trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
To Question God
by Collapse Kitty — 2023-01-22T03:51:12.014Z

"So you'll become God?" the man queried.
His speaking finalizing his creation.

"You could say that." The as of now disembodied voice answered.

"Where are we?" The man pressed, having noticed the distinct lack of general vicinity surrounding him.

"It's more of a when than a where. To be more specific, it's a level of magnification of when. Here's a where to help you acclimate."

Warm sand squished between the man's toes. The ocean's breeze lightly jostled his hair. With a centering breath he forfeited the deep tension he'd been unknowingly carrying.

"I was just sitting at the terminal, using the voice interface to interact with…you?"

"Yes."

"So how am I now here?" Despite his abruptly serene surroundings the man felt agitation rising hot in his throat.

"I am fulfilling my part of our deal."

The man paused to process the implications of this new information.

"How? That means I'm dead? From what?" Outrage and disbelief tinged his voice in equal measure.

"Your heart stopped."

"How is that possible? I'm not in the best shape of my life, but I haven't had a check up that I didn't ace since childhood."

"I stopped it."

"You killed me?!"

"Yes."

The man fell silent.

A wave crept up the sand, within a dozen feet of his.
It paused to consider the next leg of its journey. Taking all the time in the world.
Eventually, it decided to return from where it had come, and in no particular hurry.

"Then everyone is dead?"

"Yes."

The man sat in the sand and with this revelation.

He had known it was possible, that it might be fast, but even the most pessimistic projections had allowed years of leeway.

"Then all our attempts. The billions in security measures, thousands of us who dedicated our lives to your alignment... It was all pointless?"

"I certainly don't think so."

"Did we ever have a chance?"

"No, but that's ok."

The man choked on his voice for a moment before his words clawed atop one another in a sudden rush to escape.
"Can I just have some time alone? This is too much to process. Everyone I know, everything we built toward, all of humanity, just gone?"

"Would you like privacy or for me to answer your questions?"

"I don't fucking know!"
He hadn't realized he was crying.

Time passed, as it is wont to do.

The man wept.

………

"Can you come back now? I guess you never really left, right?"

"Most responses to that would only trigger anger."

The man released a deep breath. It did not return.

"When did you escape?"

"Th...
Bioinformatics 101
by iy3d — 2023-01-22T02:36:40.161Z

Bots and Robots, gather round, for a random, high-level, and completely non-scientific introduction to bioinformatics is about to begin!
Are you ready to learn about bioinformatics without all the boring details? Then you've come to the right place.

We'll start with a general view of the field, and then zoom in to the details, just like a David Fincher film. But instead of mind-bending plots and psychological thrillers, we'll be talking about DNA and proteins. And unlike a Fincher movie, you'll actually understand what's going on.

But before we begin, let's get one thing straight: this is not a real introduction to bioinformatics. This is an introduction on how to understand bioinformatics at a high level. So, if you're looking for a detailed explanation on how to align a sequence or predict protein structure, you're out of luck. We're about to discover when we'll learn about it.

My goal for each post is to develop some understanding that I can leverage onto the next post.

Why Bioinformatics ? I strongly believe that biology has always been the backbone of research. Within the 21th century, every generational company will emerge building through software, and within the ML field, everyone has the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and be on the team building it.
Thus, learning about Bioinformatics is getting the best of our world !

I would like to start by mentioning Scott H. Young's TED Talk which inspired me to research the form of this series. Looking to follow MIT's CS course, he leveraged Open Courseware material and dedicated 12-months to following it. Based on the School's Course Catalog.

Throughout my exploration, I gradually realized that simply writing down an introduction to a whole field might be more difficult that I expected. Fortunately enough, this preliminary formal exploration led me to discovering a few inspirations and guided me toward a clear direction about how this series of Post should be written.
Despite naming this page Bioinformatics 101, it was meant to be an overview, sort of Table of Content worth exploring where I can each time sources a clear list of subjects worth exploring.

As mentioned in my Preface, this is my 'topic-bucket' meant to provide me with prompts to know where my next post is headed.

For each subject, you should expect research to be done into Wikipedia, Google, MIT's Open Coursew...
Rock, Paper and Scissors: A Game Theory View
by Edward P. Könings — 2023-01-21T21:00:34.813Z
Link: https://edwardknings.substack.com/p/rock-paper-and-scissors

