ageofem

All posts tagged ageofem

Ems Evolve

Posted by Peter on July 28, 2017
Posted in: Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tagged: , , , , , .

Or, why I don’t fear the p-zombie apocalypse.

This post analyzes concerns about how evolution, in the absence of a powerful singleton, might, in the distant future, produce what Nick Bostrom calls a “Disneyland without children”. I.e. a future with many agents, whose existence we don’t value because they are missing some important human-like quality.

The most serious description of this concern is in Bostrom’s The Future of Human Evolution. Bostrom is cautious enough that it’s hard to disagree with anything he says.

Age of Em has prompted a batch of similar concerns. Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex has one of the better discussions (see section IV of his review of Age of Em).

People sometimes sound like they want to use this worry as an excuse to oppose the age of em scenario, but it applies to just about any scenario with human-in-a-broad-sense actors. If uploading never happens, biological evolution could produce slower paths to the same problem(s) [1]. Even in the case of a singleton AI, the singleton will need to solve the tension between evolution and our desire to preserve our values, although in that scenario it’s more important to focus on how the singleton is designed.

These concerns often assume something like the age of em lasts forever. The scenario which Age of Em analyzes seems unstable, in that it’s likely to be altered by stranger-than-human intelligence. But concerns about evolution only depend on control being sufficiently decentralized that there’s doubt about whether a central government can strongly enforce rules. That situation seems sufficiently stable to be worth analyzing.

I’ll refer to this thing we care about as X (qualia? consciousness? fun?), but I expect people will disagree on what matters for quite some time. Some people will worry that X is lost in uploading, others will worry that some later optimization process will remove X from some future generation of ems.

I’ll first analyze scenarios in which X is a single feature (in the sense that it would be lost in a single step). Later, I’ll try to analyze the other extreme, where X is something that could be lost in millions of tiny steps. Neither extreme seems likely, but I expect that analyzing the extremes will illustrate the important principles.

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Do AI Experts Exist?

Posted by Peter on June 1, 2017
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence. Tagged: , , .

A new paper titled When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts reports some bizarre results. From the abstract:

Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans.

So we should expect a 75 year period in which machines can perform all tasks better and more cheaply than humans, but can’t automate all occupations. Huh?

I suppose there are occupations that consist mostly of having status rather than doing tasks (queen of England, or waiter at a classy restaurant that won’t automate service due to the high status of serving food the expensive way). Or occupations protected by law, such as gas station attendants who pump gas in New Jersey, decades after most drivers switched to pumping for themselves.

But I’d be rather surprised if machine learning researchers would think of those points when answering a survey in connection with a machine learning conference.

Maybe the actual wording of the survey questions caused a difference that got lost in the abstract? Hmmm …

“High-level machine intelligence” (HLMI) is achieved when unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers

versus

when all occupations are fully automatable. That is, when for any occupation, machines could be built to carry out the task better and more cheaply than human workers.

I tried to convince myself that the second version got interpreted as referring to actually replacing humans, while the first version referred to merely being qualified to replace humans. But the more I compared the two, the more that felt like wishful thinking. If anything, the “unaided” in the first version should make that version look farther in the future.

Can I find any other discrepancies between the abstract and the details? The 120 years in the abstract turns into 122 years in the body of the paper. So the authors seem to be downplaying the weirdness of the results.

There’s even a prediction of a 50% chance that the occupation “AI researcher” will be automated in about 88 years (I’m reading that from figure 2; I don’t see an explicit number for it). I suspect some respondents said this would take longer than for machines to “accomplish every task better and more cheaply”, but I don’t see data in the paper to confirm that [1].

A more likely hypothesis is that researchers alter their answers based on what they think people want to hear. Researchers might want to convince their funders that AI deals with problems that can be solved within the career of the researcher [2], while also wanting to reassure voters that AI won’t create massive unemployment until the current generation of workers has retired.

That would explain the general pattern of results, although the magnitude of the effect still seems strange. And it would imply that most machine learning researchers are liars, or have so little understanding of when HLMI will arrive that they don’t notice a 50% shift in their time estimates.

The ambiguity in terms such as “tasks” and “better” could conceivably explain confusion over the meaning of HLMI. I keep intending to write a blog post that would clarify concepts such as human-level AI and superintelligence, but then procrastinating because my thoughts on those topics are unclear.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that I should reduce my confidence in any prediction of when AI will reach human-level competence. My prior 90% confidence interval was something like 10 to 300 years. I guess I’ll broaden it to maybe 8 to 400 years [3].

