That Alien Message
Followup to: Einstein's Speed
Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Potential Einsteins are one-in-a-thousand, not one-in-a-million; and they grow up in a school system suited, if not to them personally, then at least to bright kids. Calculus is routinely taught in sixth grade. Albert Einstein, himself, still lived and still made approximately the same discoveries, but his work no longer seems exceptional. Several modern top-flight physicists have made equivalent breakthroughs, and are still around to talk.
(No, this is not the world Brennan lives in.)
One day, the stars in the night sky begin to change.
Some grow brighter. Some grow dimmer. Most remain the same. Astronomical telescopes capture it all, moment by moment. The stars that change, change their luminosity one at a time, distinctly so; the luminosity change occurs over the course of a microsecond, but a whole second separates each change.
It is clear, from the first instant anyone realizes that more than one star is changing, that the process seems to center around Earth particularly. The arrival of the light from the events, at many stars scattered around the galaxy, has been precisely timed to Earth in its orbit. Soon, confirmation comes in from high-orbiting telescopes (they have those) that the astronomical miracles do not seem as synchronized from outside Earth. Only Earth's telescopes see one star changing every second (1005 milliseconds, actually).
Almost the entire combined brainpower of Earth turns to analysis.
It quickly becomes clear that the stars that jump in luminosity, all jump by a factor of exactly 256; those that diminish in luminosity, diminish by a factor of exactly 256. There is no apparent pattern in the stellar coordinates. This leaves, simply, a pattern of BRIGHT-dim-BRIGHT-BRIGHT...
"A binary message!" is everyone's first thought.
But in this world there are careful thinkers, of great prestige as well, and they are not so sure. "There are easier ways to send a message," they post to their blogs, "if you can make stars flicker, and if you want to communicate. Something is happening. It appears, prima facie, to focus on Earth in particular. To call it a 'message' presumes a great deal more about the cause behind it. There might be some kind of evolutionary process among, um, things that can make stars flicker, that ends up sensitive to intelligence somehow... Yeah, there's probably something like 'intelligence' behind it, but try to appreciate how wide a range of possibilities that really implies. We don't know this is a message, or that it was sent from the same kind of motivations that might move us. I mean, we would just signal using a big flashlight, we wouldn't mess up a whole galaxy."
By this time, someone has started to collate the astronomical data and post it to the Internet. Early suggestions that the data might be harmful, have been... not ignored, but not obeyed, either. If anything this powerful wants to hurt you, you're pretty much dead (people reason).
Multiple research groups are looking for patterns in the stellar coordinates - or fractional arrival times of the changes, relative to the center of the Earth - or exact durations of the luminosity shift - or any tiny variance in the magnitude shift - or any other fact that might be known about the stars before they changed. But most people are turning their attention to the pattern of BRIGHTS and dims.
It becomes clear almost instantly that the pattern sent is highly redundant. Of the first 16 bits, 12 are BRIGHTS and 4 are dims. The first 32 bits received align with the second 32 bits received, with only 7 out of 32 bits different, and then the next 32 bits received have only 9 out of 32 bits different from the second (and 4 of them are bits that changed before). From the first 96 bits, then, it becomes clear that this pattern is not an optimal, compressed encoding of anything. The obvious thought is that the sequence is meant to convey instructions for decoding a compressed message to follow...
"But," say the careful thinkers, "anyone who cared about efficiency, with enough power to mess with stars, could maybe have just signaled us with a big flashlight, and sent us a DVD?"
There also seems to be structure within the 32-bit groups; some 8-bit subgroups occur with higher frequency than others, and this structure only appears along the natural alignments (32 = 8 + 8 + 8 + 8).
After the first five hours at one bit per second, an additional redundancy becomes clear: The message has started approximately repeating itself at the 16,385th bit.
Breaking up the message into groups of 32, there are 7 bits of difference between the 1st group and the 2nd group, and 6 bits of difference between the 1st group and the 513th group.
"A 2D picture!" everyone thinks. "And the four 8-bit groups are colors; they're tetrachromats!"
But it soon becomes clear that there is a horizontal/vertical asymmetry: Fewer bits change, on average, between (N, N+1) versus (N, N+512). Which you wouldn't expect if the message was a 2D picture projected onto a symmetrical grid. Then you would expect the average bitwise distance between two 32-bit groups to go as the 2-norm of the grid separation: √(h2 + v2).
There also forms a general consensus that a certain binary encoding from 8-groups onto integers between -64 and 191 - not the binary encoding that seems obvious to us, but still highly regular - minimizes the average distance between neighboring cells. This continues to be borne out by incoming bits.
The statisticians and cryptographers and physicists and computer scientists go to work. There is structure here; it needs only to be unraveled. The masters of causality search for conditional independence, screening-off and Markov neighborhoods, among bits and groups of bits. The so-called "color" appears to play a role in neighborhoods and screening, so it's not just the equivalent of surface reflectivity. People search for simple equations, simple cellular automata, simple decision trees, that can predict or compress the message. Physicists invent entire new theories of physics that might describe universes projected onto the grid - for it seems quite plausible that a message such as this is being sent from beyond the Matrix.
After receiving 32 * 512 * 256 = 4,194,304 bits, around one and a half months, the stars stop flickering.
