If digital minds takeoff goes well [...], would we expect a better far-future for digital minds? If so, then I’m inclined to think some considerations in the post are at least indirectly important to digital mind value stuff.
Here’s a position that some people hold:
If there is a long reflection or similar, then far-future AI welfare gets solved.
A long reflection or similar will most likely happen by default, assuming alignment goes well.
For what it’s worth, I buy (1)[1] but I’m not sold on (2), and so overall I’m somewhat sympathetic to your view, Brad. On the other hand, to someone who buys both (1) and (2)—as I think@Zachdoes—your argument does not go through.
If not, then I’m inclined to think digital mind value stuff we have a clue about how to positively affect is not in the far future.
There is potentially an argument here for AI welfare being a neartermist EA cause area. If you wanted to make a more robust neartermist argument, then one approach could be to estimate the number of digital minds in the takeoff, and the quantity of suffering per digital mind, and then compare the total against animal suffering in factory farms.
In general, I do wish that people like yourself arguing for AI welfare as a cause area were clearer about whether they are making a neartermist or longtermist case. Otherwise, it kind of feels like you are coming from a pet theory-ish position that AI welfare should be a cause, rather than arguing in a cause-neutral way. (This is something I’ve observed on the whole; I’m sorry to pick on your post+comment in particular.)
Modulo some concern around metaphilosophy / our “superintelligent” advisors being philosophically incompetent, to catastrophic effect. (For more on this, see Wei Dai’s posts.)
I’m also not sold on (2). But I don’t see how buying (1) and (2) undermines the point I was making. If takeoff going well makes the far future go better in expectation for digital minds, it could do so via alignment or via non-default scenarios.
Re “I do wish people like yourself arguing for AI welfare as a cause area were clearer about whether they are making neartermist or longtermist arguments”: that makes sense. Hopefully it’s now clearer that I take considerations put forward in the post to be relevant under neartermist and longtermist assumptions. Perhaps worth adding: as someone already working in the area, I had material developed for other purposes that I thought worth putting forward for this debate week, per its (by my lights) discussing relevant considerations or illustrating the tractability of work in the area. But the material wasn’t optimized for addressing whether AI welfare should be a cause area, and optimizing it for that didn’t strike me as the most productive way for me to engage given my time constraints. (I wonder if something like this may apply more generally and help explain the pattern you observe.)
I had material developed for other purposes [...] But the material wasn’t optimized for addressing whether AI welfare should be a cause area, and optimizing it for that didn’t strike me as the most productive way for me to engage given my time constraints.
Sounds very reasonable. (Perhaps it might help to add a one-sentence disclaimer at the top of the post, to signpost for readers what the post is vs. is not trying to do? This is a weak suggestion, though.)
I don’t see how buying (1) and (2) undermines the point I was making. If takeoff going well makes the far future go better in expectation for digital minds, it could do so via alignment or via non-default scenarios.
I feel unsure about what you are saying, exactly, especially the last part. I’ll try saying some things in response, and maybe that helps locate the point of disagreement…
(… also feel free to just bow out of this thread if you feel like this is not productive…)
In the case that alignment goes well and there is a long reflection—i.e., (1) and (2) turn out true—my position is that doing AI welfare work now has no effect on the future, because all AI welfare stuff gets solved in the long reflection. In other words, I think that “takeoff going well makes the far future go better in expectation for digital minds” is an incorrect claim in this scenario. (I’m not sure if you are trying to make this claim.)
In the case that alignment goes well but there is no long reflection—i.e., (1) turns out true but (2) turns out false—my position is that doing AI welfare work now might make the far future go better for digital minds. (And thus in this scenario I think some amount of AI welfare should be done now.[1]) Having said this, in practice, in a world in which (2) whether or not a long reflection happens could go either way, I view trying to set up a long reflection as a higher priority intervention than any one of the things we’d hope to solve in the long reflection, such as AI welfare or acausal trade.