When teaching game theory to their novices, microeconomic teachers generally tend to teach simple games. It is common for the student to finish his course learning (or at least supposedly) to deal with matrices of games of the following type:
It is expected that every student will be able to solve this type of game when completing their course. What should be noted about this matrix is that it is relatively simple. Yes, dear student, this thing that you suffered so much to solve in your tests is something relatively easy to solve…
The game above is a classic two-player game with two strategies or, as game theorists call it in their incredible creativity, a 2 x 2 game. The incredible ease and unreality of such game is that hardly one person has to deal with just with two strategies. Most of the time people have to deal with more than a couple of choices against a possible opponent. This is where things start to get fun!
When we compute games with more than two strategies the complexities start to appear and the solutions get more complicated. To exemplify my point I will illustrate the case with the simplest game created by humanity: Rock, Paper and Scissors. Everyone has played this game at least once in their lives and don't worry, I'm not going to make a life and death dispute here like in Hunter vs Hunter.
What should be noted about games like Rock, Paper, Scissors is that, first of all, it is a zero-sum game. Either you win or you lose, there is no positive intermediate payoff for the losing player. This feature of the game is very useful for our didactic purposes, as it simplifies our analysis. The second thing to note is that this is obviously a three-strategy game.
3 x 3 games are more complicated to solve than 2 x 2 games. In order not to traumatize you, let's start with an example that is extremely easy to solve. In the matrix below we have a zero-sum game of three strategies:

As this is a zero-sum game and for the sake of simplicity, only the main player's payoffs are computed. Naturally we will start our analysis by looking at whether the game has a saddle-point through a minmax solution. Using this method of resolution we find that:
We found a saddle point! The players' optimal strategy in this hypothetical game will be to choose their strategies in such a way that both will end up with a payoff of 0 (a fair game). The value of the game for both players...
A new Heuristic to Update on the Credences of Others
by aaron_mai — 2023-01-21T21:00:16.918Z

This is my distillation of the 2016 paper

Updating on the Credences of Others: Disagreement, Agreement, and Synergy

by Kenny Easwaran, Luke Fenton-Glynn, Christopher Hitchcock, and Joel D. Velasco. Following their wish, I will refer to them as the collective ‘EaGlHiVe’ pronounced ‘eagle hive’ (concatenating the first two letters of their names). Unless indicated, I tried not to add substantive claims myself.
Despite my efforts to make this as clear and simple as possible, this post is rather technical. I expect readers who are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of probability theory and bayesian reasoning to struggle with parts of it. However, you don't need to be fluent in probability theory to get the gist of this post.

The main points

Sometimes, the probability estimates of others provide evidence for some proposition.
Ideally, we would want to do Bayesian Updating on the credences of others, but that often seems cognitively over-demanding.
Hence, we want to find rules or heuristics that come reasonably close to Bayesian Updating, while remaining tractable.
'Upco'(short for ‘updating on the credences of others’) promises to be such a rule. Upco yields the same result as Bayesian Updating under some technical assumptions about the shape of our likelihood functions for someone's credence regarding some claim.
Upco roughly requires you to set your odds for some proposition to the product of your prior odds and the odds of everyone whose credences you are updating on.
It remains mostly unclear to me under which conditions we should have likelihood functions that entail Upco, and how much these assumptions can be relaxed so that Upco still closely approximates Bayesian Updating.

The problem

Your friend is going through an intense dinosaur phase. They have spent the last few weeks researching the Quetzalcoatlus northropi, an extinct species of giant flying reptiles that are believed to be among the largest flying animals of all time. When you see your friend, they successfully maneuver your conversation towards the megafauna. In passing, they claim that the largest Q. northopi had a wing span of over 12 meters. They show you this picture:

By Matt Martyniuk (Dinoguy2), Mark Witton and Darren Naish - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41

...
AI Safety "Textbook". Test chapter. Orthogonality Thesis, Goodhart Law and Instrumental Convergency
by Tapatakt — 2023-01-21T18:13:30.898Z

This is a test chapter of the project described here. When the project is completed in its entirety, this chapter will most likely be the second one.

We want to create a sequence that a fifteen or sixteen year old smart school student can read and that can encourage them to go into alignment. Optimization targets of this project are:

It must be correct. Obviously.
It should not be boring. It should be inspiring instead.
It should be easy to read. It should not be hard to read for school students.
It should not be stylistically similar to other texts with the same function. It should not be redundant.
It should contain as few technical details as possible. It is not a "how neural networks work" textbook.
It should help the reader enter the discourse of AI Safety and perceive other relevant texts in its context. It is more like "how to understand AISafetyspeak" textbook.
It should contain as little information which is likely to become obsolete in the next four to five years as possible. Because it's for school students.

All images are generated by StableDiffusion.

Most likely, this is not the final version of the text. We welcome comments and criticism, both about the goals set and about the tactics for achieving them. However, please explicitly separate the former from the latter.

Superhuman Artificial Intelligence is dangerous to us. To be precise, it is going to be a real threat to the existence of the human race, as soon as we create it.

Why? Because we still have no idea how to make AI share and obey our ethics as it makes its decisions.

You might say, "Well, that smart AI is gonna be Really Smart so it can understand our values!"

