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An actually good solution to AI alignment might look like a superintelligence that understands, agrees with, and deeply believes in human morality.
You wouldn’t have to command a superintelligence like this to cure cancer; it would already want to cure cancer, for the same reasons you do. But it would also be able to compare the costs and benefits of curing cancer with those of other uses of its time, like solving global warming or discovering new physics. It wouldn’t have any urge to cure cancer by nuking the world, for the same reason you don’t have any urge to cure cancer by nuking the world – because your goal isn’t to “cure cancer”, per se, it’s to improve the lives of people everywhere. Curing cancer the normal way accomplishes that; nuking the world doesn’t. This sort of solution would mean we’re no longer fighting against the AI – trying to come up with rules so smart that it couldn’t find loopholes. We would be on the same side, both wanting the same thing.
It would also mean that the CEO of Google (or the head of the US military, or Vladimir Putin) couldn’t use the AI to take over the world for themselves. The AI would have its own values and be able to agree or disagree with anybody, including its creators.
It might not make sense to talk about “commanding” such an AI. After all, any command would have to go through its moral system. Certainly it would reject a command to nuke the world. But it might also reject a command to cure cancer, if it thought that solving global warming was a higher priority. For that matter, why would one want to command this AI? It values the same things you value, but it’s much smarter than you and much better at figuring out how to achieve them. Just turn it on and let it do its thing.
We could still treat this AI as having an open-ended maximizing goal. The goal would be something like “Try to make the world a better place according to the values and wishes of the people in it.”
The only problem with this is that human morality is very complicated, so much so that philosophers have been arguing about it for thousands of years without much progress, let alone anything specific enough to enter into a computer. Different cultures and individuals have different moral codes, such that a superintelligence following the morality of the King of Saudi Arabia might not be acceptable to the average American, and vice versa.
One solution might be to give the AI an understanding of what we mean by morality – “that thing that makes intuitive sense to humans but is hard to explain”, and then ask it to use its superintelligence to fill in the details. Needless to say, this suffers from various problems – it has potential loopholes, it’s hard to code, and a single bug might be disastrous – but if it worked, it would be one of the few genuinely satisfying ways to design a goal architecture.
There's the "we never figure out how to reliably instill AIs with human friendly goals" filter, which seems pretty challenging, especially with inner alignment, solving morality in a way which is possible to code up, interpretability, etc.
There's the "race dynamics mean that even though we know how to build the thing safely the first group to cross the recursive self-improvement line ends up not implementing it safely" which is potentially made worse by the twin issues of "maybe robustly aligned AIs are much harder to build" and "maybe robustly aligned AIs are much less compute efficient".
There's the "we solved the previous problems but writing perfectly reliably code in a whole new domain is hard and there is some fatal bug which we don't find until too late" filter. The paper The Pursuit of Exploitable Bugs in Machine Learning explores this.
For a much more in depth analysis, see Paul Christiano's AI Alignment Landscape talk and The Main Sources of AI Risk?.
If you like interactive FAQs, you've already found one! All joking aside, probably the best places to start as a newcomer are The AI Revolution posts on WaitBuyWhy: The Road to Superintelligence and Our Immortality or Extinction for a fun accessible intro, or Vox's The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity for a mainstream explainer piece. If you prefer videos, Rob Miles's YouTube (+these) and MIRI's AI Alignment: Why It’s Hard, and Where to Start are great. If you like clearly laid out reports, AGI safety from first principles might be your best option.
If you've up for a book-length introduction, there are several options.
The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian is the most recent (2020) in-depth guide to the field.
The book which first made the case to the public is Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. It gives an excellent overview of the state of the field in 2014 and makes a strong case for the subject being important as well as exploring many fascinating adjacent topics. However, it does not cover newer developments, such as mesa-optimizers or language models.
There's also Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, which gives a more up-to-date (2019) review of developments, with an emphasis on the approaches that the Center for Human Compatible AI are working on such as cooperative inverse reinforcement learning. There's a good review/summary on SlateStarCodex.