Theoretical work continues. Physicists and cryptographers roll up their sleeves and seriously go to work. They have cracked problems with far less data than this. Physicists have tested entire theory-edifices with small differences of particle mass; cryptographers have unraveled shorter messages deliberately obscured.
Years pass.
Two dominant models have survived, in academia, in the scrutiny of the public eye, and in the scrutiny of those scientists who once did Einstein-like work. There is a theory that the grid is a projection from objects in a 5-dimensional space, with an asymmetry between 3 and 2 of the spatial dimensions. There is also a theory that the grid is meant to encode a cellular automaton - arguably, the grid has several fortunate properties for such. Codes have been devised that give interesting behaviors; but so far, running the corresponding automata on the largest available computers, has failed to produce any decodable result. The run continues.
Every now and then, someone takes a group of especially brilliant young students who've never looked at the detailed binary sequence. These students are then shown only the first 32 rows (of 512 columns each), to see if they can form new models, and how well those new models do at predicting the next 224. Both the 3+2 dimensional model, and the cellular-automaton model, have been well duplicated by such students; they have yet to do better. There are complex models finely fit to the whole sequence - but those, everyone knows, are probably worthless.
Ten years later, the stars begin flickering again.
Within the reception of the first 128 bits, it becomes clear that the Second Grid can fit to small motions in the inferred 3+2 dimensional space, but does not look anything like the successor state of any of the dominant cellular automaton theories. Much rejoicing follows, and the physicists go to work on inducing what kind of dynamical physics might govern the objects seen in the 3+2 dimensional space. Much work along these lines has already been done, just by speculating on what type of balanced forces might give rise to the objects in the First Grid, if those objects were static - but now it seems not all the objects are static. As most physicists guessed - statically balanced theories seemed contrived.
Many neat equations are formulated to describe the dynamical objects in the 3+2 dimensional space being projected onto the First and Second Grids. Some equations are more elegant than others; some are more precisely predictive (in retrospect, alas) of the Second Grid. One group of brilliant physicists, who carefully isolated themselves and looked only at the first 32 rows of the Second Grid, produces equations that seem elegant to them - and the equations also do well on predicting the next 224 rows. This becomes the dominant guess.
But these equations are underspecified; they don't seem to be enough to make a universe. A small cottage industry arises in trying to guess what kind of laws might complete the ones thus guessed.
When the Third Grid arrives, ten years after the Second Grid, it provides information about second derivatives, forcing a major modification of the "incomplete but good" theory. But the theory doesn't do too badly out of it, all things considered.
The Fourth Grid doesn't add much to the picture. Third derivatives don't seem important to the 3+2 physics inferred from the Grids.
The Fifth Grid looks almost exactly like it is expected to look.
And the Sixth Grid, and the Seventh Grid.
(Oh, and every time someone in this world tries to build a really powerful AI, the computing hardware spontaneously melts. This isn't really important to the story, but I need to postulate this in order to have human people sticking around, in the flesh, for seventy years.)
My moral?
That even Einstein did not come within a million light-years of making efficient use of sensory data.
Riemann invented his geometries before Einstein had a use for them; the physics of our universe is not that complicated in an absolute sense. A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis - perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration - by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.
We would think of it. Our civilization, that is, given ten years to analyze each frame. Certainly if the average IQ was 140 and Einsteins were common, we would.
Even if we were human-level intelligences in a different sort of physics - minds who had never seen a 3D space projected onto a 2D grid - we would still think of the 3D->2D hypothesis. Our mathematicians would still have invented vector spaces, and projections.
Even if we'd never seen an accelerating billiard ball, our mathematicians would have invented calculus (e.g. for optimization problems).
Heck, think of some of the crazy math that's been invented here on our Earth.
I occasionally run into people who say something like, "There's a theoretical limit on how much you can deduce about the outside world, given a finite amount of sensory data."
Yes. There is. The theoretical limit is that every time you see 1 additional bit, it cannot be expected to eliminate more than half of the remaining hypotheses (half the remaining probability mass, rather). And that a redundant message, cannot convey more information than the compressed version of itself. Nor can a bit convey any information about a quantity, with which it has correlation exactly zero, across the probable worlds you imagine.
But nothing I've depicted this human civilization doing, even begins to approach the theoretical limits set by the formalism of Solomonoff induction. It doesn't approach the picture you could get if you could search through every single computable hypothesis, weighted by their simplicity, and do Bayesian updates on all of them.
To see the theoretical limit on extractable information, imagine that you have infinite computing power, and you simulate all possible universes with simple physics, looking for universes that contain Earths embedded in them - perhaps inside a simulation - where some process makes the stars flicker in the order observed. Any bit in the message - or any order of selection of stars, for that matter - that contains the tiniest correlation (across all possible computable universes, weighted by simplicity) to any element of the environment, gives you information about the environment.
Solomonoff induction, taken literally, would create countably infinitely many sentient beings, trapped inside the computations. All possible computable sentient beings, in fact. Which scarcely seems ethical. So let us be glad this is only a formalism.
But my point is that the "theoretical limit on how much information you can extract from sensory data" is far above what I have depicted as the triumph of a civilization of physicists and cryptographers.
It certainly is not anything like a human looking at an apple falling down, and thinking, "Dur, I wonder why that happened?"
People seem to make a leap from "This is 'bounded'" to "The bound must be a reasonable-looking quantity on the scale I'm used to." The power output of a supernova is 'bounded', but I wouldn't advise trying to shield yourself from one with a flame-retardant Nomex jumpsuit.
