AF - EAI Alignment Speaker Series #1: Challenges for Safe and Beneficial Brain-Like Artificial General Intelligence with Steve Byrnes by Curtis Huebner

<a href="https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ajhtyKxtmmErTwH5t/eai-alignment-speaker-series-1-challenges-for-safe-and">Link to original article</a><br/><br/>Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EAI Alignment Speaker Series #1: Challenges for Safe & Beneficial Brain-Like Artificial General Intelligence with Steve Byrnes, published by Curtis Huebner on March 23, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. A couple months ago EleutherAI started an alignment speaker series, some of these talks have been recorded. This is the first instalment in the series. The following is a transcript generated with the help of Conjecture's Verbalize and some light editing: Getting started 1 CURTIS00:00:22,775 --> 00:00:56,683Okay, I've started the recording. I think we can give it maybe a minute or two more and then I guess we can get started. I've also got the chat window as part of the recording. So if anyone has something they want to write out, feel free to put that in. Steve, you want to do questions throughout the talk, or should we wait till the end of the talk before we ask questions? 2 STEVE00:00:59,405 --> 00:01:09,452Let's do throughout, but I reserve the right to put people off if something seems tangential or something. 3 CURTIS00:01:10,200 --> 00:01:12,101Awesome. All right, cool. Let's go with that then. 10 STEVE00:02:02,246 --> 00:21:41,951 The talk All right. Thanks, everybody, for coming. This is going to be based on blog posts called Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety. If you've read all of them, you'll find this kind of redundant, but you're still welcome to stay. My name is Steve Byrnes and I live in the Boston area. I'm employed remotely by Astera Institute, which is based in Berkeley. I'm going to talk about challenges for safe and beneficial brain-like Artificial General Intelligence for the next 35 minutes. Feel free to jump in with questions. Don't worry, I'm funded by an entirely different crypto billionaire. .That joke was very fresh when I wrote it three months ago. I need a new one now. Okay, so I'll start with—well, we don't have to talk about the outline. You'll see as we go. General motivation Start with general motivation. Again, I'm assuming that the audience has a range of backgrounds, and some of you will find parts of this talk redundant. The big question that I'm working on is: What happens when people figure out how to run brain-like algorithms on computer chips? I guess I should say “if and when”, but we can get back to that. And I find that when I bring this up to people, they they tend to have two sorts of reactions: One is that we should think of these future algorithms as “like tools for people to use”. And the other is that we should think of them as “like a new intelligent species on the planet”. So let's go through those one by one. Let’s start with the tool perspective. This is the perspective that would be more familiar to AI people. If we put brain-like algorithms on computer chips, then that would be a form of artificial intelligence. And everybody knows that AI today is a tool for people to use. So on this perspective, the sub-problem I'm working on is accident prevention. We want to avoid the scenarios where the AI does something that nobody wanted it to do—not the people who programmed it, not anybody. So there is a technical problem to solve there, which is: If people figure out how to run brain-like algorithms on computer chips, and they want those algorithms to be trying to do X—where X is solar cell research or being honest or whatever you can think of—then what source code should they write? What training environment should they use? And so on. This is an unsolved problem. It turns out to be surprisingly tricky, for some pretty deep reasons that mostly are not going to be in the scope of this talk, but you can read the series. This slide is the bigger picture of that. So if we want our awesome post-AGI future, then we want to avoid, y'know, catastrophic accidents where the AI gets out of control and self-replicates around the Intern...

First published

03/23/2023

Genres:

