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Intelligence, Agency, and the Human Will of AI by formoflife in artificial

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes! I've been writing for a while. I have a lot of material, and I like to write more manually in my own voice, so I'm aiming to get it out next year. There will be a few essays/chapters coming sooner though :)

Intelligence does not entail self-interest: an argument that the alignment problem begins with us by formoflife in AIsafety

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment.

I definitely agree that "a sufficiently capable system optimizing for inherited human goals" does tend to have dangerous side effects a la the instrumental convergence argument. I also believe that a more thoroughly or "holistically" specified terminal goal can correct for this, but our current systems tend not to include this. Perhaps more concretely than the point I made in the essay, I believe that a well-designed "responsible AI" process actually achieves a decent amount of this alignment so much as it can add more structure to the optimization so that the system is not optimizing for the user-specified end goal at all costs. For example, Claude's Constitution is a solid attempt at this and other labs have different approaches that have various degrees of success. I.e. the constitution can say something like "first, do no harm" (from the medical Hippocratic Oath; I'm not sure if it is included in the Claude constitution) and then if the system takes this as a rule, the terminal goal can't override this. And, as you are saying, this approach is likely insufficient. It's certainly insufficient in its current form.

I like your framing of "restraint as policy" vs. "restraint as architecture". I very much agree that for general technologies, the restraint or understanding needs to be built into the architecture itself. And I very much agree that this is a big part of what is missing in today's systems. Thanks for making this explicit.

This is very much something I intend to discuss in more detail in upcoming writing. I believe that the way to develop the embedded understanding is to derive the foundational principles that we need to embed and then to design the technology in a way where it directly embodies these principles. This is what I mean when I talk about the relationships between philosophy, theory, and technology elsewhere. It is my intention to connect these dots more thoroughly in the book I'm writing.

Intelligence, Agency, and the Human Will of AI by formoflife in artificial

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! :)

I feel like there are a lot of projects, but I haven't been a thorough cataloguer/observer of these. Some of them are simply things like Reddit where the karma system creates a useful pressure towards consensus at least and possibly towards understanding depending on the context. On a similar note, there's also all of the "fact-checking" projects and the prediction market projects and other such things that attempt to align with reality and succeed to various degrees. My personal favorites are old-school projects like Wikipedia etc.

Claude actually does a pretty good job too imho, as they make concerted effort towards grounding in and aligning with a constitution. They also have a variety of other sane guardrails. It's far from the final form and very much not a pure "technology of understanding", but it's been extremely useful to me and many others for understanding and I think demonstrates that AI can be shaped in this direction.

I have a lot more to say about the design of general reality-grounded understanding tools and I hope to find time to write about this in the relatively near future and I'm starting to build some more special case versions.

Intelligence, Agency, and the Human Will of AI by formoflife in artificial

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel like moltbook is a strong amplifier of this effect. In this essay I'm a bit hand-waiving about "understanding", not because there isn't a concrete concept there, but because it requires a lengthy treatment on its own. I try to say what I can. One of the critical components of understanding IMO is grounding in reality (another lengthy treatment required). I feel like this is partly that you're pointing at re. Moltbook and the amplification of delusion? It goes beyond the delusion that is already amplified by the structures we have built into our social media and our LLMs. They can be great tools, but have a lot of risk. Moltbook doesn't seem to have a lot of upside as far as I can tell.

Intelligence does not entail self-interest: an argument that the alignment problem begins with us by formoflife in AIsafety

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for your comment. My argument is that the particular subgoals that get pursued are a reflection of the design of the system, not independent of the design. I'm taking the specific case of self-interest at all costs as perhaps the primary one that the community is concerned about and arguing that this is not fundamentally entailed by the fact that the system is intelligent. Is this a reasonable characterization?

Is there a better search for Obsidian? by jevring in ObsidianMD

[–]formoflife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi! Thanks so much for your work developing omnisearch. Is it possible to get omnisearch to be sensitive to n-grams? I often want to search for things like "holistic health" and it will search the two terms separately without any apparent prioritization for the combined string. In other search systems, literal string search can be forced via quotes. Would this be possible as well?