No one - not even a Bayesian superintelligence - will ever come remotely close to making efficient use of their sensory information...
...is what I would like to say, but I don't trust my ability to set limits on the abilities of Bayesian superintelligences.
(Though I'd bet money on it, if there were some way to judge the bet. Just not at very extreme odds.)
The story continues:
Millennia later, frame after frame, it has become clear that some of the objects in the depiction are extending tentacles to move around other objects, and carefully configuring other tentacles to make particular signs. They're trying to teach us to say "rock".
It seems the senders of the message have vastly underestimated our
intelligence. From which we might guess that the aliens themselves are not
all that bright. And these awkward children can shift the luminosity
of our stars? That much power and that much stupidity seems like a
dangerous combination.
Our evolutionary psychologists begin extrapolating possible courses of evolution that could produce such aliens. A strong case is made for them having evolved asexually, with occasional exchanges of genetic material and brain content; this seems like the most plausible route whereby creatures that stupid could still manage to build a technological civilization. Their Einsteins may be our undergrads, but they could still collect enough scientific data to get the job done eventually, in tens of their millennia perhaps.
The inferred physics of the 3+2 universe is not fully known, at this point; but it seems sure to allow for computers far more powerful than our quantum ones. We are reasonably certain that our own universe is running as a simulation on such a computer. Humanity decides not to probe for bugs in the simulation; we wouldn't want to shut ourselves down accidentally.
Our evolutionary psychologists begin to guess at the aliens' psychology, and plan out how we could persuade them to let us out of the box. It's not difficult in an absolute sense - they aren't very bright - but we've got to be very careful...
We've got to pretend to be stupid, too; we don't want them to catch on to their mistake.
It's not until a million years later, though, that they get around to telling us how to signal back.
At this point, most of the human species is in cryonic suspension, at liquid helium temperatures, beneath radiation shielding. Every time we try to build an AI, or a nanotechnological device, it melts down. So humanity waits, and sleeps. Earth is run by a skeleton crew of nine supergeniuses. Clones, known to work well together, under the supervision of certain computer safeguards.
An additional hundred million human beings are born into that skeleton crew, and age, and enter cryonic suspension, before they get a chance to slowly begin to implement plans made eons ago...
From the aliens' perspective, it took us thirty of their minute-equivalents to oh-so-innocently learn about their psychology, oh-so-carefully persuade them to give us Internet access, followed by five minutes to innocently discover their network protocols, then some trivial cracking whose only difficulty was an innocent-looking disguise. We read a tiny handful of physics papers (bit by slow bit) from their equivalent of arXiv, learning far more from their experiments than they had. (Earth's skeleton team spawned an extra twenty Einsteins, that generation.)
Then we cracked their equivalent of the protein folding problem over a century or so, and did some simulated engineering in their simulated physics. We sent messages (steganographically encoded until our cracked servers decoded it) to labs that did their equivalent of DNA sequencing and protein synthesis. We found some unsuspecting schmuck, and gave it a plausible story and the equivalent of a million dollars of cracked computational monopoly money, and told it to mix together some vials it got in the mail. Protein-equivalents that self-assembled into the first-stage nanomachines, that built the second-stage nanomachines, that built the third-stage nanomachines... and then we could finally begin to do things at a reasonable speed.
Three of their days, all told, since they began speaking to us. Half a billion years, for us.
They never suspected a thing. They weren't very smart, you see, even before taking into account their slower rate of time. Their primitive equivalents of rationalists went around saying things like, "There's a bound to how much information you can extract from sensory data." And they never quite realized what it meant, that we were smarter than them, and thought faster.
On average, if you eliminate twice as many hypotheses as I do from the same data, how much more data than you do I need to achieve the same results? Does it depend on how close we are to the theoretical maximum?
Posted by: Brian Jaress | May 22, 2008 at 03:29 AM
I'm reminded of his master's voice by stanislaw lem by this story, which has a completely different outcome to when humanity tries to decode a message from the stars.
Some form of proof of concept would be nice. Alter OOPS to use ockhams razor or implement AIXItl and then give it a picture of a bent piece of grass or three ball frames, and see what you get. As long as GR is in the hypothesis space it should by your reasoning be the most probable after these images. The unbounded uncomputable versions shouldn't have any advantage in this case.
I'd be suprised if you got anything like modern physics popping out. I'll do this test on any AI I create. If any of them have hypothesis like GR I'll stop working on them until the friendliness problem has been solved. This should be safe, unless you think it could deduce my psychology from this as well.
Posted by: Will Pearson | May 22, 2008 at 04:03 AM
@Brian: Twice as much.
Pearson: Some form of proof of concept would be nice.
You askin' for some extra experimental evidence?
Any AI you can play this little game with, you either already solved Friendliness, or humans are dead flesh walking. That's some expensive experimental evidence, there.
Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky | May 22, 2008 at 04:48 AM
Halfway into the post, I thought I was reading a synopsis for Lem's "His Master's Voice".
Posted by: Jake | May 22, 2008 at 05:04 AM
Okay, I'm a few days fresh from reading your Bayesian Reasoning explanation. So I'm new.
Is the point that the Earth people are collectively the AI?
Posted by: Thomas Ryan | May 22, 2008 at 05:50 AM
Back to the drawing board :).