P.S. – See also Katja’s comments on prior surveys.

[1] – the paper says most participants were asked the question that produced the estimate of 45 years to HLMI, the rest got the question that produced the 122 year estimate. So the median for all participants ought to be less than about 84 years, unless there are some unusual quirks in the data.

[2] – but then why do experienced researchers say human-level AI is farther in the future than new researchers, who presumably will be around longer? Maybe the new researchers are chasing fads or get-rich-quick schemes, and will mostly quit before becoming senior researchers?

[3] – years of subjective time as experienced by the fastest ems. So probably nowhere near 400 calendar years.

AI Phase Change?

Posted by Peter on August 28, 2016
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence. Tagged: .

One of the weakest claims in The Age of Em was that AI progress has not been accelerating.

J Storrs Hall (aka Josh) has a hypothesis that AI progress accelerated about a decade ago due to a shift from academia to industry. (I’m puzzled why the title describes it as a coming change, when it appears to have already happened).

I find it quite likely that something important happened then, including an acceleration in the rate at which AI affects people.

I find it less clear whether that indicates a change in how fast AI is approaching human intelligence levels.

Josh points to airplanes as an example of a phase change being important.

I tried to compare AI progress to other industries which might have experienced a similar phase change, driven by hardware progress. But I was deterred by the difficulty of estimating progress in industries when they were driven by academia.

One industry I tried to compare to was photovoltaics, which seemed to be hyped for a long time before becoming commercially important (10-20 years ago?). But I see only weak signs of a phase change around 2007, from looking at Swanson’s Law. It’s unclear whether photovoltaic progress was ever dominated by academia enough for a phase change to be important.

Hypertext is a domain where a clear phase change happened in the earl 1990s. It experienced a nearly foom-like rate of adoption when internet availability altered the problem, from one that required a big company to finance the hardware and marketing, to a problem that could be solved by simply giving away a small amount of code. But this change in adoption was not accompanied by a change in the power of hypertext software (beyond changes due to network effects). So this seems like weak evidence against accelerating progress toward human-level AI.

What other industries should I look at?

Childhood’s Em

Posted by Peter on July 8, 2016
Posted in: Politics. Tagged: , , .

Will young ems be created? Why and how will it happen?

Any children that exist as ems will be important as em societies mature, because they will adapt better to em environments than ems who uploaded as adults, making them more productive.

The Age of Em says little about children, presumably in part because no clear outside view predictions seem possible.

This post will use a non-Hansonian analysis style to speculate about which children will become ems. I’m writing this post to clarify my more speculative thoughts about how em worlds will work, without expecting to find much evidence to distinguish the good ideas from the bad ones.

Robin predicts few regulatory obstacles to uploading children, because he expects the world to be dominated by ems. I’m skeptical of that. Ems will be dominant in the sense of having most of the population, but that doesn’t tell us much about em influence on human society – farmers became a large fraction of the world population without meddling much in hunter-gatherer political systems. And it’s unclear whether em political systems would want to alter the relevant regulations – em societies will have much the same conflicting interest groups pushing for and against immigration that human societies have.

How much of Robin’s prediction of low regulation is due to his desire to start by analyzing a relatively simple scenario (low regulation) and add complexity later?

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AGI Timelines

Posted by Peter on June 8, 2016
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Economics. Tagged: , , , .

One of most important assumptions in The Age of Ems is that non-em AGI will take a long time to develop.

1.

Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex complains that Robin rejects survey data that uses validated techniques, and instead uses informal surveys whose results better fit Robin’s biases [1]. Robin clearly explains one reason why he does that: to get the outside view of experts.

Whose approach to avoiding bias is better?

  • Minimizing sampling error and carefully documenting one’s sampling technique are two of the most widely used criteria to distinguish science from wishful thinking.
  • Errors due to ignoring the outside view have been documented to be large, yet forecasters are reluctant to use the outside view.

So I rechecked advice from forecasting experts such as Philip Tetlock and Nate Silver, and the clear answer I got was … that was the wrong question.

Tetlock and Silver mostly focus on attitudes that are better captured by the advice to be a fox, not a hedgehog.

The strongest predictor of rising into the ranks of superforecasters is perpetual beta, the degree to which one is committed to belief updating and self-improvement.

Tetlock’s commandment number 3 says “Strike the right balance between inside and outside views”. Neither Tetlock or Silver offer hope that either more rigorous sampling of experts or dogmatically choosing the outside view over the inside view help us win a forecasting contest.

