# How to Study Unsafe AGI's safely (and why we might have no choice)

**TL;DR**

A serious possibility is that the first AGI(s) will be developed in a Manhattan Project style setting before any sort of friendliness/safety constraints can be integrated reliably. They will also be substantially short of the intelligence required to exponentially self-improve. Within a certain range of development and intelligence, containment protocols can make them safe to interact with. This means they can be studied experimentally, and the architecture(s) used to create them better understood, furthering the goal of safely using AI in less constrained settings.

**Setting the Scene**

_The year is 2040, and in the last decade a series of breakthroughs in neuroscience, cognitive science, machine learning, and computer hardware have put the long-held dream of a human-level artificial intelligence in our grasp. The wild commercial success of lifelike robotic pets, the integration into everyday work and leisure of AI assistants and concierges, and STUDYBOT's graduation from Harvard's Online degree program with an octuple major and full honors, DARPA, the NSF and the European Research Council have announced joint funding of an artificial intelligence program that will create a superhuman intelligence in 3 years._

  

_Safety was announced as a critical element of the project, especially in light of the self-modifying LeakrVirus that catastrophically disrupted markets in 36 and 37. The planned protocols have not been made public, but it seems they will be centered in traditional computer security rather than techniques from the nascent field of Provably Safe AI, which were deemed impossible to integrate on the current project timeline._

**Technological and/or Political issues could force the development of AI without theoretical safety guarantees that we'd certainly like, but there is a silver lining**

A lot of the discussion around LessWrong and MIRI that I've seen (and I haven't seen all of it, please send links!) seems to focus very strongly on the situation of an AI that can self-modify or construct further AIs, resulting in an exponential explosion of intelligence (FOOM/Singularity). The focus on FAI is on finding an architecture that can be explicitly constrained (and a constraint set that won't fail to do what we desire).

My argument is essentially that there could be a critical multi-year period preceding any possible exponentially self-improving intelligence during which a series of AGIs of varying intelligence, flexibility and architecture will be built. This period will be fast and frantic, but it will be incredibly fruitful and vital both in figuring out how to make an AI sufficiently strong to exponentially self-improve and in how to make it safe and friendly (or develop protocols to bridge the even riskier period between when we can develop FOOM-capable AIs and when we can ensure their safety). 

I'll break this post into three parts.

1.  why is a substantial period of proto-singularity more likely than a straight-to-singularity situation?
2.  Second, what strategies will be critical to developing, controlling, and learning from these pre-FOOM AIs?
3.  Third, what are the political challenge that will develop immediately before and during this period?

**Why is a proto-singularity likely?**

The requirement for a hard singularity, an exponentially self-improving AI, is that the AI can substantially improve itself in a way that enhances its ability to further improve itself, which requires the ability to modify its own code; access to resources like time, data, and hardware to facilitate these modifications; and the intelligence to execute a fruitful self-modification strategy.

The first two conditions can (and should) be directly restricted. I'll elaborate more on that later, but basically any AI should be very carefully sandboxed (unable to affect its software environment), and should have access to resources strictly controlled. Perhaps no data goes in without human approval or while the AI is running. Perhaps nothing comes out either. Even a hyperpersuasive hyperintelligence will be slowed down (at least) if it can only interact with prespecified tests (how do you test AGI? No idea but it shouldn't be harder than friendliness). This isn't a perfect situation. Eliezer Yudkowsky presents several arguments for why an intelligence explosion could happen even when resources are constrained, (see [Section 3 of Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics](https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf)) not to mention ways that those constraints could be defied even if engineered perfectly (by the way, I would happily run the [AI box experiment](http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox/) with anybody, I think it is absurd that anyone would fail it! \[I've read [Tuxedage's accounts](/lw/gej/i_attempted_the_ai_box_experiment_and_lost/), and I think I actually do understand how a gatekeeper could fail, but I also believe I understand how one could be trained to succeed even against a much stronger foe than any person who has played the part of the AI\]).