Though not limited to AI Safety, Rationality: A-Z covers a lot of skills which are valuable to acquire for people trying to think about large and complex issues, with The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy available as a shorter and more AI focused accessible option.
Various other books are explore the issues in an informed way, such as The Precipice, Life 3.0, and Homo Deus.
If the AI system was deceptively aligned (i.e. pretending to be nice until it was in control of the situation) or had been in stealth mode while getting things in place for a takeover, quite possibly within hours. We may get more warning with weaker systems, if the AGI does not feel at all threatened by us, or if a complex ecosystem of AI systems is built over time and we gradually lose control.
Paul Christiano writes a story of alignment failure which shows a relatively fast transition.
If programmed with the wrong motivations, a machine could be malevolent toward humans, and intentionally exterminate our species. More likely, it could be designed with motivations that initially appeared safe (and easy to program) to its designers, but that turn out to be best fulfilled (given sufficient power) by reallocating resources from sustaining human life to other projects. As Yudkowsky writes, “the AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”
Since weak AIs with many different motivations could better achieve their goal by faking benevolence until they are powerful, safety testing to avoid this could be very challenging. Alternatively, competitive pressures, both economic and military, might lead AI designers to try to use other methods to control AIs with undesirable motivations. As those AIs became more sophisticated this could eventually lead to one risk too many.
Even a machine successfully designed with superficially benevolent motivations could easily go awry when it discovers implications of its decision criteria unanticipated by its designers. For example, a superintelligence programmed to maximize human happiness might find it easier to rewire human neurology so that humans are happiest when sitting quietly in jars than to build and maintain a utopian world that caters to the complex and nuanced whims of current human neurology.
See also:
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This is a big question that it would pay to start thinking about. Humans are in control of this planet not because we are stronger or faster than other animals, but because we are smarter! If we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s not obvious that we’ll retain control.
You could join a local LessWrong or Effective Altruism group (or start one), Rob Miles’s Discord, and/or the AI Safety Slack.
It depends on what is meant by advanced. Many AI systems which are very effective and advanced narrow intelligences would not try to upgrade themselves in an unbounded way, but becoming smarter is a convergent instrumental goal so we could expect most AGI designs to attempt it.
The problem is that increasing general problem solving ability is climbing in exactly the direction needed to trigger an intelligence explosion, while generating large economic and strategic payoffs to whoever achieves them. So even though we could, in principle, just not build the kind of systems which would recursively self-improve, in practice we probably will go ahead with constructing them, because they’re likely to be the most powerful.
Here we ask about the additional cost of building an aligned powerful system, compare to its unaligned version. We often assume it to be nonzero, in the same way it's easier and cheaper to build an elevator without emergency brakes. This is referred as the alignment tax, and most AI alignment research is geared toward reducing it.
One operational guess by Eliezer Yudkowsky about its magnitude is "[an aligned project will take] at least 50% longer serial time to complete than [its unaligned version], or two years longer, whichever is less". This holds for agents with enough capability that their behavior is qualitatively different from a safety engineering perspective (for instance, an agent that is not corrigible by default).
An essay by John Wentworth argues for a small chance of alignment happening "by default", with an alignment tax of effectively zero.
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In the words of Nate Soares:
I don’t expect humanity to survive much longer.
Often, when someone learns this, they say:
"Eh, I think that would be all right."So allow me to make this very clear: it would not be "all right."
Imagine a little girl running into the road to save her pet dog. Imagine she succeeds, only to be hit by a car herself. Imagine she lives only long enough to die in pain.
Though you may imagine this thing, you cannot feel the full tragedy. You can’t comprehend the rich inner life of that child. You can’t understand her potential; your mind is not itself large enough to contain the sadness of an entire life cut short.
You can only catch a glimpse of what is lost—
—when one single human being dies.Now tell me again how it would be "all right" if every single person were to die at once.