So instead of asking who is right, we should be glad to have two approaches to ponder, and should want more. (Robin only uses one approach for quantifying the time to non-em AGI, but is more fox-like when giving qualitative arguments against fast AGI progress).

2.

What Robin downplays is that there’s no consensus of the experts on whom he relies, not even about whether progress is steady, accelerating, or decelerating.

Robin uses the median expert estimate of progress in various AI subfields. This makes sense if AI progress depends on success in many subfields. It makes less sense if success in one subfield can make the other subfields obsolete. If “subfield” means a guess about what strategy best leads to intelligence, then I expect the median subfield to be rendered obsolete by a small number of good subfields [2]. If “subfield” refers to a subset of tasks that AI needs to solve (e.g. vision, or natural language processing), then it seems reasonable to look at the median (and I can imagine that slower subfields matter more). Robin appears to use both meanings of “subfield”, with fairly similar results for each, so it’s somewhat plausible that the median is informative.

3.

Scott also complains that Robin downplays the importance of research spending while citing only a paper dealing with government funding of agricultural research. But Robin also cites another paper (Ulku 2004), which covers total R&D expenditures in 30 countries (versus 16 countries in the paper that Scott cites) [3].

4.

Robin claims that AI progress will slow (relative to economic growth) due to slowing hardware progress and reduced dependence on innovation. Even if I accept Robin’s claims about these factors, I have trouble believing that AI progress will slow.

I expect higher em IQ will be one factor that speeds up AI progress. Garrett Jones suggests that a 40 IQ point increase in intelligence causes a 50% increase in a country’s productivity. I presume that AI researcher productivity is more sensitive to IQ than is, say, truck driver productivity. So it seems fairly plausible to imagine that increased em IQ will cause more than a factor of two increase in the rate of AI progress. (Robin downplays the effects of IQ in contexts where a factor of two wouldn’t much affect his analysis; he appears to ignore them in this context).

I expect that other advantages of ems will contribute additional speedups – maybe ems who work on AI will run relatively fast, maybe good training/testing data will be relatively cheap to create, or maybe knowledge from experimenting on ems will better guide AI research.

5.

Robin’s arguments against an intelligence explosion are weaker than they appear. I mostly agree with those arguments, but I want to discourage people from having strong confidence in them.

The most suspicious of those arguments is that gains in software algorithmic efficiency “remain surprisingly close to the rate at which hardware costs have fallen. This suggests that algorithmic gains have been enabled by hardware gains”. He cites only (Grace 2013) in support of this. That paper doesn’t comment on whether hardware changes enable software changes. The evidence seems equally consistent with that or with the hypothesis that both are independently caused by some underlying factor. I’d say there’s less than a 50% chance that Robin is correct about this claim.

Robin lists 14 other reasons for doubting there will be an intelligence explosion: two claims about AI history (no citations), eight claims about human intelligence (one citation), and four about what causes progress in research (with the two citations mentioned earlier). Most of those 14 claims are probably true, but it’s tricky to evaluate their relevance.

Conclusion

I’d say there’s maybe a 15% chance that Robin is basically right about the timing of non-em AI given his assumptions about ems. His book is still pretty valuable if an em-dominated world lasts for even one subjective decade before something stranger happens. And “something stranger happens” doesn’t necessarily mean his analysis becomes obsolete.

Footnotes

[1] – I can’t find any SlateStarCodex complaint about Bostrom doing something in Superintelligence that’s similar to what Scott accuses Robin of, when Bostrom’s survey of experts shows an expected time of decades for human-level AI to become superintelligent. Bostrom wants to focus on a much faster takeoff scenario, and disagrees with the experts, without identifying reasons for thinking his approach reduces biases.

[2] – One example is that genetic algorithms are looking fairly obsolete compared to neural nets, now that they’re being compared on bigger problems than when genetic algorithms were trendy.

Robin wants to avoid biases from recent AI fads by looking at subfields as they were defined 20 years ago. Some recent changes in AI are fads, but some are increased wisdom. I expect many subfields to be dead ends, given how immature AI was 20 years ago (and may still be today).

[3] – Scott quotes from one of three places that Robin mentions this subject (an example of redundancy that is quite rare in the book), and that’s the one place out of three where Robin neglects to cite (Ulku 2004). Age of Em is the kind of book where it’s easy to overlook something important like that if you don’t read it more carefully than you’d read a normal book.

I tried comparing (Ulku 2004) to the OECD paper that Scott cites, and failed to figure out whether they disagree. The OECD paper is probably consistent with Robin’s “less than proportionate increases” claim that Scott quotes. But Scott’s doubts are partly about Robin’s bolder prediction that AI progress will slow down, and academic papers don’t help much in evaluating that prediction.