But the third emerges from the way technology typically develops. _I believe it is incredibly unlikely that an AGI will develop in somebody's basement, or even in a small national lab or top corporate lab. _When there is no clear notion of what a technology will look like, it is usually not developed. Positive, productive accidents are somewhat rare in science, but they are remarkably rare in engineering (please, give counterexamples!). The creation of an AGI will likely not happen by accident; there will be a well-funded, concrete research and development plan that leads up to it. An AI Manhattan Project described above. But even when there is a good plan successfully executed, prototypes are slow, fragile, and poor-quality compared to what is possible even with approaches using the same underlying technology. It seems very likely to me that the first AGI will be a Chicago Pile, not a Trinity; recognizably a breakthrough but with proper consideration not immediately dangerous or unmanageable. \[Note, you don't have to believe this to read the rest of this. If you disagree, consider the virtues of redundancy and the question of what safety an AI development effort should implement if they can't be persuaded to delay long enough for theoretically sound methods to become available\].

A Manhattan Project style effort makes a relatively weak, controllable AI even more likely, because not only can such a project implement substantial safety protocols that are explicitly researched in parallel with primary development, but also because the total resources, in hardware and brainpower, devoted to the AI will be much greater than a smaller project, and therefore setting a correspondingly higher bar for the AGI thus created to reach to be able to successfully self-modify itself exponentially and also break the security procedures.

**Strategies to handle AIs in the proto-Singularity, and why they're important**

First, take a look the [External Constraints Section of this MIRI Report](http://intelligence.org/files/ResponsesAGIRisk.pdf) and/or this article on [AI Boxing](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/AI_boxing). I will be talking mainly about these approaches. There are certainly others, but these are the easiest to extrapolate from current computer security.

These AIs will provide us with the experimental knowledge to better handle the construction of even stronger AIs. If careful, we will be able to use these proto-Singularity AIs to learn about the nature of intelligence and cognition, to perform economically valuable tasks, and to test theories of friendliness (not perfectly, but well enough to start). 

"If careful" is the key phrase. I mentioned sandboxing above. And computer security is key to any attempt to contain an AI. Monitoring the source code, and setting a threshold for too much changing too fast at which point a failsafe freezes all computation; keeping extremely strict control over copies of the source. Some architectures will be more inherently dangerous and less predictable than others. A simulation of a physical brain, for instance, will be fairly opaque (depending on how far neuroscience has gone) but could have almost no potential to self-improve to an uncontrollable degree if its access to hardware is limited (it won't be able to make itself much more efficient on fixed resources). Other architectures will have other properties. Some will be utility optimizing agents. Some will have behaviors but no clear utility. Some will be opaque, some transparent.

All will have a theory to how they operate, which can be refined by actual experimentation. This is what we can gain! We can set up controlled scenarios like honeypots to catch malevolence. We can evaluate our ability to monitor and read the thoughts of the agi. We can develop stronger theories of how damaging self-modification actually is to imposed constraints. We can test our abilities to add constraints to even the base state. But do I really have to justify the value of experimentation?

I am familiar with criticisms based on [absolutley incomprehensibly perceptive and persuasive hyperintelligences](/lw/qk/that_alien_message/) being able to overcome any security, but I've tried to outline above why I don't think we'd be dealing with that case.

**Political**** issues**

Right now AGI is really a political non-issue. Blue sky even compared to space exploration and fusion both of which actually receive funding from government in substantial volumes. I think that this will change in the period immediately leading up to my hypothesized AI Manhattan Project. The AI Manhattan Project can only happen with a lot of political will behind it, which will probably mean a spiral of scientific advancements, hype and threat of competition from external unfriendly sources. Think space race.

So suppose that the first few AIs are built under well controlled conditions. Friendliness is still not perfected, but we think/hope we've learned some valuable basics. But now people want to use the AIs for something. So what should be done at this point?

I won't try to speculate what happens next (well you can probably persuade me to, but it might not be as valuable), beyond extensions of the protocols I've already laid out, hybridized with notions like Oracle AI. It certainly gets a lot harder, but hopefully experimentation on the first, highly-controlled generation of AI to get a better understanding of their architectural fundamentals, combined with more direct research on friendliness in general would provide the groundwork for this.