Roman Yampolsky
speaker
257 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Roman Yampolsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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People have individually very different preferences politically and such. So even if we somehow managed all the other aspects of it, programming those fuzzy concepts in, getting AI to follow them closely, we don't agree on what to program in. So my solution was, okay, we don't have to compromise on room temperature. You have your universe, I have mine. whatever you want.
And if you like me, you can invite me to visit your universe. We don't have to be independent, but the point is you can be. And virtual reality is getting pretty good. It's going to hit a point where you can't tell the difference. And if you can't tell if it's real or not, what's the difference?
You still have to align with that individual. They have to be happy in that simulation. But it's a much easier problem to align with one agent versus 8 billion agents plus animals, aliens.
I'm trying to do that, yeah.
It seems contradictory. I haven't seen anyone explain what it means outside of kind of words which pack a lot, make it good, make it desirable, make it something they don't regret. But how do you specifically formalize those notions? How do you program them in? I haven't seen anyone make progress on that so far.
Right. But the examples you gave, some of them are, for example, two different religions saying this is our holy site and we are not willing to compromise it in any way. If you can make two holy sites in virtual worlds, you solve the problem. But if you only have one, it's not divisible. You're kind of stuck there.
If we go back to that idea of simulation and this is entertainment kind of giving meaning to us, the question is how much suffering is reasonable for a video game? So yeah, I don't mind a video game where I get haptic feedback, there is a little bit of shaking, maybe I'm a little scared. I don't want a game where kids are tortured, literally. That seems unethical, at least by our human standards.
So we know there are some humans who, because of a mutation, don't experience physical pain. So at least physical pain can be mutated out, re-engineered out. Suffering in terms of meaning, like you burn the only copy of my book, is a little harder. But even there, you can manipulate your hedonic set point, you can change defaults, you can reset.
Problem with that is if you start messing with your reward channel, you start wireheading and end up bleacing out a little too much.
I think we need that, but I would change the overall range. So right now it's negative infinity to kind of positive infinity, pain-pleasure axis. I would make it like zero to positive infinity. And being unhappy is like, I'm close to zero.
So there are many malevolent actors. We can talk about psychopaths, crazies, hackers, doomsday cults. We know from history they tried killing everyone. They tried on purpose to cause maximum amount of damage, terrorism. What if someone malevolent wants on purpose to torture all humans as long as possible?
You solve aging, so now you have functional immortality, and you just try to be as creative as you can.
So there are different malevolent agents. Some maybe just gaining personal benefit and sacrificing others to that cause. Others, we know for a fact, are trying to kill as many people as possible. And we look at recent school shootings. If they had more capable weapons, they would take out not dozens, but thousands, millions, billions.
There is mental diseases where people don't have empathy, don't have this human quality of understanding suffering in ours.
Again, I would like to assume that normal people never think like that. It's always some sort of psychopaths, but yeah.
They can certainly be more creative. They can understand human biology better, understand our molecular structure, genome. Again, a lot of times torture ends and the individual dies. That limit can be removed as well.
Right. We can definitely keep up for a while. I'm saying you cannot do it indefinitely. At some point, the cognitive gap is too big. The surface you have to defend is infinite. But attackers only need to find one exploit.
If we create general super intelligences, I don't see a good outcome long-term for humanity. The only way to win this game is not to play it.
I don't know for sure. The prediction markets right now are saying 2026 for AGI. I heard the same thing from CEO of Anthropic, DeepMind, so maybe we are two years away, which seems very soon given we don't have a working safety mechanism in place or even a prototype for one. And there are people trying to accelerate those timelines because they feel we're not getting there quick enough.
So the definitions we used to have, and people are modifying them a little bit lately. Artificial general intelligence was a system capable of performing in any domain a human could perform. So kind of you're creating this average artificial person. They can do cognitive labor, physical labor, where you can get another human to do it.
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