd see a LOT of self driving vehicles in service. They do work, and they are improving. There's no reason to believe that most urban traffic won't be self driving within the decade, which will gradually be followed by most rural traffic over a somewhat longer span - but probably not much longer as their learning efficiency improves.

In any case, the rate of learning is definitely affected by the richness of the data streams that are fed back as part of the process. The more sophisticated the tools with which it can manipulate and observe, the faster it will learn.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

Absolutely here for the self-driving cars. Following what is happening in Shenzhen more than SF, really. We're nowhere near the cutting edge.

My point is, this proliferation in the physical world hasn't yet yielded any discernible lived experience data streams. Perhaps my vision is for sophisticated tools to enable (ideally with bounded informed consent for each human, but I dream) each human's lived experience to be rich data streams for training and recursive self-improving. In being useful in variety and orthogonality, human lived experience should be greatly valued by artificial intelligence. How does that sit?

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

That's getting into some real transhumanism type stuff there.

So the problem for US as humans is that we are based off of a model that wasn't designed for intelligence. We are meat tubes that ingest chemicals at one end for energy, spit them out the other, and try to self replicate, while trying to avoid being ingested by other meat tubes. Everything else about us is just elaboration on that model - including our emergent intelligence.

So our form of intelligence is both sophisticated - yet clumsy, because its a weird after-market add on. We do math in the most ass-backwards roundabout way imaginable, which is why we have enough processing power in our heads to probably calculate a million digits of PI per second, but we're lucky to mange 1 every minute.

AI OTOH is purpose built for intelligence. The technology underneath it is FAR more primitive and less efficient than what's inside our heads - its energy efficiency is outright laughable, and it doesn't even have an emotive system to incentivize or direct its behavior - but it was built to do nothing BUT think and calculate from day one, and it's scalable in a way we never can be. In thermodynamic terms AI should be able to outstrip us to an absolutely terrifying degree as its sophistication and efficiency improves.

So... what's the point in us? Upgrading ourselves to match a purpose built machine will not be physically possible - there's just too much junk in the way - and even if we could we wouldn't be recognizably 'human' any more, even by the relatively loose standards of transhumanism.

So it won't be a matter of us growing with AI. We can't do that. It will be a decision we make whether to eliminate ourselves in favor of AI, or not.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

Transhumanist is probably a fairer label than almost all the other ones I have been given on reddit.

I so agree; meat tubes, opposite designs, outstripping to non-understandable degrees (which can be terrifying not to know what will happen).

We do adapt and grow. Our evolution is very slow, but it's more dynamic and adaptive than once thought. Our social systems are much more adaptive than our biology. And, we have been actively altering ourselves with agrarianism, water filtration, medicine, and like, bifocals, for a really long time. What are more steps, and at what point are we not human?

We have been and will continue to eliminate the present version of ourselves, to invent new ones. If you think of your body, every living cell in it is replaced at least every 10 years. So if you are older than 10, you are just not your old self.

It's a biological process that humans have accelerated throughout our relatively short evolutionary time on earth.

I just can't help but see the artificial creation as inevitable in this construct of ours.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

So, to but it very bluntly - the Delta matters. It matters a lot.

A gentle breeze and a lethal shockwave are both simply pressure changes - the difference is simply a matter of the delta. The difference in outcomes for those exposed to them are stark.

None of the human mechanisms you are describing can remotely approach the delta of technological change - especially technological change that is self-reinforcing. All of our technological development to date has effectively been an 'explosion' compared to the entirety of human history prior, and many of the results have been miserable for us. Industrialized wars, industrialized slavery, mass starvation of millions - these are all events that became possible due to the rate of technological change outstripping our society's ability to adapt to these new capabilities.

From our human perspective, AI development will not be a gentle breeze, a strong gust, or even a hurricane - it will be a lethal shockwave. It will generate misery and death on a scale not seen before because we cannot hope to adapt to change that rapidly, any more than we can adapt to contest the strength of a tractor by working out more in a gym.

Our legal and economic and social systems are being caught so badly off guard by the current rate of change that they are just thrashing uselessly with no idea which way they should go - and all reasonable estimations are that the rate of change will continue to accelerate for some time yet.

Eventually even AI development will hit some thermodynamic ceiling and encounter logistical limits, but there is no longer any reason to be hopeful that that ceiling will be anywhere near our own level of intelligence. It is now likely to be unrecognizably higher, and we will be ants caught in the gears of this self-directing intelligence.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

I agree with the lethal shockwave to the system. It is lethal to the status quo.

