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R.B. Griggs's avatar

Your concluding prediction is an odd one, seeing as you gesture at a viable approach throughout the piece. Humans are autonomous, intelligent and capable entities, yet as you indicate we've found a way to muddle through without destroying ourselves.

You even point to a few components of how we've managed this impressive feat: evolved internal compass, social pressure, overt regulation. What if this very process could be formalized into something that could translate into credible engineering statements? And what if this the entire key to AI safety and alignment?

This is the hypothesis of the bio-mimicry approach based on Evo-Devo principles. You can read an extremely verbose version here: https://naturalalignment.substack.com/p/how-biomimicry-can-improve-ai.

This is less to advocate bio-mimicry as the "one right way", and more to point to how much larger the potential solution space is compared to what's been properly explored so far.

And this is where the analogy to the Drake equation breaks down. Each variable in the Drake Equation is static, with no real interdependencies with us, the observers. But the Strange Loop Equation is deeply interdependent with humans, including our (increasing?) ability to solve problems.

This is the perfect example of the fallacy Deutsch would point out: just as the growth of AI will increase the scale of the problem along each variable, so will our capacity to solve those problems increase (including using other AIs to help). Will those capacities be up to the job? That's the real question.

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Steven Marlow's avatar

Everything under "Real Intelligence" is specific to ML/DL methods, and for many, this is an automatic fail. Even if current tools seem to get results, they are not on a path to AGI. EA/LessWrong community projects dangers based on current problems because of an unwavering assumption that these things just need to scale. For the same reason ML-AGI would be a problem, it doesn't actually reach that level of ability.

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