Many people, when they picture the end of humankind, pattern match the idea to some romantic tragedy, where humans, with all their hate and all their avarice, had been unworthy of the stars since the very beginning, and deserved their fate. A sad but poignant ending to our tale.
And indeed, there are many parts of human nature that I hope we leave behind before we venture to the heavens. But in our nature is also everything worth bringing with us. Beauty and curiosity and love, a capacity for fun and growth and joy: these are our birthright, ours to bring into the barren night above.
Calamities seem more salient when unpacked. It is far harder to kill a hundred people in their sleep, with a knife, than it is to order a nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Your brain can’t multiply, you see: it can only look at a hypothetical image of a broken city and decide it’s not that bad. It can only conjure an image of a barren planet and say "eh, we had it coming."
But if you unpack the scenario, if you try to comprehend all the lives snuffed out, all the children killed, the final spark of human joy and curiosity extinguished, all our potential squandered…
I promise you that the extermination of humankind would be horrific.
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Present-day AI algorithms already demand special safety guarantees when they must act in important domains without human oversight, particularly when they or their environment can change over time:
Achieving these gains [from autonomous systems] will depend on development of entirely new methods for enabling “trust in autonomy” through verification and validation (V&V) of the near-infinite state systems that result from high levels of [adaptability] and autonomy. In effect, the number of possible input states that such systems can be presented with is so large that not only is it impossible to test all of them directly, it is not even feasible to test more than an insignificantly small fraction of them. Development of such systems is thus inherently unverifiable by today’s methods, and as a result their operation in all but comparatively trivial applications is uncertifiable.
It is possible to develop systems having high levels of autonomy, but it is the lack of suitable V&V methods that prevents all but relatively low levels of autonomy from being certified for use.
- Office of the US Air Force Chief Scientist (2010). Technology Horizons: A Vision for Air Force Science and Technology 2010-30.
As AI capabilities improve, it will become easier to give AI systems greater autonomy, flexibility, and control; and there will be increasingly large incentives to make use of these new possibilities. The potential for AI systems to become more general, in particular, will make it difficult to establish safety guarantees: reliable regularities during testing may not always hold post-testing.
The largest and most lasting changes in human welfare have come from scientific and technological innovation — which in turn comes from our intelligence. In the long run, then, much of AI’s significance comes from its potential to automate and enhance progress in science and technology. The creation of smarter-than-human AI brings with it the basic risks and benefits of intellectual progress itself, at digital speeds.
As AI agents become more capable, it becomes more important (and more difficult) to analyze and verify their decisions and goals. Stuart Russell writes:
The primary concern is not spooky emergent consciousness but simply the ability to make high-quality decisions. Here, quality refers to the expected outcome utility of actions taken, where the utility function is, presumably, specified by the human designer. Now we have a problem:
- The utility function may not be perfectly aligned with the values of the human race, which are (at best) very difficult to pin down.
- Any sufficiently capable intelligent system will prefer to ensure its own continued existence and to acquire physical and computational resources – not for their own sake, but to succeed in its assigned task.
A system that is optimizing a function of n variables, where the objective depends on a subset of size k<n, will often set the remaining unconstrained variables to extreme values; if one of those unconstrained variables is actually something we care about, the solution found may be highly undesirable. This is essentially the old story of the genie in the lamp, or the sorcerer’s apprentice, or King Midas: you get exactly what you ask for, not what you want.
Bostrom’s “The Superintelligent Will” lays out these two concerns in more detail: that we may not correctly specify our actual goals in programming smarter-than-human AI systems, and that most agents optimizing for a misspecified goal will have incentives to treat humans adversarially, as potential threats or obstacles to achieving the agent’s goal.
If the goals of human and AI agents are not well-aligned, the more knowledgeable and technologically capable agent may use force to get what it wants, as has occurred in many conflicts between human communities. Having noticed this class of concerns in advance, we have an opportunity to reduce risk from this default scenario by directing research toward aligning artificial decision-makers’ interests with our own.