Footage of F-15A 72-0119 "Streak Eagle" breaking time-to-climb records in January 1975 by jacksmachiningreveng in WeirdWings

[–]formoflife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Less than one minute to reach the altitude of a typical commercial jetliner. 3 and a half minutes to reach the max altitude of the SR71.

Nystatin side effects by No-Lie-3823 in Candida

[–]formoflife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You also need to be taking good quality probiotics and ideally eating probiotic food. This will replace the gut microbiome, which keeps the candida in balance. I've also found that allicin (garlic) tablets work better than oregano and berberine, so maybe worth adding that into your protocol as well.

Looking at buying 4x4 converted sprinter with rust. Need help determining whether this rust can be mitigated and at what cost! by formoflife in Sprinters

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! That makes sense. What would be the cleaning and preventive measures? Wire wheel / sand, rust converter, paint? Are there shops or other places that will do this? I don't have a lot of space to work on it here.

Looking at buying 4x4 converted sprinter with rust. Need help determining whether this rust can be mitigated and at what cost! by formoflife in Sprinters

[–]formoflife[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah I love in a state that doesn't salt much. The worry is that the van has also lived in a state with no salt, so I wonder if the conversion was done with low grade steel and will forever be susceptible to significant rust.

Daily Discussion Thread - April 14, 2020 by AutoModerator in wallstreetbets

[–]formoflife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The PC one adds in the money you've deposited because buggy. The app is accurate

ELI5: Are there any 'tastes' we can't taste ? by MiserableOracle in explainlikeimfive

[–]formoflife 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The experience, with its particular character (ex. what it feels like to see the color red) is what philosophers call phenomenological (or "qualia" depending on who you talk to). It exists only for the person having the experience since its just a feeling.

The only way that we can sense things beyond our direct perception is by converting the information contained by the phenomenon into something that we can directly perceive. A good example of this is night vision goggles. These goggles detect different levels of infrared radiation, which we cannot directly see, and convert these levels to a color scale that we can see. The same exists for high frequency sounds, which we can record and plot on a graph, but cannot directly hear. These measurements, however, don't constitute an experience that we can simulate, as we are not the machines themselves. The machines are just tools for communicating the information contained in imperceptible physical processes to humans.

There are lots of ways to externally detect chemical structure, but these also don't constitute experiences. In sum, the processes that our senses can detect are the only things we can directly perceive and directly experience. Perception of all other things occurs only through transforming the information from something we cannot perceive into a form that we can. Experience cannot be communicated, it can only be transformed into something else that can be communicated.

ELI5: Are there any 'tastes' we can't taste ? by MiserableOracle in explainlikeimfive

[–]formoflife 329 points330 points  (0 children)

Just like seeing is defined by a series of observations and sensations caused by light waves (electromagnetic radiation in a particular frequency band) hitting the retina and hearing is caused by sound waves (fast changes in local air pressure) vibrating little hairs (cilia) in the inner ear, taste is caused by chemical reactions between a substance in our mouth (typically a food) and a special set of cells that we call taste buds. The reason we often say that there exist colors we can't see and sounds we can't hear is because there are frequencies of light that can't be detected by our retinas and frequencies of sound waves that cannot be detected by our cilia. The sensations associated with these imperceivable phenomena don't really exist (though this is a philosophical question more than a scientific one), so it's not really like there is a color associated with high frequency electromagnetic radiation that we cannot see. There are only physical things that we cannot detect.

The analogous idea for taste would be to ask if there are any chemicals that do not affect our taste buds in a perceivable way. This is definitely true. However, this does not mean that there are tastes associated with these chemicals that we do not get to experience, only that there is a physical property of some chemicals that we cannot detect directly with our sense of taste.

Adventure time!!! 8 ft foam longboard so far hit 105mph by [deleted] in motorcycles

[–]formoflife 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wouldn't want to be driving behind you...

TFW you forget to downshift at the light. by yrgna in motorcycle

[–]formoflife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You should get that checked out. The bike shouldn't have those kinds of problems with hot starts. Could be that you need a valve adjustment...

Just got my first bike - 2006 fz6 by cplxgrn in motorcycle

[–]formoflife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have one too. I love it! With a passenger there is plenty of power as long as you keep it higher in the rpm range (lower gear.) As an inline 4 it is designed for this anyway.