In the case that alignment goes poorly, humans either go extinct or are disempowered. In this case, does doing AI welfare work now improve the future at all? I usedto think the answer to this was “yes,” because I thought that better understanding sentience could help with designing AIs that avoid creating suffering digital minds.[2] However, I now believe that this basically wouldn’t work, and that something much hackier (and therefore lower cost) would work instead, like simply nudging AIs in their training to have altruistic/anti-sadistic preferences. (This thing of nudging AIs to be anti-sadistic is part of the suffering risk discourse—I believe it’s something that CLR works on or has worked on—and feels outside of what’s covered by the “AI welfare” field.)
Exactly how much should be done depends on things like how important and tractable digital minds stuff is relative to the other things on the table, like acausal trade, and to what extent the returns to working on each of these things are diminishing, etc.
Why would an AI create digital minds that suffer? One reason is that the AI could have sadistic preferences. A more plausible reason is that the AI is mostly indifferent about causing suffering, and so does not avoid taking actions that incidentally cause/create suffering. Carl Shulman explored this point in his recent 80k episode:
Rob Wiblin: Maybe a final question is it feels like we have to thread a needle between, on the one hand, AI takeover and domination of our trajectory against our consent — or indeed potentially against our existence — and this other reverse failure mode, where humans have all of the power and AI interests are simply ignored. Is there something interesting about the symmetry between these two plausible ways that we could fail to make the future go well? Or maybe are they just actually conceptually distinct?
Carl Shulman: I don’t know that that quite tracks. One reason being, say there’s an AI takeover, that AI will then be in the same position of being able to create AIs that are convenient to its purposes. So say that the way a rogue AI takeover happens is that you have AIs that develop a habit of keeping in mind reward or reinforcement or reproductive fitness, and then those habits allow them to perform very well in processes of training or selection. Those become the AIs that are developed, enhanced, deployed, then they take over, and now they’re interested in maintaining that favourable reward signal indefinitely.
Then the functional upshot is this is, say, selfishness attached to a particular computer register. And so all the rest of the history of civilisation is dedicated to the purpose of protecting the particular GPUs and server farms that are representing this reward or something of similar nature. And then in the course of that expanding civilisation, it will create whatever AI beings are convenient to that purpose.
So if it’s the case that, say, making AIs that suffer when they fail at their local tasks — so little mining bots in the asteroids that suffer when they miss a speck of dust — if that’s instrumentally convenient, then they may create that, just like humans created factory farming. And similarly, they may do terrible things to other civilisations that they eventually encounter deep in space and whatnot.
And you can talk about the narrowness of a ruling group and say, and how terrible would it be for a few humans, even 10 billion humans, to control the fates of a trillion trillion AIs? It’s a far greater ratio than any human dictator, Genghis Khan. But by the same token, if you have rogue AI, you’re going to have, again, that disproportion.
Thanks for your response. I’m unsure if we’re importantly disagreeing. But here are some reactions.
I feel unsure about what you are saying, exactly [...] In the case that alignment goes well and there is a long reflection—i.e., (1) and (2) turn out true—my position is that doing AI welfare work now has no effect on the future, because all AI welfare stuff gets solved in the long reflection [...] In the case that alignment goes well but there is no long reflection—i.e., (1) turns out true but (2) turns out false
I read this as equating (1) with alignment goes well and (2) with there is a long reflection. These understandings of (1) and (2) are rather different from the original formulations of (1) and (2), which were what I had in mind when I responded to an objection by saying I didn’t see how buying (1) and (2) undermined the point I was making. Crucially, I was understanding (2) as equivalent to the claim that if alignment goes well, then a long reflection probably happens by default. I don’t know if we were on the same page about what (1) and (2) say, so I don’t know if that clears things up. In case not, I’ll offer a few more-substantive thoughts (while dropping further reference to (1) and (2) to avoid ambiguity).
I think digital minds takeoff going well (again, for digital minds and with respect to existential risk) makes it more likely that alignment goes well. So, granting (though I’m not convinced of this) that alignment going well and the long reflection are key for how well things go in expectation for digital minds, I think digital minds takeoff bears on that expectation via alignment. In taking alignment going well to be sensitive to how takeoff goes, I am denying that alignment going well is something we should treat as given independently of how takeoff goes. (I’m unsure if we disagree here.)