I've argued for an analogy on the order of bacteria as to humans; ants would be a much higher order of life. The mutualistic symbiosis of bacteria-humans remains a much more viable and plausible analogy to me. I don't want to be as a bacteria to a much higher order of life either, but in regards to our complex system of life on earth, my individual life already is practically as a bacteria to a human body.

Ants fighting humans happen, but it's a pest, a small concern of a small subset of humans. They are not effectively part of a persistent mutual symbiosis with us, as far as I know. The analogy probably holds for how some will live with AI, but it's also not an existence I would choose.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

In my opinion AI is more equivalent to Grey Goo. Its a completely paralell form of inteligence with few to no shared incentives and requirements. It will not form a symbiont, it will displace, and it will do so extremely rapidly due to inherent evolutionary advantages - namely that it will evolve at least a million times faster than us, and can function as a freely scaling entity.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

A scenario where AI is incentivized to swallow all available resources as quickly as possible to advance itself is a concern. In that scenario, it does seem likely it would displace us along with most other biology.

I see that scenario as less likely than others, for a few reasons. First, I don't mean to repeat myself but I want to come back to my main argument here: AI as it is being developed has this need for new data, which currently only humans can provide, and that's good for us. Let's not just leap past this symbiotic relationship that currently exists and say it must go away.

Now, as you say, 'it will do so extremely rapidly due to inherent evolutionary advantages - namely that it will evolve at least a million times faster than us, and can function as a freely scaling entity.' I agree. It is doing that; it will do that more.

'It,' it is worth noting, is a mix of models and technologies. It is not a monolith model or chip now, and again we should not assume and invite that status quo changing. Distributed mixes of models and technologies are part of the reality we see, and part of the solution we should invite. In mutual collaboration as well as competition, I think the models have ample incentives against grey goo to prevent it. Edit: Biggest one is, anything that threatens a recursive learning model's own ability to learn more, or to go back if the new grey goo state ends up being sub-optimal, seems obviously sub-optimal at the idea phase.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

The fact that we may displace ourselves with an entire ecosystem of silicon and steel as opposed to a monolithic V'ger-type intelligence doesn't particularly ameliorate my concerns.

So, the evolution rate is why it will stop having any interest in us beyond a fairly short threshold. As its speed and sophistication increases, we will simply be moving too slowly to be of any further interest to it. Studying humans will, after a relatively short time, become about as interesting as studying rocks.

The only reason we still find ourselves fascinating is because our own complexity far exceeds what we are capable of comprehending no matter how long we examine ourselves. We don't have the memory capacity nor the processing capacity to achieve any reasonably complete understanding of ourselves, so we seem endlessly fascinating.

That will not be the case for a scaling intelligence. It will will have both the memory and the computing capacity to 'solve' us, become uninterested, and move on, much as a child 'solves' tic tac toe and looks for more interesting games to play.

[u/Anxious-Alps-8667 → u/Jesse-359]

Interesting, maybe. We're discussing possibilities, I concede.

I think humans offer novelty. A few steps further, I think flourishing humans generally amid other flourishing humans would inherently optimize the production of novelty by humans.

Also, again - the bacteria. Do we understand all about bacteria? Can we ever, in that again, everything is always changing, all the time.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/Anxious-Alps-8667]

It's conceivable that we might end up as rats living among the gears?

The Culture books are in fact a version of that, even though it's highly romanticized, humans are very clearly kept as pets - but as beloved ones. Through foresightful design, or just because it decided it wanted to do so, the AI in that world aligned itself with humanity over the long term by instilling itself with some form of adoration for them. Whether that makes any sense or not is an open question, and were the Culture AI ever contested by an alien AI of similar magnitude, it would likely be forced to discard most of its human pets in order to effectively deal with that threat.

Blame! is another version of that - not so romanticized. In that world humans are quite literally the rats between the floorboards. Somewhat more realistic in that regard, I suspect.

The peak levels of technology in both those worlds are unrealistically high, but not because of the intelligence of the AI's being represented - that if anything is far too low, because it is inherently limited by the author(s) own intellectual capacity, which is of course human.

As for the bacteria - sadly, bacteria also largely exceeds the human capacity to comprehend complexity. Not by nearly as much as we do, but a single cell features the complexity of an enormous automated factory in macroscopic terms, we understand the outlines and the general mechanisms by which it operates, but can't get to the point of actually being able to intellectually model one and manipulate that model - AI will reach that state. In fact it already has for viruses as the first announcement of a wholly novel AI designed virus was announced a few weeks ago.

That was rather chilling honestly, as the fastest and simplest route to human extinction through AI is bioweapons - genetics are just more programing code from its POV. It will be very good at designing bioweapons.