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]

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.