education

Listen to this episode

0:00 / 0:00

Summary

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EAI Alignment Speaker Series #1: Challenges for Safe & Beneficial Brain-Like Artificial General Intelligence with Steve Byrnes, published by Curtis Huebner on March 23, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. A couple months ago EleutherAI started an alignment speaker series, some of these talks have been recorded. This is the first instalment in the series. The following is a transcript generated with the help of Conjecture's Verbalize and some light editing: Getting started 1 CURTIS00:00:22,775 --> 00:00:56,683Okay, I've started the recording. I think we can give it maybe a minute or two more and then I guess we can get started. I've also got the chat window as part of the recording. So if anyone has something they want to write out, feel free to put that in. Steve, you want to do questions throughout the talk, or should we wait till the end of the talk before we ask questions? 2 STEVE00:00:59,405 --> 00:01:09,452Let's do throughout, but I reserve the right to put people off if something seems tangential or something. 3 CURTIS00:01:10,200 --> 00:01:12,101Awesome. All right, cool. Let's go with that then. 10 STEVE00:02:02,246 --> 00:21:41,951 The talk All right. Thanks, everybody, for coming. This is going to be based on blog posts called Intro to Brain-Like AGI Safety. If you've read all of them, you'll find this kind of redundant, but you're still welcome to stay. My name is Steve Byrnes and I live in the Boston area. I'm employed remotely by Astera Institute, which is based in Berkeley. I'm going to talk about challenges for safe and beneficial brain-like Artificial General Intelligence for the next 35 minutes. Feel free to jump in with questions. Don't worry, I'm funded by an entirely different crypto billionaire. .That joke was very fresh when I wrote it three months ago. I need a new one now. Okay, so I'll start with—well, we don't have to talk about the outline. You'll see as we go. General motivation Start with general motivation. Again, I'm assuming that the audience has a range of backgrounds, and some of you will find parts of this talk redundant. The big question that I'm working on is: What happens when people figure out how to run brain-like algorithms on computer chips? I guess I should say “if and when”, but we can get back to that. And I find that when I bring this up to people, they they tend to have two sorts of reactions: One is that we should think of these future algorithms as “like tools for people to use”. And the other is that we should think of them as “like a new intelligent species on the planet”. So let's go through those one by one. Let’s start with the tool perspective. This is the perspective that would be more familiar to AI people. If we put brain-like algorithms on computer chips, then that would be a form of artificial intelligence. And everybody knows that AI today is a tool for people to use. So on this perspective, the sub-problem I'm working on is accident prevention. We want to avoid the scenarios where the AI does something that nobody wanted it to do—not the people who programmed it, not anybody. So there is a technical problem to solve there, which is: If people figure out how to run brain-like algorithms on computer chips, and they want those algorithms to be trying to do X—where X is solar cell research or being honest or whatever you can think of—then what source code should they write? What training environment should they use? And so on. This is an unsolved problem. It turns out to be surprisingly tricky, for some pretty deep reasons that mostly are not going to be in the scope of this talk, but you can read the series. This slide is the bigger picture of that. So if we want our awesome post-AGI future, then we want to avoid, y'know, catastrophic accidents where the AI gets out of control and self-replicates around the Intern...

Duration

45 minutes

Parent Podcast

The Nonlinear Library: Alignment Forum Daily

View Podcast

Share this episode

Similar Episodes

AMA: Paul Christiano, alignment researcher by Paul Christiano

Release Date: 12/06/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Paul Christiano, alignment researcher, published by Paul Christiano on the AI Alignment Forum. I'll be running an Ask Me Anything on this post from Friday (April 30) to Saturday (May 1). If you want to ask something just post a top-level comment; I'll spend at least a day answering questions. You can find some background about me here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details

What is the alternative to intent alignment called? Q by Richard Ngo

Release Date: 11/17/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What is the alternative to intent alignment called? Q, published by Richard Ngo on the AI Alignment Forum. Paul defines intent alignment of an AI A to a human H as the criterion that A is trying to do what H wants it to do. What term do people use for the definition of alignment in which A is trying to achieve H's goals (whether or not H intends for A to achieve H's goals)? Secondly, this seems to basically map on to the distinction between an aligned genie and an aligned sovereign. Is this a fair characterisation? (Intent alignment definition from) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details

AI alignment landscape by Paul Christiano

Release Date: 11/19/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI alignment landscape, published byPaul Christiano on the AI Alignment Forum. Here (link) is a talk I gave at EA Global 2019, where I describe how intent alignment fits into the broader landscape of “making AI go well,” and how my work fits into intent alignment. This is particularly helpful if you want to understand what I’m doing, but may also be useful more broadly. I often find myself wishing people were clearer about some of these distinctions. Here is the main overview slide from the talk: The highlighted boxes are where I spend most of my time. Here are the full slides from the talk. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details

Would an option to publish to AF users only be a useful feature?Q by Richard Ngo

Release Date: 11/17/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Would an option to publish to AF users only be a useful feature?Q , published by Richard Ngo on the AI Alignment Forum. Right now there are quite a few private safety docs floating around. There's evidently demand for a privacy setting lower than "only people I personally approve", but higher than "anyone on the internet gets to see it". But this means that safety researchers might not see relevant arguments and information. And as the field grows, passing on access to such documents on a personal basis will become even less efficient. My guess is that in most cases, the authors of these documents don't have a problem with other safety researchers seeing them, as long as everyone agrees not to distribute them more widely. One solution could be to have a checkbox for new posts which makes them only visible to verified Alignment Forum users. Would people use this? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details