In a scenario where alignment does not go well, I think it’s important that digital minds takeoff not have happened yet or, failing that, that digital minds’ susceptibility to harm has been reduced before things go off the rails. In this scenario, I think it’d be good to have a portfolio of suffering and mistreatment risk-reducing measures that have been in place, including ones that nudge AIs away from having certain preferences and ones that disincentivize creating AIs with various other candidates for morally relevant features. I take such interventions to be within the purview of AI welfare as an area, partly because what counts as in the area is still up for grabs and such interventions seem natural to include and partly because such interventions are in line with stuff that people working in the area have been saying (e.g. a coauthor and I have suggested related risk-reducing interventions in Sec. 4.2.2 of our article on digital suffering and Sec. 6 of our draft on alignment and ethical treatment)--though I’d agree CLR folks have made related points and that associated suffering discourse feels outside the AI welfare field.
Oh, sorry, I see now that the numberings I used in my second comment don’t map onto how I used them in my first one, which is confusing. My bad.
Your last two paragraphs are very informative to me.
I think digital minds takeoff going well (again, for digital minds and with respect to existential risk) makes it more likely that alignment goes well. [...] In taking alignment going well to be sensitive to how takeoff goes, I am denying that alignment going well is something we should treat as given independently of how takeoff goes.
This is interesting; by my lights this is the right type of argument for justifying AI welfare being a longtermist cause area (which is something that I felt was missing from the debate week). If you have time, I would be keen to hear how you see digital minds takeoff going well as aiding in alignment.[1]
[stuff about nudging AIs away from having certain preferences, etc., being within the AI welfare cause area’s purview, in your view]
Okay, interesting, makes sense.
Thanks a lot for your reply, your points have definitely improved my understanding of AI welfare work!
One thing I’ve previously been cautiously bullish about as an underdiscussed wildcard is the kinda sci-fi approach of getting to human mind uploading (or maybe just regular whole brain emulation) before prosaic AGI, and then letting the uploaded minds—which could be huge in number and running much faster than wall clock time—solve alignment. However, my Metaculus question on this topic indicates that such a path to alignment is very unlikely.
I’m not sure if the above is anything like what you have in mind? (I realize that human mind uploading is different to the thing of LLMs or other prosaic AI systems gaining consciousness (and/or moral status), and that it’s the latter that is more typically the focus of digital minds work (and the focus of your post, I think). So, on second thoughts, I imagine your model for the relationship between digital minds takeoff and alignment will be something different.)
Re how I see digital minds takeoff going well as aiding alignment: the main paths I see go through digital minds takeoff happening after we figure out alignment. That’s because I think aligning AIs that merit moral consideration without mistreating them adds an additional layer of difficulty to alignment. (My coauthor and I go into detail about this difficulty in the second paper I linked in my previous comment.) So if a digital minds takeoff happens while we’re still figuring out alignment, I think we’ll face tradeoffs between alignment and ethical treatment of digital minds, and that this bodes poorly for both alignment and digital minds takeoff.
To elaborate in broad strokes, even supposing that for longtermist reasons alignment going well dwarfs the importance of digital minds’ welfare during takeoff, key actors may not agree. If digital minds takeoff is already underway, they may trade some probability of alignment going well for improved treatment of digital minds.
Upon noticing our willingness to trade safety for ethical treatment, critical-to-align AIs we’re trying to align may exploit that willingness e.g. by persuading their key actors that they (the AIs) merit more moral consideration; this could in turn make those systems less safe and/or lead to epistemic distortions about which AIs merit moral consideration.
This vulnerability could perhaps be avoided by resolving not to give consideration to AI systems until after we’ve figured out alignment. But if AIs merit moral consideration during the alignment process, this policy could result in AIs that are aligned to values which are heavily biased against digital minds. I would count that outcome as one way for alignment to not go well.