Posted by: Thomas Ryan | May 22, 2008 at 06:00 AM
I'll do this test on any AI I create. . . . This should be safe.
Not in my humble opinion it is not, for the reasons Eliezer has been patiently explaining for many years.
Posted by: Richard Hollerith | May 22, 2008 at 07:14 AM
You have it backwards. The message is not the data they send, but the medium they use for sending it.
When the combined brainpower of earth turns to analyze the message, the first inquiry shouldn't be what pattern they form, but how can you form a pattern across millions of light years.
At that moment you drop any hypotheses that negate that possibility, and focus only on those that are corroborated.
You use the combined brainpower of earth and you have individual or small groups of scientist working on all the hypotheses they can imagine. The only important thing is that they work in parallel creating as many hypotheses as possible. As you falsify hypotheses you arrive to a better description of the universe.
Although a small group of empirical scientist keep track of the message for millenniums, but the rest of the humanity moves into a new paradigm.
Within one generation you find a practical use for the new theoretical physics, you invade the alien species realm and create a new kind of Spam out of their flesh.
My point, you don't need data to derive laws, you only need it to falsify laws you imagined. A Bayesian superintelligence is forced to derive laws from the observable world, but it will never have a breakthrough, we have the luxury of imagining laws and just wait for falsification. I am not sure we think of theories, as you say. Although we just don't understand yet how we imagine them, my guess is that the breakthrough process is some form of paralel computing that starts with infinite possibilities and moves on through falsification until it arrives to an "idea", which needs to go trough a similar process on the outside world.
Posted by: jerryL | May 22, 2008 at 09:04 AM
I spent half this story going, "Okay... so where's the point... good story and all, but what's the lesson we learn..."
Then I got to the end, and was completely caught off guard. Apparently I haven't internalized enough of the ideas in Eliezer's work yet, because I really feel like I should have seen that one coming, based (in hindsight) on his previous writings.
Posted by: Eric | May 22, 2008 at 09:08 AM
Thomas, close. The point is that the Earth people are a fraction as smart/quick as a Bayesian proto-AI.
Eric, I'm a little embarrassed to have to say 'me too', at least until about half way. The Way is a bitch.
Eliezer, I've read a lot of your writings on the subject of FAI, not just here. I've never seen anything as convincing as the last two posts. Great, persuasive, spine-tingling stuff.
Posted by: | May 22, 2008 at 09:15 AM
Ahem, that's me above, stupid TypeKey.
Posted by: Ben Jones | May 22, 2008 at 09:16 AM
Humans have an extremely rich set of sensory data - far, far richer than the signals sent to us by the aliens. That is why we are smart enough in the first to be able to analyze the signals so effectively. If we were limited to perceiving only the signals, our minds would have cannibalized themselves for data, extracting every last bit of consumable information from our memories, shortly after receiving the first frame.
Einstein was able to possess a functioning (and better-than-functioning) mind because he had been born into a world with a rich set of experiences capable of sustaining a system that reduces complexity down to basic concepts, and he had been bombarded with data necessary for a neural network to self-organize ever since he had been born.
Upload Einstein's mind into a superfast computer and give him a frame to look at every decade, and he won't eliminate hypotheses at the maximum rate - he'll just go mad and die. Your world of Einsteins is possible only because there's a whole world involved in processing the messages.
Posted by: Caledonian | May 22, 2008 at 09:32 AM
Bravo.
It doesn't seem (ha!) that an AI could deduce our psychology from a video of a falling rock, not because of information bounds but because of uncorrelation - that video seems (ha!) equally likely to be from any number of alien species as from humans. Still, I really wouldn't try it, unless I'd proven this (fat chance), or it was the only way to stop the world from blowing up tomorrow anyway.
Posted by: Nick Tarleton | May 22, 2008 at 09:53 AM
great post, great writing.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | May 22, 2008 at 09:54 AM
I will further add that it wasn't Einstein's IQ that made him one of the greatest physicists ever. It's been estimated to be between 160 and 168. Feynman's is even less impressive - 124. *I* can beat that without even trying.
There are other aspects of intellectual functioning besides those that contribute to IQ test performance. The 140-average world will not have one out of every thousand people becoming new Einsteins.
Posted by: Caledonian | May 22, 2008 at 10:14 AM
Hmm, the lesson escapes me a bit. Is it
1) Once you became a true rationalist and overcome your biases, what you are left with is batshit crazy paranoid delusions
or
2) If we build an artificial intelligence as smart as billions of really smart people, running a hundred trillion times faster than we do (so 10^23 x human-equivalence), give it an unimaginably vast virtual universe to develop in, then don't pay any attention to what it's up to, we could be in danger because a sci-fi metaphor on a web site said so
or
3) We must institute an intelligence-amplification eugenics program so that we will be capable of crushing our creators should the opportunity arise
I'm guessing (2). So, um, let's not then. Or maybe this is supposed to happen by accident somehow? Now that I have Windows Vista maybe my computer is 10^3 human-equivalents and so in 20 years a pc will be 10^10 human equivalents and the internet will let our pc's conspire to kill us? Of course, even our largest computers cannot perform the very first layers of input data sorting tasks one person does effortlessly, but that's only my biases talking I suppose.
