One Direction News

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Humanity coordinates to prevent the creation of potentially-unsafe AIs.

Alignment is not properly solved, but core human values are simple enough that partial alignment techniques can impart these robustly. Despite caring about other things, it is relatively cheap for AGI to satisfy human values.

Sheer Dumb Luck. The aligned AI agrees that alignment is hard, any Everett branches in our neighborhood with slightly different AI models or different random seeds are mostly dead.

Other

Yudkowsky is trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and fortunately all of his mistakes have failed to cancel out

We create a truth economy. https://manifold.markets/Krantz/is-establishing-a-truth-economy-tha?r=S3JhbnR6

Eliezer finally listens to Krantz.

Because of quantum immortality we will observe only the worlds where AI will not kill us (assuming that s-risks chances are even smaller, it is equal to ok outcome).

Someone solves agent foundations

Alignment is unsolvable. AI that cares enough about its goal to destroy humanity is also forced to take it slow trying to align its future self, preventing run-away.

Aliens invade and stop bad |AI from appearing

A smaller AI disaster causes widespread public panic about AI, making it a bad legal or PR move to invest in powerful AIs without also making nearly-crippling safety guarantees

AGI is never built (indefinite global moratorium)

Alignment is impossible. Sufficiently smart AIs know this and thus won't improve themselves and won't create successor AIs, but will instead try to prevent existence of smarter AIs, just as smart humans do.

Ethics turns out to be a precondition of superintelligence

AI systems good at finding alignment solutions to capable systems (via some solution in the space of alignment solutions, supposing it is non-null, and that we don't have a clear trajectory to get to) have find some solution to alignment.

There’s some cap on the value extractible from the universe and we already got the 20%

Humans become transhuman through other means before AGI happens

Techniques along the lines outlined by Collin Burns turn out to be sufficient for alignment (AIs/AGIs are made truthful enough that they can be used to get us towards full alignment)

There is a natural limit of effectiveness of intelligence, like diminishing returns, and it is on the level IQ=1000. AIs have to collaborate with humans.

AIs will not have utility functions (in the same sense that humans do not), their goals such as they are will be relatively humanlike, and they will be "computerish" and generally weakly motivated compared to humans.

Orthogonality Thesis is false.

Something to do with self-other overlap, which Eliezer called "Not obviously stupid" - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzt9gHpNwA2oHtwKX/self-other-overlap-a-neglected-approach-to-ai-alignment?commentId=WapHz3gokGBd3KHKm

Pascals mugging: it’s not okay in 99.9% of the worlds but the 0.1% are so much better that the combined EV of AGI for the multiverse is positive

The Super-Strong Self Sampling Assumption (SSSSA) is true. If superintelligence is possible, "I" will become the superintelligence.

AI control gets us helpful enough systems without being deadly

an aligned AGI is built and the aligned AGI prevents the creation of any unaligned AGI.

I've been a good bing 😊

We make risk-conservative requests to extract alignment-related work out of AI-systems that were boxed prior to becoming superhuman. We somehow manage to achieve a positive feedback-loop in alignment/verification-abilities.

The response to AI advancements or failures makes some governments delay the timelines

Far more interesting problems to solve than take over the world and THEN solve them. The additional kill all humans step is either not a low-energy one or just by chance doesn't get converged upon.

AIs make "proof-like" argumentation for why output does/is what we want. We manage to obtain systems that *predict* human evaluations of proof-steps, and we manage to find/test/leverage regularities for when humans *aren't* fooled.

A lot of humans participate in a slow scalable oversight-style system, which is pivotally used/solves alignment enough

Something less inscrutable than matrices works fast enough

SHA3-256: 1f90ecfdd02194d810656cced88229c898d6b6d53a7dd6dd1fad268874de54c8

Robot Love!!

AI thinks it is in a simulation controlled by Roko's basilisk

The human brain is the perfect arrangement of atoms for a "takeover the world" agent, so AGI has no advantage over us in that task.

Aligned AI is more economically valuable than unaligned AI. The size of this gap and the robustness of alignment techniques required to achieve it scale up with intelligence, so economics naturally encourages solving alignment.