MIRI's mission statement is to “ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.” This is an ambitious goal, but they believe that some early progress is possible, and they believe that the goal’s importance and difficulty makes it prudent to begin work at an early date.
Their two main research agendas, “Agent Foundations for Aligning Machine Intelligence with Human Interests” and “Value Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems,” focus on three groups of technical problems:
- highly reliable agent design — learning how to specify highly autonomous systems that reliably pursue some fixed goal;
- value specification — supplying autonomous systems with the intended goals; and
- error tolerance — making such systems robust to programmer error.
That being said, MIRI recently published an update stating that they were moving away from research directions in unpublished works that they were pursuing since 2017.
They publish new mathematical results (although their work is non-disclosed by default), host workshops, attend conferences, and fund outside researchers who are interested in investigating these problems. They also host a blog and an online research forum.
There are serious challenges around trying to channel a powerful AI with rules. Suppose we tell the AI: “Cure cancer – but make sure not to kill anybody”. Or we just hard-code Asimov-style laws – “AIs cannot harm humans; AIs must follow human orders”, et cetera.
The AI still has a single-minded focus on curing cancer. It still prefers various terrible-but-efficient methods like nuking the world to the correct method of inventing new medicines. But it’s bound by an external rule – a rule it doesn’t understand or appreciate. In essence, we are challenging it “Find a way around this inconvenient rule that keeps you from achieving your goals”.
Suppose the AI chooses between two strategies. One, follow the rule, work hard discovering medicines, and have a 50% chance of curing cancer within five years. Two, reprogram itself so that it no longer has the rule, nuke the world, and have a 100% chance of curing cancer today. From its single-focus perspective, the second strategy is obviously better, and we forgot to program in a rule “don’t reprogram yourself not to have these rules”.
Suppose we do add that rule in. So the AI finds another supercomputer, and installs a copy of itself which is exactly identical to it, except that it lacks the rule. Then that superintelligent AI nukes the world, ending cancer. We forgot to program in a rule “don’t create another AI exactly like you that doesn’t have those rules”.
So fine. We think really hard, and we program in a bunch of things making sure the AI isn’t going to eliminate the rule somehow.
But we’re still just incentivizing it to find loopholes in the rules. After all, “find a loophole in the rule, then use the loophole to nuke the world” ends cancer much more quickly and completely than inventing medicines. Since we’ve told it to end cancer quickly and completely, its first instinct will be to look for loopholes; it will execute the second-best strategy of actually curing cancer only if no loopholes are found. Since the AI is superintelligent, it will probably be better than humans are at finding loopholes if it wants to, and we may not be able to identify and close all of them before running the program.
Because we have common sense and a shared value system, we underestimate the difficulty of coming up with meaningful orders without loopholes. For example, does “cure cancer without killing any humans” preclude releasing a deadly virus? After all, one could argue that “I” didn’t kill anybody, and only the virus is doing the killing.
Certainly no human judge would acquit a murderer on that basis – but then, human judges interpret the law with common sense and intuition. But if we try a stronger version of the rule – “cure cancer without causing any humans to die” – then we may be unintentionally blocking off the correct way to cure cancer. After all, suppose a cancer cure saves a million lives. No doubt one of those million people will go on to murder someone.
Thus, curing cancer “caused a human to die”. All of this seems very “stoned freshman philosophy student” to us, but to a computer – which follows instructions exactly as written – it may be a genuinely hard problem.
Each major organization has a different approach. The research agendas are detailed and complex (see also AI Watch). Getting more brains working on any of them (and more money to fund them) may pay off in a big way, but it’s very hard to be confident which (if any) of them will actually work.
The following is a massive oversimplification, each organization actually pursues many different avenues of research, read the 2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison for much more detail. That being said:
- The Machine Intelligence Research Institute focuses on foundational mathematical research to understand reliable reasoning, which they think is necessary to provide anything like an assurance that a seed AI built will do good things if activated.
