Gwern Branwen

I think the most underrated benefit of anonymity is that people don't project onto you as much.

They kind of can't like slot you into any particular niche or identity and like end up writing you off in advance.

Everyone has to read you at least a little bit to even begin to dismiss you.

It's great that people can't retaliate against you.

And I've derived a lot of benefit from people not being able to, like, mail heroin to my home and call the police to swap me.

But I always feel that the biggest benefit is just that you get a hearing at all, basically.

You don't get immediately written off by the context.

All the pressures, I think, are to go bottom up.

And from existing things, it's just much more palatable in every way to start at the bottom and replace there and then work your way up to eventually kind of just having human executives overseeing a firm of AIs.

And also from an RL perspective, I think if we are in fact better than AIs in some way, it should be in the long-term vision thing, right?

Like the AIs will be too myopic to execute any kind of novel long-term strategy and seize new opportunities.

So that would presumably give you this paradigm where you have like a human CEO who does the vision thing and then the AI corporation kind of like scurries around underneath them doing the CEO's bidding and they don't have the taste that the CEO has.

So you have one kind of Steve Jobs figure at the helm and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing the vision and bringing him new proposals.

And he, you know, he looks at every individual thing and says, no, like that proposal is bad.

This one is good.

That may be hard to quantify, but I think that human led firms should, you know, under this view, end up out competing the entirely AI firms, which would keep making these myopic choices that just don't quite work out in the long term.

The last thing that I see myself still doing right before the nanobots start eating me from the bottom up and I start screaming, no, I specifically requested the opposite of this.

I think right before that, I think what I'm still doing is the Steve Jobs kind of thing of choosing, right?

So my AI minions are like bringing me wonderful essays, and I'm saying this one is better.

This is the one that I like, and possibly building on that and saying that's almost right, but you know what would make it really good if you pushed it to 11 in this way.