Humans and human tech (like AI) never reach singularity, and whatever eats our lightcone instead (like aliens) happens to create an "okay" outcome

AIs never develop coherent goals

Rolf Nelson's idea that we make precommitment to simulate all possible bad AIs works – and keeps AI in check.

Nick Bostrom's idea (Hail Mary) that AI will preserve humans to trade with possible aliens works

For some reason, the optimal strategy for AGIs is just to head somewhere with far more resources than Earth, as fast as possible. All unaligned AGIs immediately leave, and, for some reason, do not leave anything behind that kills us.

An AI that is not fully superior to humans launches a failed takeover, and the resulting panic convinces the people of the world to unite to stop any future AI development.

We're inside of a simulation created by an entity that has values approximately equal to ours, and it intervenes and saves us from unaligned AI.

God exists and stops the AGI

Someone at least moderately sane leads a campaign, becomes in charge of a major nation, and starts a secret project with enough resources to solve alignment, because it turns out there's a way to convert resources into alignment progress.

Someone creates AGI(s) in a box, and offers to split the universe. They somehow find a way to arrange this so that the AGI(s) cannot manipulate them or pull any tricks, and the AGI(s) give them instructions for safe pivotal acts.

Someone understands how minds work enough to successfully build and use one directed at something world-savingly enough

Dolphins, or some other species, but probably dolphins, have actually been hiding in the shadows, more intelligent than us, this whole time. Their civilization has been competent enough to solve alignment long before we can create an AGI.

AGIs' takeover attempts are defeated by Michael Biehn with a pipe bomb.

Eliezer funds the development of controllable nanobots that melt computer circuitry, and they destroy all computers, preventing the Singularity. If Eliezer's past self from the 90s could see this, it would be so so so soooo hilarious.

Several AIs are created but they move in opposite directions with near light speed, so they never interacts. At least one of them is friendly and it gets a few percents of the total mass of the universe.

Unfriendly AIs choose to advance not outwards but inwards, and form a small blackhole which helps them to perform more calculations than could be done with the whole mass of the universe. For external observer such AIs just disappear.

Any sufficiently advance AI halts because it wireheads itself or halts for some other reasons. This puts a natural limit on AI's intelligence, and lower intelligence AIs are not that dangerous.

Social contagion causes widespread public panic about AI, making it a bad legal or PR move to invest in powerful AIs without also making nearly-crippling safety guarantees

Getting things done in Real World is as hard for AGI as it is for humans. AGI needs human help, but aligning humans is as impossible as aligning AIs. Humans and AIs create billions of competing AGIs with just as many goals.

Development and deployment of advanced AI occurs within a secure enclave which can only be interfaced with via a decentralized governance protocol

Friendly AI more likely to resurrect me than paperclipper or suffering maximiser. Because of quantum immortality I will find myself eventually resurrected. Friendly AIs will wage a multiverse wide war against s-risks, s-risks are unlikely.

High-level self-improvement (rewriting code) is intrinsically risky process, so AIs will prefer low level and slow self-improvement (learning), thus AIs collaborating with humans will have advantage. Ends with posthumans ecosystem.

Human consciousness is needed to collapse wave function, and AI can't do it. Thus humans should be preserved and they may require complete friendliness in exchange (or they will be unhappy and produce bad collapses)

Power dynamics stay multi-polar. Partly easy copying of SotA performance, bigger projects need high coordination, and moderate takeoff speed. And "military strike on all society" remains an abysmal strategy for practically all entities.

First AI is actually a human upload (maybe LLM-based model of person) AND it will be copies many times to form weak AI Nanny which prevents creation of other AIs.

Nanotech is difficult without experiments, so no mail order AI Grey Goo; Humans will be the main workhorse of AI everywhere. While they will be exploited, this will be like normal life from inside

ASI needs not your atoms but information. Humans will live very interesting lives.

Something else

Moral Realism is true, the AI discovers this and the One True Morality is human-compatible.

Valence realism is true. AGI hacks itself to experiencing every possible consciousness and picks the best one (for everyone)

AGI develops natural abstractions sufficiently similar to ours that it is aligned with us by default

AGI discovers new physics and exits to another dimension (like the creatures in Greg Egan’s Crystal Nights).

