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Ajeya Cotra has written an excellent article named Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning on this question.
The basic concern as AI systems become increasingly powerful is that they won’t do what we want them to do – perhaps because they aren’t correctly designed, perhaps because they are deliberately subverted, or perhaps because they do what we tell them to do rather than what we really want them to do (like in the classic stories of genies and wishes.) Many AI systems are programmed to have goals and to attain them as effectively as possible – for example, a trading algorithm has the goal of maximizing profit. Unless carefully designed to act in ways consistent with human values, a highly sophisticated AI trading system might exploit means that even the most ruthless financier would disavow. These are systems that literally have a mind of their own, and maintaining alignment between human interests and their choices and actions will be crucial.
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Why can’t we just use Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics?
Isaac Asimov wrote those laws as a plot device for science fiction novels. Every story in the I, Robot series details a way that the laws can go wrong and be misinterpreted by robots. The laws are not a solution because they are an overly-simple set of natural language instructions that don’t have clearly defined terms and don’t factor in all edge-case scenarios.
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
There is a broad range of possible goals that an AI might possess, but there are a few basic drives that would be useful to almost any of them. These are called instrumentally convergent goals:
- Self preservation. An agent is less likely to achieve its goal if it is not around to see to its completion.
- Goal-content integrity. An agent is less likely to achieve its goal if its goal has been changed to something else. For example, if you offer Gandhi a pill that makes him want to kill people, he will refuse to take it.
- Self-improvement. An agent is more likely to achieve its goal if it is more intelligent and better at problem-solving.
- Resource acquisition. The more resources at an agent’s disposal, the more power it has to make change towards its goal. Even a purely computational goal, such as computing digits of pi, can be easier to achieve with more hardware and energy.
Because of these drives, even a seemingly simple goal could create an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) hell-bent on taking over the world’s material resources and preventing itself from being turned off. The classic example is an ASI that was programmed to maximize the output of paper clips at a paper clip factory. The ASI had no other goal specifications other than “maximize paper clips,” so it converts all of the matter in the solar system into paper clips, and then sends probes to other star systems to create more factories.
What is MIRI’s mission? What is MIRI trying to do? What is MIRI working on?
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.
A machine superintelligence, if programmed with the right motivations, could potentially solve all the problems that humans are trying to solve but haven’t had the ingenuity or processing speed to solve yet. A superintelligence might cure disabilities and diseases, achieve world peace, give humans vastly longer and healthier lives, eliminate food and energy shortages, boost scientific discovery and space exploration, and so on.
Furthermore, humanity faces several existential risks in the 21st century, including global nuclear war, bioweapons, superviruses, and more. A superintelligent machine would be more capable of solving those problems than humans are.
See also:
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How soon will transformative AI / AGI / superintelligence likely come?
As is often said, it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. This has not stopped many people thinking about when AI will transform the world, but all predictions should come with a warning that it's a hard domain to find anything like certainty.
This report for the Open Philanthropy Project is perhaps the most careful attempt so far (and generates these graphs, which peak at 2042), and there's been much discussion including this reply and analysis which argues that we likely need less compute than the OpenPhil report expects.
There have also been expert surveys, and many people have shared various thoughts. Berkeley AI professor Stuart Russell has given his best guess as “sometime in our children’s lifetimes”, and Ray Kurzweil (Futurist and Google’s director of engineering) predicts human level AI by 2029 and the singularity by 2045. The Metaculus question on publicly known AGI has a median of around 2029 (around 10 years sooner than it was before the GPT-3 AI showed unexpected ability on a broad range of tasks).
The consensus answer, if there was one, might be something like: “highly uncertain, maybe not for over a hundred years, maybe in less than 15, with around the middle of the century looking fairly plausible”.
One possible way to ensure the safety of a powerful AI system is to keep it contained in a software environment. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this procedure - keeping an AI system in a secure software environment would make it safer than letting it roam free. However, even AI systems inside software environments might not be safe enough.
Humans sometimes put dangerous humans inside boxes to limit their ability to influence the external world. Sometimes, these humans escape their boxes. The security of a prison depends on certain assumptions, which can be violated. Yoshie Shiratori reportedly escaped prison by weakening the door-frame with miso soup and dislocating his shoulders.
Human written software has a high defect rate; we should expect a perfectly secure system to be difficult to create. If humans construct a software system they think is secure, it is possible that the security relies on a false assumption. A powerful AI system could potentially learn how its hardware works and manipulate bits to send radio signals. It could fake a malfunction and attempt social engineering when the engineers look at its code. As the saying goes: in order for someone to do something we had imagined was impossible requires only that they have a better imagination.
Experimentally, humans have convinced other humans to let them out of the box. Spooky.
People tend to imagine AIs as being like nerdy humans – brilliant at technology but clueless about social skills. There is no reason to expect this – persuasion and manipulation is a different kind of skill from solving mathematical proofs, but it’s still a skill, and an intellect as far beyond us as we are beyond lions might be smart enough to replicate or exceed the “charming sociopaths” who can naturally win friends and followers despite a lack of normal human emotions. A superintelligence might be able to analyze human psychology deeply enough to understand the hopes and fears of everyone it negotiates with. Single humans using psychopathic social manipulation have done plenty of harm – Hitler leveraged his skill at oratory and his understanding of people’s darkest prejudices to take over a continent. Why should we expect superintelligences to do worse than humans far less skilled than they?
(More outlandishly, a superintelligence might just skip language entirely and figure out a weird pattern of buzzes and hums that causes conscious thought to seize up, and which knocks anyone who hears it into a weird hypnotizable state in which they’ll do anything the superintelligence asks. It sounds kind of silly to me, but then, nuclear weapons probably would have sounded kind of silly to lions sitting around speculating about what humans might be able to accomplish. When you’re dealing with something unbelievably more intelligent than you are, you should probably expect the unexpected.)
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
If you like interactive FAQs, you've already found one! All joking aside, probably the best places to start as a newcomer are the The AI Revolution posts on WaitBuyWhy: The Road to Superintelligence and Our Immortality or Extinction for a fun accessible intro, or AGI safety from first principles for a more up to date option. If you prefer videos, Rob Miles's YouTube and MIRI's AI Alignment: Why It’s Hard, and Where to Start are great.
If you've up for a book-length introduction, there are several options.
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.
The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian is the most recent (2020) and has more of an emphasis on machine learning and current generation problems with AI than Superintelligence or Human Compatible.
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.
These 4 canonical answers are marked as outdated. Feel free to update them!
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
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
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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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.
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.
Answers to YouTube questions should not be marked as canonical, and will generally remain as they were when originally written since they have details which are specific to an idiosyncratic question. YouTube answers may be forked into wiki answers, in order to better respond to a particular question, in which case the YouTube question should have its canonical version field set to the new more widely useful question.
Try to avoid directly referencing the wording of the question in the answer, in order to make the answer more robust to alternate phrasings. 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.
How is AGI different from current AI? e.g. AlphaGo, GPT-3, etc
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.
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.