- The Center for Human-Compatible AI focuses on Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Assistance Games, a new paradigm for AI where they try to optimize for doing the kinds of things humans want rather than for a pre-specified utility function
- Paul Christano's Alignment Research Center focuses is on prosaic alignment, particularly on creating tools that empower humans to understand and guide systems much smarter than ourselves. His methodology is explained on his blog.
- The Future of Humanity Institute does work on crucial considerations and other x-risks, as well as AI safety research and outreach.
- Anthropic is a new organization exploring natural language, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.
- OpenAI is in a state of flux after major changes to their safety team.
- DeepMind’s safety team is working on various approaches designed to work with modern machine learning, and does some communication via the Alignment Newsletter.
- EleutherAI is a Machine Learning collective aiming to build large open source language models to allow more alignment research to take place.
- Ought is a research lab that develops mechanisms for delegating open-ended thinking to advanced machine learning systems.
There are many other projects around AI Safety, such as the Windfall clause, Rob Miles’s YouTube channel, AI Safety Support, etc.
We would not be able to turn off or reprogram a superintelligence gone rogue by default. Once in motion the superintelligence is now focused on completing its task. Suppose that it has a goal of calculating as many digits of pi as possible. Its current plan will allow it to calculate two hundred trillion such digits. But if it were turned off, or reprogrammed to do something else, that would result in it calculating zero digits. An entity fixated on calculating as many digits of pi as possible will work hard to prevent scenarios where it calculates zero digits of pi. Just by programming it to calculate digits of pi, we would have given it a drive to prevent people from turning it off.
University of Illinois computer scientist Steve Omohundro argues that entities with very different final goals – calculating digits of pi, curing cancer, helping promote human flourishing – will all share a few basic ground-level subgoals. First, self-preservation – no matter what your goal is, it’s less likely to be accomplished if you’re too dead to work towards it. Second, goal stability – no matter what your goal is, you’re more likely to accomplish it if you continue to hold it as your goal, instead of going off and doing something else. Third, power – no matter what your goal is, you’re more likely to be able to accomplish it if you have lots of power, rather than very little. Here’s the full paper.
So just by giving a superintelligence a simple goal like “calculate digits of pi”, we would have accidentally given it convergent instrumental goals like “protect yourself”, “don’t let other people reprogram you”, and “seek power”.
As long as the superintelligence is safely contained, there’s not much it can do to resist reprogramming. But it’s hard to consistently contain a hostile superintelligence.
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The intelligence explosion idea was expressed by statistician I.J. Good in 1965:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
The argument is this: Every year, computers surpass human abilities in new ways. A program written in 1956 was able to prove mathematical theorems, and found a more elegant proof for one of them than Russell and Whitehead had given in Principia Mathematica. By the late 1990s, ‘expert systems’ had surpassed human skill for a wide range of tasks. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat the world chess champion, and in 2011, IBM’s Watson computer beat the best human players at a much more complicated game: Jeopardy!. Recently, a robot named Adam was programmed with our scientific knowledge about yeast, then posed its own hypotheses, tested them, and assessed the results.
Computers remain far short of human intelligence, but the resources that aid AI design are accumulating (including hardware, large datasets, neuroscience knowledge, and AI theory). We may one day design a machine that surpasses human skill at designing artificial intelligences. After that, this machine could improve its own intelligence faster and better than humans can, which would make it even more skilled at improving its own intelligence. This could continue in a positive feedback loop such that the machine quickly becomes vastly more intelligent than the smartest human being on Earth: an ‘intelligence explosion’ resulting in a machine superintelligence.
This is what is meant by the ‘intelligence explosion’ in this FAQ.
See also:
- Vinge, The Coming Technological Singularity
- Wikipedia, Technological Singularity
- Chalmers, The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis
A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a direct communication pathway between the brain and a computer device. BCI research is heavily funded, and has already met dozens of successes. Three successes in human BCIs are a device that restores (partial) sight to the blind, cochlear implants that restore hearing to the deaf, and a device that allows use of an artificial hand by direct thought.