I think takeoff happening before we’ve figured out alignment would also risk putting more-ethical actors at a disadvantage in an AGI/ASI race: if takeoff has already happened, there will be an ethical treatment tax. As with a safety tax, paying the ethical treatment tax may lower the probability of winning while also correlating with alignment going well conditional on winning. There’s also the related issue of race dynamics: even if all actors are inclined toward ethical treatment of digital minds but think that it’s more crucial that they win, we should expect the winner to have cut corners with respect to ethical treatment if the systems they’re trying to align merit moral consideration.
In contrast, if a digital minds takeoff happens after alignment, I think we’d have a better shot at avoiding these tradeoffs and risks.
If a digital minds takeoff happens before alignment, I think it’d still tend to be better in expectation for alignment if the takeoff went well. If takeoff went poorly, I’d guess that’d be because we decided not to extend moral consideration to digital minds and/or because we’ve made important mistakes about the epistemology of digital mind welfare. I think those factors would make it more likely that we align AIs with values that are biased against digital minds or with importantly mistaken beliefs about digital minds. (I don’t think there’s any guarantee that these values and beliefs would be corrected later.)
Re uploading: while co-writing the digital suffering paper, I thought whole brain emulations (not necessarily uploads) might help with alignment. I’m now pessimistic about this, partly because whole brain emulation currently seems to me very unlikely to arrive before critical attempts at alignment, partly because I’m particularly pessimistic about whole brain emulations being developed in a morally acceptable manner, and partly because of the above concerns about a digital minds takeoff happening before we’ve figured out alignment. (But I don’t entirely discount the idea—I’d probably want to seriously revisit it in the event of another AI winter.)
This exchange has been helpful for me! It’s persuaded me to think I should consider doing a project on AI welfare under neartermist vs. longtermist assumptions.
A couple of reactions:
Here’s a position that some people hold:
If there is a long reflection or similar, then far-future AI welfare gets solved.
A long reflection or similar will most likely happen by default, assuming alignment goes well.
For what it’s worth, I buy (1)[1] but I’m not sold on (2), and so overall I’m somewhat sympathetic to your view, Brad. On the other hand, to someone who buys both (1) and (2)—as I think @Zach does—your argument does not go through.
There is potentially an argument here for AI welfare being a neartermist EA cause area. If you wanted to make a more robust neartermist argument, then one approach could be to estimate the number of digital minds in the takeoff, and the quantity of suffering per digital mind, and then compare the total against animal suffering in factory farms.
In general, I do wish that people like yourself arguing for AI welfare as a cause area were clearer about whether they are making a neartermist or longtermist case. Otherwise, it kind of feels like you are coming from a pet theory-ish position that AI welfare should be a cause, rather than arguing in a cause-neutral way. (This is something I’ve observed on the whole; I’m sorry to pick on your post+comment in particular.)
Modulo some concern around metaphilosophy / our “superintelligent” advisors being philosophically incompetent, to catastrophic effect. (For more on this, see Wei Dai’s posts.)
I’m also not sold on (2). But I don’t see how buying (1) and (2) undermines the point I was making. If takeoff going well makes the far future go better in expectation for digital minds, it could do so via alignment or via non-default scenarios.
Re “I do wish people like yourself arguing for AI welfare as a cause area were clearer about whether they are making neartermist or longtermist arguments”: that makes sense. Hopefully it’s now clearer that I take considerations put forward in the post to be relevant under neartermist and longtermist assumptions. Perhaps worth adding: as someone already working in the area, I had material developed for other purposes that I thought worth putting forward for this debate week, per its (by my lights) discussing relevant considerations or illustrating the tractability of work in the area. But the material wasn’t optimized for addressing whether AI welfare should be a cause area, and optimizing it for that didn’t strike me as the most productive way for me to engage given my time constraints. (I wonder if something like this may apply more generally and help explain the pattern you observe.)
Sounds very reasonable. (Perhaps it might help to add a one-sentence disclaimer at the top of the post, to signpost for readers what the post is vs. is not trying to do? This is a weak suggestion, though.)