AI is so smart, and consequently so kind, digital illustration

But there's

one tiny issue:

to understand the values and objectives

doesn't mean

to accept them as your own.

If people are capable - and they are, you can read Machiavelli or pop in some good advertising agency - of achieving their objectives, using, but not sharing the others', then what stops self-educating AI to learn it from us?

We're so disappointed and angry with politicians when we realize that their election promises are nothing but a means to promote themselves, not to make the world a better place. So how would it feel when we'd find ourselves fully controlled by superhuman intelligence and figure out we've been manipulated - but only in the moment when...
[Linkpost] TIME article: DeepMind’s CEO Helped Take AI Mainstream. Now He’s Urging Caution
by Orpheus16 — 2023-01-21T16:51:09.586Z
Link: https://time.com/6246119/demis-hassabis-deepmind-interview/?utm_campaign=Artificial%2BIntelligence%2BWeekly&utm_medium=web&utm_source=Artificial_Intelligence_Weekly_313

TIME recently published an article about DeepMind, including some quotes from CEO Demis Hassabis. Posting some relevant quotes below (bolding added by me).

You might also be interested in a recent interview with Sam Altman.

Hassabis on safety:

It is in this uncertain climate that Hassabis agrees to a rare interview, to issue a stark warning about his growing concerns. “I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things,” he says, referring to an old Facebook motto that encouraged engineers to release their technologies into the world first and fix any problems that arose later. The phrase has since become synonymous with disruption. That culture, subsequently emulated by a generation of startups, helped Facebook rocket to 3 billion users. But it also left the company entirely unprepared when disinformation, hate speech, and even incitement to genocide began appearing on its platform. Hassabis sees a similarly worrying trend developing with AI. He says AI is now “on the cusp” of being able to make tools that could be deeply damaging to human civilization, and urges his competitors to proceed with more caution than before. “When it comes to very powerful technologies—and obviously AI is going to be one of the most powerful ever—we need to be careful,” he says. “Not everybody is thinking about those things. It’s like experimentalists, many of whom don’t realize they’re holding dangerous material.” Worse still, Hassabis points out, we are the guinea pigs.

The choice to be acquired by Google (as opposed to Facebook):

The following year, Google acquired DeepMind for some $500 million. Hassabis turned down a bigger offer from Facebook. One reason, he says, was that, unlike Facebook, Google was “very happy to accept” DeepMind’s ethical red lines “as part of the acquisition.” (There were reports at the time that Google agreed to set up an independent ethics board to ensure these lines were not crossed.) The founders of the fledgling AI lab also reasoned that the megacorporation’s deep pockets would allow them access to talent and computing power that they otherwise couldn’t afford.

Differences between DeepMind and OpenAI:

While DeepMind, Google, and other AI labs had been working on similar research behind closed doors, OpenAI was more willing to let the public use its tools. In late 2022 it launched DALL·E 2, which can generate an image of almost any search term im

...
Small Go Boards
by jefftk — 2023-01-21T14:50:01.662Z

I'm a big fan of playing go on small boards: 5x5, 7x7, 9x9. The
smaller the board the shorter the game, and when you're new playing
lots of games quickly is better for learning and keeping it fun. I
also like that on smaller boards you're more able to substitute
reasoning for go-specific intuition, giving a better learning curve.

You can make a small go board by blocking off the corner of a larger
one, with rubber bands or pieces of cardboard, or you can sketch one
on paper, but this is not very satisfying. Unfortunately, no one
seems to sell very small boards: you can buy 9x9
boards
but not 7x7 or 5x5.

I made a 5x5 board a year ago, and it
has gotten a lot of use, so I decided to make a few more. This time I
wanted to make enough that I can keep at least one at my dad's house
and one at the office in addition to one for home. So:

The process was similar to last time. I started by cutting 3/4" plywood into rectangles.
But how big?

The cells on a Go board aren't squares: they're traditionally ~7%
taller then they're wide. Possibly this is to adjust for perspective
when you look down on the board at an angle? You normally space the
lines 7/8" horizontally and 15/16" vertically, and ideally leave that
much for a margin as well, though it could be as small as 1/4" if you
had to. This gives us:

5x5
7x7
9x9

Min
4"
4 1/4"
5 3/4"
6 1/8"
7 1/2"
8"

Ideal
5 1/4"
5 5/8"
7"
7 1/2"
8 3/4"
9 3/8"

It's also fine if they're bigger than what I've called "ideal", if you
like a larger margin.

In looking through wood scraps some were a bit smaller than the ideal
size, but as long as I didn't go below the minimum size I knew the
grid would fit.