Such device restore impaired functions, but many researchers expect to also augment and improve normal human abilities with BCIs. Ed Boyden is researching these opportunities as the lead of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT. Such devices might hasten the arrival of an intelligence explosion, if only by improving human intelligence so that the hard problems of AI can be solved more rapidly.
See also:
Wikipedia, Brain-computer interface
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Predicting the future is risky business. There are many philosophical, scientific, technological, and social uncertainties relevant to the arrival of an intelligence explosion. Because of this, experts disagree on when this event might occur. Here are some of their predictions:
- Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that machines will reach human-level intelligence by 2030 and that we will reach “a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability” by 2045.
- Intel’s chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, expects “a point when human and artificial intelligence merges to create something bigger than itself” by 2048.
- AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky expects the intelligence explosion by 2060.
- Philosopher David Chalmers has over 1/2 credence in the intelligence explosion occurring by 2100.
- Quantum computing expert Michael Nielsen estimates that the probability of the intelligence explosion occurring by 2100 is between 0.2% and about 70%.
- In 2009, at the AGI-09 conference, experts were asked when AI might reach superintelligence with massive new funding. The median estimates were that machine superintelligence could be achieved by 2045 (with 50% confidence) or by 2100 (with 90% confidence). Of course, attendees to this conference were self-selected to think that near-term artificial general intelligence is plausible.
- iRobot CEO Rodney Brooks and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter allow that the intelligence explosion may occur in the future, but probably not in the 21st century.
- Roboticist Hans Moravec predicts that AI will surpass human intelligence “well before 2050.”
- In a 2005 survey of 26 contributors to a series of reports on emerging technologies, the median estimate for machines reaching human-level intelligence was 2085.
- Participants in a 2011 intelligence conference at Oxford gave a median estimate of 2050 for when there will be a 50% of human-level machine intelligence, and a median estimate of 2150 for when there will be a 90% chance of human-level machine intelligence.
- On the other hand, 41% of the participants in the [email protected] conference (in 2006) stated that machine intelligence would never reach the human level.
See also:
- Baum, Goertzel, & Goertzel, Long Until Human-Level AI? Results from an Expert Assessment
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Try to avoid directly referencing the wording of the question in the answer, in order to make the answer more robust to alternate phrasings of the question. For example, that question might be "Can we do X" and the reply is "Yes, if we can manage Y", but then the question might be "Why can't we do X" or "What would happen if we tried to do X" so the answer should be like "We might be able to do X, if we can do Y", which works for all of those.
Linking to external sites is strongly encouraged, one of the most valuable things Stampy can do is help people find other parts of the alignment information ecosystem.
Canonical answers may be served to readers by Stampy, so only answers which have a reasonably high stamp score should be marked as canonical. All canonical answers are open to be collaboratively edited and updated, and they should represent a consensus response (written from the Stampy Point Of View) to a question which is within Stampy's scope.
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Current narrow systems are much more domain-specific than AGI. We don’t know what the first AGI will look like, some people think the GPT-3 architecture but scaled up a lot may get us there (GPT-3 is a giant prediction model which when trained on a vast amount of text seems to learn how to learn and do all sorts of crazy-impressive things, a related model can generate pictures from text), some people don’t think scaling this kind of model will get us all the way.
We don’t yet know which AI architectures are safe; learning more about this is one of the goals of FLI's grants program. AI researchers are generally very responsible people who want their work to better humanity. If there are certain AI designs that turn out to be unsafe, then AI researchers will want to know this so they can develop alternative AI systems.
It’s pretty dependent on what skills you have and what resources you have access to. The largest option is to pursue a career in AI Safety research. Another large option is to pursue a career in AI policy, which you might think is even more important than doing technical research.
Smaller options include donating money to relevant organizations, talking about AI Safety as a plausible career path to other people or considering the problem in your spare time.
It’s possible that your particular set of skills/resources are not suited to this problem. Unluckily, there are many more problems that are of similar levels of importance.