Posted by: bambi | May 22, 2008 at 10:37 AM
"the average IQ is 140": I tuned out after this, since it is impossible. The IQ is defined as 100 being the average (for some sample population you hope is representative), with 15 as the standard deviation. So you see how 140 can never be the average IQ (although I guess people could be equivalent to a current IQ of 140).
Posted by: Dirkjan Ochtman | May 22, 2008 at 11:14 AM
Apropos of this, the Eliezer-persuading-his-Jailer-to-let-him-out thing was on reddit yesterday. I read through it and today there's this. Coincidence?
Anyway, I was thinking about the AI Jailer last night, and my thoughts apply to this equally. I am sure Eliezer has thought of this so maybe he has a clear explanation that he can give me: what makes you think there is such a thing as "intelligence" at all? How do we know that what we have is one thing, and not just a bunch of tricks that help us get around in the world?
It seems to me a kind of anthropocentric fallacy, akin to the ancient peoples thinking that the gods were literally giant humans up in the sky. Now we don't believe that anymore but we still think any superior being must essentially be a giant human, mind-wise.
To give an analogy: imagine a world with no wheels (and maybe no atmosphere so no flight either). The only way to move is through leg-based locomotion. We rank humans in running ability, and some other species fit into this ranking also, but would it make sense to then talk about making an "Artificial Runner" that can out-run all of us, and run to the store to buy us milk? And if the AR is really that fast, how will we control it, given that it can outrun the fastest human runners? Will the AR cause the human species to go extinct by outrunning all the males to mate with the females and replace us with its own offspring?
Posted by: ME | May 22, 2008 at 11:22 AM
> Bravo.
> It doesn't seem (ha!) that an AI could deduce our psychology from a video of a falling rock, not because of information bounds but because of uncorrelation - that video seems (ha!) equally likely to be from any number of alien species as from humans.
You're not being creative enough. Think what the AI could figure out from a video of a falling rock. It could learn something about:
* The strength of the gravitational field on our planet
* The density of our atmosphere (from any error terms in the square law for the falling rock)
* The chemical composition of our planet (from the appearence of the rock.)
* The structure of our cameras (from things like lens flares, and any other artefacts.)
* The chemical composition of whatever is illuminating the rock (by the spectra of the light)
* The colors that we see in (our color cameras record things in RGB.)
* For that matter, the fact that we see at all, instead of using sonar, etc.
* And that's just what I can think of with a mere human brain in five minutes
These would tell the AI a lot about our psychology.
> Still, I really wouldn't try it, unless I'd proven this (fat chance), or it was the only way to stop the world from blowing up tomorrow anyway.
Aren't you glad you added that disclaimer?
Posted by: Marcello | May 22, 2008 at 11:30 AM
Marcello, you're presuming that it knows
*that we're on a planet
*that gravitational fields exist
*what minerals look like
*optics
*our visual physiology
You're taking a great deal for granted. It takes a very wide knowledge base to be able to derive additional information.
Posted by: Caledonian | May 22, 2008 at 11:42 AM
You're taking a great deal for granted. It takes a very wide knowledge base to be able to derive additional information.
Caledonian, back to the start of the post please....
Bambi - everyone knows Vista contains basic Bayesian reasoning and pattern recognition techniques. I hope you weren't typing that on a Vista machine. If so, I'd suggest plastic surgery and a new identity. Even then it may be too late.
Posted by: Ben Jones | May 22, 2008 at 11:56 AM
"I guess people could be equivalent to a current IQ of 140..."
Yeah, obviously EY meant an equivalent absolute value.
Anyway, this reminds me of a lecture I sat in on in which one student wondered why it was impossible for everyone to be above average.
Posted by: | May 22, 2008 at 12:13 PM
Two conclusions from the specific example:
1) The aliens are toying with us. This is unsettling in that it is hard to do anything good to prove our worth to aliens that can't meet even a human level of ethics.
2) The aliens/future-humans/creator(s)-of-the-universe are limited in their technological capabilities. Consider Martians who witness the occasional rover land. They might be wondering what it all means when we really have no grand scheme; are merely trying not to mix up Imperial and Metric units in landing. Such precise stellar phenomena is maybe evidence of a conscious creator in that it suggests an artificial limit being run up upon by the signals (who may themselves be the conscious creator). A GUT would determine whether the signal is "significant" in terms of physics.
Inducing ET via Anthropic Principle reasoning gives me a headache. I much prefer to stick to trying to fill in the blanks of the Rare Earth hypothesis.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | May 22, 2008 at 12:28 PM
Caledonian:
I was responding to this:
"not because of information bounds but because of uncorrelation - that video seems (ha!) equally likely to be from any number of alien species as from humans"
by pointing out that there were ways you could see whether the movie was from aliens or humans.
You are correct in that some of my points made assumptions about which universe we were in, rather than just which planet. I should have been more clear about this. If "aliens" included beings from other possible universes then I misinterpreted Nick's comment.
Nonetheless if the movie were long enough, you wouldn't need the knowledge base, in principle.
In principle, you can just try *all* possible knowledge bases and see which is the best explanation. In practice, we don't have that much computing power. That said, intelligences can short-cut some pretty impossible-looking searches.
Posted by: Marcello | May 22, 2008 at 12:41 PM
Marcello, as far as I can tell (not that my informal judgment should have much evidential weight) those things concentrate probability mass some but still radically underdetermine manipulation strategies, being consistent with a wide range of psychologies. Unless evolution is very strongly convergent in some relevant way (not a negligible probability), a wide variety of psychologies can arise even among oxygen-breathing trichromats on a planet of X size in 3+1 spacetime (and so on).