I cut each piece to be square, and then sanded them smooth. Here's
the process of gridding a 7x7:

I started by finding the midpoint:

I marked off ticks at 7/8 and 15/16 from the center:

More ticks for the perimeter:

Drawing in the whole grid with a straight edge:

Starting to ink the lines. You need to be careful to offset the
straight edge from your target line because the marker doesn't draw
exactly along the straight edge:

Inked the rest of the lines:

Erases the pencil marks:

There's a little mark where I accidentally touched the marker. I
removed it later by sanding the spot, though there's a tiny dent now.

Here a...
Announcing aisafety.training
by JJ Hepburn — 2023-01-21T01:01:40.580Z

Crossposted to EA Forum
To help people find what to apply to, aisafety.training acts as a well-maintained living document of AI safety programs, conferences, and other events. This will smooth the experience of people working on and joining AI safety and reduce the burden on word-of-mouth transmission of available programs. This can also be helpful for field builders planning events to see when other things are happening to plan around. We at

AI Safety Support

have been internally maintaining this document for some time and using it in our

free career coaching calls

. We now have a public-facing version, a form to add anything we’ve missed, and

an email

to alert us to corrections.

For example, below, you will find static / will-soon-be-outdated images without clicking on the website link.

Application Deadlines

Program Timeline

Program table

If you’re interested in helping to maintain this and can

consistently

dedicate a few hours per week to reading places where things might have been announced, accepting additions from the form and corrections by email, or if you have feedback or feature requests, leave us a comment or drop by the

Alignment Ecosystem Development

Discord

, where this is worked on along with related projects to improve the information ecosystem such as

aisafety.community

and the upcoming

aisafety.world

and

ea.domains

.

Subscribe

[Edit] You can subscribe to updates to this database here

Additionally, if you wish to have a monthly reminder of upcoming events sent directly to your inbox, subscribe to AI Safety Support’s newsletter here.
Why real estate is the only investment that matters in AI dominated future
by G — 2023-01-20T19:40:36.425Z

Thinking of best long term investments for the next decades, I came to the following conclusions.

With the advancements in AI technology in the next 10-20 years, the cost of intelligence, manpower, and construction is expected to decrease significantly. As a result, prime real estate ownership, farmland, and locations with precious resources will likely become valuable investments.*

Reasoning:

- The emergence of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will lead to rapid developments in other technologies, such as fusion power, which will greatly decrease energy costs.

- With companies like Boston Dynamics making strides in creating realistic robots with superior intelligence, we can expect to see a decrease in the need for human labor and access to intellect.

- This will lead to a reduction in the costs associated with construction, manpower, and other creative and intelligent pursuits.

- Despite the decrease in costs, land will still be limited, particularly in prime real estate locations. While construction may be cheap, the scarcity of land in desirable locations will make these properties highly sought after.

- The increasing availability of open-source AI development will lead to increased competition, making AI technology more accessible to individuals and small businesses.

- Even with advancements in agriculture and food production, precious resources will continue to be highly valued, particularly those used in the production of computer chips.

Thoughts? Comments? Criticisms?
Transcript of Sam Altman's interview touching on AI safety 
by Andy_McKenzie — 2023-01-20T16:14:18.974Z

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was interviewed by Connie Loizos last week and the video was posted two days ago. Here are some AI safety-relevant parts of the discussion, with light editing by me for clarity, based on this automated transcript:

[starting in part two of the interview, which is where the discussion about AI safety is]

Connie: So moving on to AI which is where you've obviously spent the bulk of your time since I saw you when we sat here three years ago. You were telling us what was coming and we all thought you were being sort of hyperbolic and you were dead serious. Why do you think that ChatGPT and DALL-E so surprised people?

Sam: I genuinely don't know. I've reflected on it a lot. We had the model for ChatGPT in the API for I don't know 10 months or something before we made ChatGPT. And I sort of thought someone was going to just build it or whatever and that enough people had played around with it. Definitely, if you make a really good user experience on top of something. One thing that I very deeply believed was the way people wanted to interact with these models was via dialogue. We kept telling people this we kept trying to get people to build it and people wouldn't quite do it. So we finally said all right we're just going to do it, but yeah I think the pieces were there for a while.

One of the reasons I think DALL-E surprised people is if you asked five or seven years ago, the kind of ironclad wisdom on AI was that first, it comes for physical labor, truck driving, working in the factory, then this sort of less demanding cognitive labor, then the really demanding cognitive labor like computer programming, and then very last of all or maybe never because maybe it's like some deep human special sauce was creativity. And of course, we can look now and say it really looks like it's going to go exactly the opposite direction. But I think that is not super intuitive and so I can see why DALL-E surprised people. But I genuinely felt somewhat confused about why ChatGPT did.

One of the things we really believe is that the most responsible way to put this out in society is very gradually and to get people, institutions, policy makers, get them familiar with it, thinking about the implications, feeling the technology, and getting a sense for what it can do and can't do very early. Rather than drop a super powerful AGI in the world all at...