If you’re tempted to evaluate how well the Ulku paper supports Robin’s views, beware that this quote is one of its easier to understand parts:

In addition, while our analysis lends support for endogenous growth theories in that it confirms a significant relationship between R&D stock and innovation, and between innovation and per capita GDP, it lacks the evidence for constant returns to innovation in terms of R&D stock. This implies that R&D models are not able to explain sustainable economic growth, i.e. they are not fully endogenous.

The Age of Em

Posted by Peter on May 24, 2016
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Economics, Miscellaneous, Virtual Worlds. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, by Robin Hanson.

This book analyzes a possible future era when software emulations of humans (ems) dominate the world economy. It is too conservative to tackle longer-term prospects for eras when more unusual intelligent beings may dominate the world.

Hanson repeatedly tackles questions that scare away mainstream academics, and gives relatively ordinary answers (guided as much as possible by relatively standard, but often obscure, parts of the academic literature).

Assumptions

Hanson’s scenario relies on a few moderately controversial assumptions. The assumptions which I find most uncertain are related to human-level intelligence being hard to understand (because it requires complex systems), enough so that ems will experience many subjective centuries before artificial intelligence is built from scratch. For similar reasons, ems are opaque enough that it will be quite a while before they can be re-engineered to be dramatically different.

Hanson is willing to allow that ems can be tweaked somewhat quickly to produce moderate enhancements (at most doubling IQ) before reaching diminishing returns. He gives somewhat plausible reasons for believing this will only have small effects on his analysis. But few skeptics will be convinced.

Some will focus on potential trillions of dollars worth of benefits that higher IQs might produce, but that wealth would not much change Hanson’s analysis.

Others will prefer an inside view analysis which focuses on the chance that higher IQs will better enable us to handle risks of superintelligent software. Hanson’s analysis implies we should treat that as an unlikely scenario, but doesn’t say what we should do about modest probabilities of huge risks.

Another way that Hanson’s assumptions could be partly wrong is if tweaking the intelligence of emulated Bonobos produces super-human entities. That seems to only require small changes to his assumptions about how tweakable human-like brains are. But such a scenario is likely harder to analyze than Hanson’s scenario, and it probably makes more sense to understand Hanson’s scenario first.

Wealth

Wages in this scenario are somewhat close to subsistence levels. Ems have some ability to restrain wage competition, but less than they want. Does that mean wages are 50% above subsistence levels, or 1%? Hanson hints at the former. The difference feels important to me. I’m concerned that sound-bite versions of book will obscure the difference.

Hanson claims that “wealth per em will fall greatly”. It would be possible to construct a measure by which ems are less wealthy than humans are today. But I expect it will be at least as plausible to use a measure under which ems are rich compared to humans of today, but have high living expenses. I don’t believe there’s any objective unit of value that will falsify one of those perspectives [1].

Style / Organization

The style is more like a reference book than a story or an attempt to persuade us of one big conclusion. Most chapters (except for a few at the start and end) can be read in any order. If the section on physics causes you to doubt whether the book matters, skip to chapter 12 (labor), and return to the physics section later.

The style is very concise. Hanson rarely repeats a point, so understanding him requires more careful attention than with most authors.

It’s odd that the future of democracy gets less than twice as much space as the future of swearing. I’d have preferred that Hanson cut out a few of his less important predictions, to make room for occasional restatements of important ideas.

Many little-known results that are mentioned in the book are relevant to the present, such as: how the pitch of our voice affects how people perceive us, how vacations affect productivity, and how bacteria can affect fluid viscosity.

I was often tempted to say that Hanson sounds overconfident, but he is clearly better than most authors at admitting appropriate degrees of uncertainty. If he devoted much more space to caveats, I’d probably get annoyed at the repetition. So it’s hard to say whether he could have done any better.

Conclusion

Even if we should expect a much less than 50% chance of Hanson’s scenario becoming real, it seems quite valuable to think about how comfortable we should be with it and how we could improve on it.

Footnote

[1] – The difference matters only in one paragraph, where Hanson discusses whether ems deserve charity more than do humans living today. Hanson sounds like he’s claiming ems deserve our charity because they’re poor. Most ems in this scenario are comfortable enough for this to seem wrong.

Hanson might also be hinting that our charity would be effective at increasing the number of happy ems, and that basic utilitarianism says that’s preferable to what we can do by donating to today’s poor. That argument deserves more respect and more detailed analysis.