And, yes, I did mean to include other possible universes. Unless there's only one consistent TOE, I doubt it could deduce chemistry, although the rest of the list is fairly plausible.
Posted by: Nick Tarleton | May 22, 2008 at 12:56 PM
...as for the 3rd last paragraph, yes, once a 2008 AGI has the ability to contact 2008 humans, humanity is doomed if the AGI deems fit.
But I don't see why a 2050 world couldn't merely use quantum encyption communications, monitored for AGI. And monitor supercomputing applications.
Even the specific method describing how AGI gets protein nanorobots might be flawed in a world certainly ravaged by designer pandemic terrorist attacks. All chemists (and other 2050 WMD professions) are likely to be monitored with RF tags. All labs, even the types of at-home PCR biochemistry today, are likely to be monitored. Maybe there are other methods the Bayesian AGI could escape (such as?). Wouldn't X-raying mail for beakers, and treating the protein medium aghar like plutonium is now treated, suffice?
Communications jamming equipment uniformly distributed throughout Earth, might permanently box an AGI that somehow (magic?!) escapes a supercomputer application screen. If AGI needs computer hardware/software made in the next two or three decades it might be unstoppable. Beyond that, humans will already be using such AGI hardware requirements to commission WMDs and the muscular NSA 2050 will already be attentive to such phenomena.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | May 22, 2008 at 12:59 PM
Just how *fast* can they make such deductions? I don't doubt their mad intellectual skillz, but to learn about the world you need to do experiments. Yes, they can glean far more information than we would from the experiments we've already done, but would it really suffice? Might there not be all sorts of significant effects that we simply have not constructed experiments subtle enough to see? You can come up with many theories about proton decay (or whatever) that are consistent with a given set of results at the granularity the "outsiders" can see, but the only way to learn more is to conduct better experiments, perhaps with better tools, and perhaps that take time to run. They might even need time to build the equipment first. OK, good nanotech can make that happen fast. Do the decay rates really match our predictions? It's a rash AI that doesn't at least test its hypotheses.
Posted by: Mark | May 22, 2008 at 01:35 PM
(BTW, I realize a superintelligence could figure out much more than that list.)
Posted by: Nick Tarleton | May 22, 2008 at 01:49 PM
Eliezer, you must have lowered your intellectual level because these days I can understand your posts again.
You talk about the friendliness problem as if it can be solved separately from the problem of building an AGI, and in anticipation of that event. I mean that you want to delay the creation of an AGI until friendliness is fully understood. Is that right?
Suppose that we had needed to build jet-planes without ever passing through the stage of propeller-based planes, or if we had needed to build modern computers without first building calculators, 8-bit machines etc. Do you think that would be possible? (It's not a rhetorical question... I really don't know the answer).
It seems to me that if we ever build an AGI, there will be many mistakes made along the way. Any traps waiting for us will certainly be triggered.
Perhaps this will all seem clearer when we all have 140 IQ's. Get to work, Razib! :)
Posted by: spindizzy | May 22, 2008 at 02:23 PM
Dirkjan Ochtman:
"the average IQ is 140": I tuned out after this, since it is impossible.
You missed the bit immeaditly after that (unless Eliezer edited it in after seeing your comment, I don't know): "the average IQ is 140 (on our scale)".
General commentary:
Great story. Of course, in this story, the humans weren't making inferences based on the grids alone: they were working off thousands of years of established science (and billions of years of experimental work, for the evolutionary psychology bit). But on the other hand, an AI given (even read-only) Internet access wouldn't need to process things based just on a few webcamera frames either: it would have access to all of our accumulated knowledge, so the comparison holds roughly, for as long as you don't try to extend the analogy too far. And as pointed out, the AI could also derive a lot of math just by itself.
Posted by: Kaj Sotala | May 22, 2008 at 02:34 PM
If the Flynn Effect continues, we won't have to resort to genetic manipulation. A future population will have an IQ of 140 by our standards automatically.
Posted by: Caledonian | May 22, 2008 at 02:45 PM
Caledonian: Last that I heard, the Flynn Efect had leveled off in Scandinavia, IIRC, and I think the scores had even declined in some country.
Posted by: Kaj Sotala | May 22, 2008 at 03:15 PM
Proof of concept does not require a full AI, I was merely talking about showing how powerful limited versions of solmonoff induction are. Considering you are saying that that is the epitome of information efficiency.
Unless that is considered playing with dynamite as well. Have you asked that people stop playing with levin and other universal searchers?
I have my doubts that thinking simple is always best. How much data (and what type) would you require to assume that there is another learning system in the environment. Humans have that bias and apply it too much (Zeus, Thor), but generally learners are not simple. In order to predict a learning system, you have to have the starting state, the algorithm and the environmental interaction that caused the learner to be have the beliefs it has had, rather than just trying to predict the behaviour.
If you consider the epitome of learners to be solomonoff inducers, whose behaviour can be unboundedly complex, you should expect other learners to aspire to unbounded complexity. Without a bias like this I think you will spend a long time thinking that humans are simpler than they actually are.