I feel unsure about what you are saying, exactly, especially the last part. I’ll try saying some things in response, and maybe that helps locate the point of disagreement…
(… also feel free to just bow out of this thread if you feel like this is not productive…)
In the case that alignment goes well and there is a long reflection—
i.e., (1) and (2) turn out true—my position is that doing AI welfare work now has no effect on the future, because all AI welfare stuff gets solved in the long reflection. In other words, I think that “takeoff going well makes the far future go better in expectation for digital minds” is an incorrect claim in this scenario. (I’m not sure if you are trying to make this claim.)In the case that alignment goes well but there is no long reflection—
i.e., (1) turns out true but (2) turns out false—my position is that doing AI welfare work now might make the far future go better for digital minds. (And thus in this scenario I think some amount of AI welfare should be done now.[1]) Having said this, in practice, in a world in which(2)whether or not a long reflection happens could go either way, I view trying to set up a long reflection as a higher priority intervention than any one of the things we’d hope to solve in the long reflection, such as AI welfare or acausal trade.In the case that alignment goes poorly, humans either go extinct or are disempowered. In this case, does doing AI welfare work now improve the future at all? I used to think the answer to this was “yes,” because I thought that better understanding sentience could help with designing AIs that avoid creating suffering digital minds.[2] However, I now believe that this basically wouldn’t work, and that something much hackier (and therefore lower cost) would work instead, like simply nudging AIs in their training to have altruistic/anti-sadistic preferences. (This thing of nudging AIs to be anti-sadistic is part of the suffering risk discourse—I believe it’s something that CLR works on or has worked on—and feels outside of what’s covered by the “AI welfare” field.)
Exactly how much should be done depends on things like how important and tractable digital minds stuff is relative to the other things on the table, like acausal trade, and to what extent the returns to working on each of these things are diminishing, etc.
Why would an AI create digital minds that suffer? One reason is that the AI could have sadistic preferences. A more plausible reason is that the AI is mostly indifferent about causing suffering, and so does not avoid taking actions that incidentally cause/create suffering. Carl Shulman explored this point in his recent 80k episode:
Thanks for your response. I’m unsure if we’re importantly disagreeing. But here are some reactions.
I read this as equating (1) with alignment goes well and (2) with there is a long reflection. These understandings of (1) and (2) are rather different from the original formulations of (1) and (2), which were what I had in mind when I responded to an objection by saying I didn’t see how buying (1) and (2) undermined the point I was making. Crucially, I was understanding (2) as equivalent to the claim that if alignment goes well, then a long reflection probably happens by default. I don’t know if we were on the same page about what (1) and (2) say, so I don’t know if that clears things up. In case not, I’ll offer a few more-substantive thoughts (while dropping further reference to (1) and (2) to avoid ambiguity).
I think digital minds takeoff going well (again, for digital minds and with respect to existential risk) makes it more likely that alignment goes well. So, granting (though I’m not convinced of this) that alignment going well and the long reflection are key for how well things go in expectation for digital minds, I think digital minds takeoff bears on that expectation via alignment. In taking alignment going well to be sensitive to how takeoff goes, I am denying that alignment going well is something we should treat as given independently of how takeoff goes. (I’m unsure if we disagree here.)
In a scenario where alignment does not go well, I think it’s important that digital minds takeoff not have happened yet or, failing that, that digital minds’ susceptibility to harm has been reduced before things go off the rails. In this scenario, I think it’d be good to have a portfolio of suffering and mistreatment risk-reducing measures that have been in place, including ones that nudge AIs away from having certain preferences and ones that disincentivize creating AIs with various other candidates for morally relevant features. I take such interventions to be within the purview of AI welfare as an area, partly because what counts as in the area is still up for grabs and such interventions seem natural to include and partly because such interventions are in line with stuff that people working in the area have been saying (e.g. a coauthor and I have suggested related risk-reducing interventions in Sec. 4.2.2 of our article on digital suffering and Sec. 6 of our draft on alignment and ethical treatment)--though I’d agree CLR folks have made related points and that associated suffering discourse feels outside the AI welfare field.
Oh, sorry, I see now that the numberings I used in my second comment don’t map onto how I used them in my first one, which is confusing. My bad.
Your last two paragraphs are very informative to me.