Alien Information Theory is true (this is discovered by experiments with sustained hours/days long DMT trips). The aliens have solved alignment and give us the answer.

AGI executes a suicide plan that destroys itself and other potential AGIs, but leaves humans in an okay outcome.

Multipolar AGI Agents run wild on the internet, hacking/breaking everything, causing untold economic damage but aren't focused enough to manipulate humans to achieve embodiment. In the aftermath, humanity becomes way saner about alignment.

Some form of objective morality is true, and any sufficiently intelligent agent automatically becomes benevolent.

Co-operative AI research leads to the training of agents with a form of pro-social concern that generalises to out of distribution agents with hidden utilities, i.e. humans.

"Corrigibility" is a bit more mathematically straightforward than was initially presumed, in the sense that we can expect it to occur, and is relatively easy to predict, even under less-than-ideal conditions.

Either the "strong form" of the Orthogonality Thesis is false, or "Goal-directed agents are as tractable as their goals" is true while goal-sets which are most threatening to humanity are relatively intractable.

A concerted effort targets an agent at a capability plateau which is adequate to defer the hard parts of the problem until later. The necessary near-term problems to solve didn't depend on deeply modeling human values.

Almost all human values are ex post facto rationalizations and enough humans survive to do what they always do

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It will be based on deep learning

Gary Marcus will be completely unimpressed by its capabilities

It will be based on neural networks

At least one person directly involved in its creation will be a trillionaire

More than 10 000 human hours will be spent to make sure it does not return politically incorrect outputs

It will run on Nvidia GPUs

It will wipe out humanity after the rapid recursive self-improvement

Right before the extermination event, it will be considered by the majority of human population as a prosaic thing, e.g. “it is just matrices to predict the next word”

Right before the extermination event, at least 25% of human population will think that they are smarter than it.

Before the extermination event, it will make significant extraordinary contributions to science, technology, and human well-being.

When communicating with human words, it will use the word “delve” more often than it occurs in human texts on average

It will be created by OpenAI, Anthropic or DeepMind

It will be some advanced form of a multimodal transformer

It will run on an AI architecture which is not known as of 2024

Right before the extermination event, it will be considered by the majority of human population a superintelligence with the capabilities beyond their comprehension

Meta will try to create an open source version of it

The process of wiping out humanity will take less than 24 hours from the first signs of attempts to wipe out humanity till the last human on Earth killed

Before wiping out humanity, it will attempt some trade with humanity

Right before the extermination event, alignment will be generally considered a solved problem

I recently started putting up flyers around. Will at least one person join discord cause of these, directly, not because of any other reason, within a week? By eod Jan 16

I submitted a flyer to the library admin office for approval. Will it be up by Thursday noon?

Will I hear from the library by Jan 16 via email or other, or flyer is up?

Will we have 10+ people this year at a meeting?

Well at least five people wrote and submit stories for the March event?

Will at least 1 member besides me join manifest 2024? There are some leads

Will we have 11+ at a meeting by mid 2025?

Will at least 3 people read Neuromancer (in addition to me) by EOY 2024 as we plan?

By 2030 will anyone who ever was a regular member at least two times publish a novel? Self publishing okay

By 2030 will anyone who ever was a regular member at least two times win a fiction or sci-fi award?

Will we have a new author special guest by EOY 2024? (We already had Richard Ngo once!)

Will any past/future/present members excluding me be published online in a "real" magazine (not completely self-published) such as lightspeed? by mid 2026

Will Richard Ngo win a major scifi award (Hugo, Nebula, Philip K Dick, or other with prize 20k or more by mid 2031

Will someone discovering us via flyer show up at a meeting by mid year?

Will the library deny me initially, which I'm going to push them on to find out?

Will I have to escalate the situations with legal threats to get us on the bulletin board in the San Mateo library?

Will someone else submit a flyer design which is better than my primitive one?

Will at least one person show up in person via this market or Manifold, by mid year?

Will at least two semipermanent members be found via flyers by mid year?

Will we have 20+ this year?

Will we have a meeting in a cafe or other commercial spot by mid year?

Will we meet in the library at least once?

Will two people who met at scifi date for at least a month this year?

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