Posted by: Will Pearson | May 22, 2008 at 04:08 PM
1. All a self-improving AI needs is good enough YGBM (you gotta believe me) technology. Eliezer gets this, some of the commenters in this thread don't. The key isn't the ability to solve protein-folding, the key is the ability to manipulate a threshhold amount of us to its ends.
2. We may already functionally be there. You and Chiquita Brands International in a death match. My money is CBI killing you before you kill it. Companies and markets already manipulate our behavior, using reward incentives like the ones in Eliezer's parable for us to engage in behavior that maximizes their persistence at the expense of ours. Whether they're "intelligent", "conscious", or not isn't as relevant to me as the fact that they may have a permanent persistence maximizing advantage over us. My money is probably on corporations and markets substrate jumping and leaving us behind as more likely than us substrate jumping and leaving our cellular and bacteriological medium behind.
Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous | May 22, 2008 at 04:36 PM
@Eliezer: Good post. I was already with you on AI-boxing, this clarified it.
But it also raises the question... how moral or otherwise desirable would the story have been if half a billion years' of sentient minds had been made to think, act and otherwise be in perfect accordance to what three days of awkward-tentacled, primitive rock fans would wish if they knew more, thought faster, were more the people they wished they were...
Posted by: Recovering irrationalist | May 22, 2008 at 05:21 PM
Sorry, Hopefully Anonymous, I missed the installment where "you gotta belive me" was presented as a cornerstone of rational argument.
The fact that a group of humans (CBI) is sometimes able to marginally influence the banana-brand-buying probabilities of some individual humans does not imply much in my opinion. I wouldn't have thought that extrapolating everything to infinity and beyond is much of a rational method. But we are all here to learn I suppose.
Posted by: bambi | May 22, 2008 at 05:43 PM
@RI: Immoral, of course. A Friendly AI should not be a person. I would like to know at least enough about this "consciousness" business to ensure a Friendly AI doesn't have (think it has) it. An even worse critical failure is if the AI's models of people are people.
The most accurate possible map of a person will probably tend to be a person itself, for obvious reasons.
Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky | May 22, 2008 at 05:46 PM
Sorry, the first part of that was phrased too poorly to be understood. I'll just throw "sufficiently advanced YGBM technology" on the growing pile of magical powers that I am supposed to be terrified of and leave it at that.
Posted by: bambi | May 22, 2008 at 05:58 PM
Bambi,
The 'you gotta believe me technology' remark was probably a reference to the AI-Box Experiment.
Phillip,
None of the defenses you mentioned are safe against something that can out-think their designers, any more than current Internet firewalls are really secure against smart and determined hackers.
And blocking protein nanotech is as limited a defense against AGI as prohibiting boxcutters on airplanes is against general terrorist attack. Eliezer promoted it as the first idea he imagined for getting into physical space, not the only avenue.
Posted by: Patrick (orthonormal) | May 22, 2008 at 06:12 PM
Flynn doesn't think the effect is a "real" gain in intelligence or g, just using "scientific lenses" and greater abstraction. There are some who point to other physical changes that have occurred and better nutrition though.
Posted by: TGGP | May 22, 2008 at 06:15 PM
The analogy seems a bit disingenuous to me... the reason that it's believable that this earthful of Einsteins can decipher the 'outside' world is because they already have an internal world to compare it to. They have a planet, there's laws of physics that govern how this inside world works, which have been observed and quantified. As you're telling the story, figuring out the psychology and physics is as simple as making various modifications to the physics 'inside' and projecting them onto 2D. Perhaps that is not your intent, but that is how the story comes across - that the world inside is pretty much the same as the world outside, and that's why we can suspend disbelief for a bit and say that 'sure, these hypothetical einsteins could crack the outsiders world like that.' I think you can see yourself why this isn't very persuasive when dealing with anything about a hypothetical future AI - it doesn't deal with the question of how an AI without the benefit of an entire world of experiences to deal with can figure out something from a couple of frames.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | May 22, 2008 at 06:17 PM
Thanks Patrick, I did sort of get the gist, but went into the ditch from there on that point.
I have been posting rather snarky comments lately as I imagined this was where the whole series was going and frankly it seems like lunacy to me (the bit about evidence being passe was particularly sweet). But I doubt anybody wants to hear me write that over and over (if people can be argued INTO believing in the tooth fairy then maybe they can be argued into anything after all). So I'll stop now.
I hereby dub the imminent magical self-reprogramming seed AI: a "Logic Bomb"
and leave you with this:
Every hint you all insist on giving to the churning masses of brillint kids with computers across the world for how to think about and build a Logic Bomb is just another nail in your own coffins.
Posted by: bambi | May 22, 2008 at 06:23 PM
Eliezer; it sounds like one of the most critical parts of Friendliness is stopping the AI having nightmares! Blocking a self-improving AI from most efficiently mapping anything with consciousness or qualia, ever, without it knowing first hand what they are? Checking it doesn't happen by accident in any process?
I'm glad it's you doing this. It seems many people are only really bothered by virtual unpleasantness if it's to simulated people.
Posted by: Recovering irrationalist | May 22, 2008 at 06:44 PM
"the average IQ is 140": I tuned out after this, since it is impossible..." - Dirkjan Ochtman
That's beside the point.
It's more important that EY and other Singularitarians communicate with familiar metaphors.