This is interesting; by my lights this is the right type of argument for justifying AI welfare being a longtermist cause area (which is something that I felt was missing from the debate week). If you have time, I would be keen to hear how you see digital minds takeoff going well as aiding in alignment.[1]
Okay, interesting, makes sense.
Thanks a lot for your reply, your points have definitely improved my understanding of AI welfare work!
One thing I’ve previously been cautiously bullish about as an underdiscussed wildcard is the kinda sci-fi approach of getting to human mind uploading (or maybe just regular whole brain emulation) before prosaic AGI, and then letting the uploaded minds—which could be huge in number and running much faster than wall clock time—solve alignment. However, my Metaculus question on this topic indicates that such a path to alignment is very unlikely.
I’m not sure if the above is anything like what you have in mind? (I realize that human mind uploading is different to the thing of LLMs or other prosaic AI systems gaining consciousness (and/or moral status), and that it’s the latter that is more typically the focus of digital minds work (and the focus of your post, I think). So, on second thoughts, I imagine your model for the relationship between digital minds takeoff and alignment will be something different.)
Re how I see digital minds takeoff going well as aiding alignment: the main paths I see go through digital minds takeoff happening after we figure out alignment. That’s because I think aligning AIs that merit moral consideration without mistreating them adds an additional layer of difficulty to alignment. (My coauthor and I go into detail about this difficulty in the second paper I linked in my previous comment.) So if a digital minds takeoff happens while we’re still figuring out alignment, I think we’ll face tradeoffs between alignment and ethical treatment of digital minds, and that this bodes poorly for both alignment and digital minds takeoff.
To elaborate in broad strokes, even supposing that for longtermist reasons alignment going well dwarfs the importance of digital minds’ welfare during takeoff, key actors may not agree. If digital minds takeoff is already underway, they may trade some probability of alignment going well for improved treatment of digital minds.
Upon noticing our willingness to trade safety for ethical treatment, critical-to-align AIs we’re trying to align may exploit that willingness e.g. by persuading their key actors that they (the AIs) merit more moral consideration; this could in turn make those systems less safe and/or lead to epistemic distortions about which AIs merit moral consideration.
This vulnerability could perhaps be avoided by resolving not to give consideration to AI systems until after we’ve figured out alignment. But if AIs merit moral consideration during the alignment process, this policy could result in AIs that are aligned to values which are heavily biased against digital minds. I would count that outcome as one way for alignment to not go well.
I think takeoff happening before we’ve figured out alignment would also risk putting more-ethical actors at a disadvantage in an AGI/ASI race: if takeoff has already happened, there will be an ethical treatment tax. As with a safety tax, paying the ethical treatment tax may lower the probability of winning while also correlating with alignment going well conditional on winning. There’s also the related issue of race dynamics: even if all actors are inclined toward ethical treatment of digital minds but think that it’s more crucial that they win, we should expect the winner to have cut corners with respect to ethical treatment if the systems they’re trying to align merit moral consideration.
In contrast, if a digital minds takeoff happens after alignment, I think we’d have a better shot at avoiding these tradeoffs and risks.
If a digital minds takeoff happens before alignment, I think it’d still tend to be better in expectation for alignment if the takeoff went well. If takeoff went poorly, I’d guess that’d be because we decided not to extend moral consideration to digital minds and/or because we’ve made important mistakes about the epistemology of digital mind welfare. I think those factors would make it more likely that we align AIs with values that are biased against digital minds or with importantly mistaken beliefs about digital minds. (I don’t think there’s any guarantee that these values and beliefs would be corrected later.)
Re uploading: while co-writing the digital suffering paper, I thought whole brain emulations (not necessarily uploads) might help with alignment. I’m now pessimistic about this, partly because whole brain emulation currently seems to me very unlikely to arrive before critical attempts at alignment, partly because I’m particularly pessimistic about whole brain emulations being developed in a morally acceptable manner, and partly because of the above concerns about a digital minds takeoff happening before we’ve figured out alignment. (But I don’t entirely discount the idea—I’d probably want to seriously revisit it in the event of another AI winter.)
This exchange has been helpful for me! It’s persuaded me to think I should consider doing a project on AI welfare under neartermist vs. longtermist assumptions.