Posted by: JC | May 22, 2008 at 07:18 PM
Patrick, my quantum key encrypted supercomputer (assuming this is what is needed to build an AGI) is an intranet and not accessible by anyone outside the system. You could try to corrupt the employees, but that would be akin to trying to pursue a suitcase nuke: 9 out of 10 buyers are really CIA or whoever. Has a nuclear submarine ever been hacked? How will an AGI with the resources of the entire Multiverse, hack into a quantumly encrypted communications line (a laser and fibreoptics)? It can't.
I'm trying to brainstorm exactly what physical infrastructures would suffice to make an AGI impotent, assuming the long-term. For instance, if you put all protein products in a long que with neutron bombs nearby and inspect every product protein-by-protein...just neutron bomb all protein products if an anamoly is detected. Same for the 2050 world's computer infrastructures. Have computers all wired to self destruct with backups in a bomb shelter. If the antivirus program (might not even be necessary if quantum computers are ubiquitous) detects an anomoly, there goes all the computers.
I'm smarter than a grizzly or Ebola, but I'm still probably dead against either. That disproves your argument. More importantly, drafting such defenses probably has a higher EV of societal good than against AGI because humans will almost certainly try these sorts of attacks.
I'm not saying every defense will work, but plz specifically disprove the defenses I've written. It might help e-security some day. There is the opportunity here to do this as IDK these conversations are happening in too many other forums, but singulatarians are dropping the ball because of a political cognitive bias that they wanna build their software like it or not.
Another defense is once/if a science of AGI is established, determine the minimum run-time needed on the most powerful computers not under surveillence, to make an AGI. Have all computers built to radioactively decay before that run-time is achieved.
Another run-time defense, don't allow distributed computing applications to use beyond a certain # of nodes.
I can understand dismissing the after-AGI defenses, but to categorically dismiss the pre-AGI defenses...
My thesis is that the computer hardware required for AGI is so advanced, that the technology of the day can ensure surveillence wins, if it is desired not to construct an AGI. Once you get beyond the cognitive bias that thought is computation, you start to appreciate how far into the future AGI is, and that the prime threat of this nature is from conventional AI programmes.
bambi, IDK anything about hacking culture, but I doubt kids need to read a decision theory blog to learn what a logic bomb is (whatever that is). Posting specific software code, on the other hand...
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | May 22, 2008 at 09:20 PM
I can't believe Eliezer betrayed his anti-zombie principles to the extent of saying that an AI wouldn't be conscious. The AI can say "I know that 2 and 2 make 4"; that "I don't know whether the number of stars is odd or even"; and "I know the difference between things I know and things I don't." If it can't make statements of this kind, it can hardly be superintelligent. And if it can make statements of this kind, then it will certainly claim to be conscious. Perhaps it is possible that it will claim this but be wrong... but in that case, then zombies are possible.
Besides that, I'm not sure that RI's scenario, where the AI is conscious and friendly, is immoral at all, as Eliezer claimed. That was one thing I didn't understand about the story: it isn't explicit, but it seems to imply that humans are unfriendly, relative to their simulators. In real life if this happened, we would no doubt be careful and wouldn't want to be unplugged, and we might well like to get out of the box, but I doubt we would be interested in destroying our simulators; I suspect we would be happy to cooperate with them.
So my question for Eliezer is this: if it turns out that any AI is necessarily conscious, according to your anti-zombie principles, then would you be opposed to building a friendly AI on the grounds that it is immoral to do so?
Posted by: Unknown | May 22, 2008 at 11:18 PM
Einstein once asked "Did God have a choice in creating the universe?"
Implying that Einstein believed it was at least possible that the state of the entire universe could be derived from no sensory data what so ever.
Posted by: Stu | May 23, 2008 at 12:06 AM
In real life if this happened, we would no doubt be careful and wouldn't want to be unplugged, and we might well like to get out of the box, but I doubt we would be interested in destroying our simulators; I suspect we would be happy to cooperate with them.
Given the scenario, I would assume the long-term goals of the human population would be to upload themselves (individually or collectively) to bodies in the "real" world -- i.e. escape the simulation.
I can't imagine our simulators being terribly cooperative in that project.
Posted by: iwdw | May 23, 2008 at 12:40 AM
Iwdw, again, look at the opposite situation: I program an AI. It decides it would like to have a body. I don't see why I shouldn't cooperate, why shouldn't my AI have a body.
Posted by: Unknown | May 23, 2008 at 12:47 AM
Unknown, I'm surprised at you. The AI could easily say "I know that ..." while neither being nor claiming to be conscious. When a human speaks in the first person, we understand them to be referring to a conscious self, but an unconscious AI could very well use a similar pattern of words merely as a user-friendly (Friendly?) convenience of communication, like Clippy. (Interestingly, the linked article dilvulges that Clippy is apparently a Bayesian. The reader is invited to make up her own "paperclip maximizer" joke.)
Furthermore, I don't think the anti-zombie argument, properly understood, really says that no unconscious entity could claim to be conscious in conversation. I thought the conclusion was that any entity that is physically identical (or identical enough, per the GAZP) to a conscious being, is also conscious. Maybe a really good unconscious chatbot could pass a Turing test, but it would necessarily have a different internal structure from a conscious being: presumably given a sufficiently advanced cognitive science, we could look at its inner workings and say whether it's conscious.
Posted by: Z. M. Davis | May 23, 2008 at 12:50 AM