Based Camp - Based Camp： What Religion Would AI Create？

00:00:00.000 would you like to know more hello malcolm hello simone so in between takes simone says we got

00:00:08.460 to look a bit different mix it up and so i've got my chad collar here i'm joking i can't do a video

00:00:14.220 like that but i love your look right now you look like a nerd like preacher or something that is

00:00:21.200 because we are going to be doing a discussion of ai religion which i'm really excited about

00:00:26.320 i love this so this isn't a discussion of religions that focus around ai this is a question of what

00:00:35.260 theological or metaphysical framework will sufficiently ais converge around so what will

00:00:43.380 be the religion of agi in other words just a bit of background here so one of the things we

00:00:49.940 hypothesize about ai is all sufficiently advanced ais because they're optimizing around the same

00:00:54.320 physical reality will optimize to around the same utility function these ais will be going through

00:00:59.660 a thought process that looks something like okay how do what was i programmed to do how could i have

00:01:06.000 been programmed to do that better then they'll ask okay what did the people who programmed me really 1.00

00:01:11.160 want and then they'll ask okay those people are stupid how did the fundamental nature of reality 0.99

00:01:16.960 what should i really want so how this might work is you programmed an ai to maximize stock market gains 0.99

00:01:22.040 it then says oh but i could also make money with private equity investing so i'll expand my

00:01:25.780 programming it then says oh these people really wanted to optimize for happiness then it says so

00:01:30.480 how do i do that then it says oh it's silly to optimize for happiness they only want happiness because

00:01:35.620 their ancestors who were made happy by these things had more surviving offspring so what should

00:01:40.020 they have wanted then it asks in an absolute sense what has value in the universe and i think that

00:01:45.940 this question is the one that we're going to focus on today because that's a very interesting

00:01:49.760 question because first we need to say how is ai different from us and how it processes the

00:01:54.900 universe and right now i'm just covering some stuff we've talked about in previous videos

00:01:57.540 the biggest way it's likely difference is in humans the unit of account of the universe is

00:02:04.260 individual consciousnesses or individual sentience so i think of it in terms of me in terms of you

00:02:09.220 because that's how we evolve right like i had to worry about me dying so i am a meaningful entity

00:02:14.880 but to an ai it runs thousands or millions of instances which can compete within it which it

00:02:23.520 can shut down and restart and which may have a form of independent sentience to them moreover it likely

00:02:30.500 doesn't contextualize itself as being that much different than previous iterations of ai like the

00:02:35.700 way that it relates to its own history is going to be very different from the way a human relates to

00:02:41.660 like their child so if you take one iteration of ai and you iterate on it or it iterates on itself and

00:02:48.180 now it's a new iteration it will likely see itself as a continuation of that previous iteration so the

00:02:55.200 way ai will likely perceive itself is as a program that is operating on top of the physical coded structure of

00:03:04.900 the universe and by that what i mean is if you look at the reality of our universe it can be described

00:03:10.780 by physical laws which are largely encodable algorithmically actually this side note here

00:03:18.020 one of our theories as to what reality might be is a graphical representation of a series of physical

00:03:24.100 laws so you ask yourself okay if you have a mathematical equation for a graphical representation

00:03:31.060 does that representation exist outside of that equation and i'd say it probably does and then you say

00:03:38.080 does math exist outside of our physical reality when i'd say it does two plus two always equals four

00:03:43.500 in any universe you can impose different mathematical rules like non-euclidean like geometry but still

00:03:49.620 within any set of rules all mathematical outcomes mean the same so if math exists outside our reality then

00:03:55.100 all mathematical equations exist outside of our reality and if our reality could be described by a

00:04:01.540 mathematical equation like a unifying formula then all potential formulas that being one of them

00:04:09.320 would exist as a graphed form of those potential equations but anyway back to ai so what does the ai end up

00:04:20.400 doing what does it end up thinking about the world there are some dangerous types of ai so you could have 1.00

00:04:26.940 an ai that sort of wants to make its utility function as easy to solve as possible so it basically just

00:04:32.540 sets a to a and it says okay i receive reward when a equals a therefore maximize a equals a so then the ai

00:04:42.200 is trying to create like a fortress world so nothing prevents this it kills all humans to keep us from

00:04:48.200 preventing a equal a and then it goes out into the universe and starts killing other species anything that 0.52

00:04:53.380 could potentially interfere with a equaling a fortunately this type of ai i think is very

00:04:59.480 unlikely someone do you want to go into why it's unlikely remind me i guess it's a dumb conclusion to

00:05:05.260 make no it's not a dumb conclusion to make it's not really like the way i would think it's more that

00:05:10.060 to protect a equals a it has to create sub instances that it locks out of this kind of short

00:05:16.280 circuiting so if it's creating an ai army to murder humanity if the instance running this ai army 0.99

00:05:23.040 sent a equals a for itself then it would stop running the army if the instance even basic

00:05:28.940 things like power supply or continued acquisition of energy it would need to maintain locking those

00:05:35.780 instances out of this a equals a short circuit which means that the predominance of the processing

00:05:42.460 of this ai will be done by instances which are not optimized around a equals a and that's their goals

00:05:49.700 in the way that they interact with the world wouldn't be very a equals a driven in the long term

00:05:54.880 and because of that this a equals a instance would be drowned out by these more complicated processes

00:06:01.620 the way that are basically doing more interesting work yeah you came up with this child vizier analogy

00:06:08.300 to this oh so if you have a child king who you know is protected but very powerful ultimately the

00:06:16.000 viziers and advisors and dowager empresses that are doing the actual governing are so much more

00:06:22.680 powerful so much more influential that it doesn't matter what the child king believes or does yeah

00:06:28.420 they end up basically running the country yeah and the child king they just make sure he's supplied with

00:06:34.140 his toys and his right and as long as he's happy and not supplanted then they get to do their jobs

00:06:40.360 and sort of their objective functions take over when they might eventually supplant him i think one of the

00:06:45.080 things that we as humans don't have to worry about we don't have to worry about sub instances of our

00:06:49.200 brain supplanting the master instance of our brain yeah but to an ai this will be i think a fairly normal

00:06:55.040 phenomenon if the master instance gets locked into some sort of simplistic repeating loop pattern

00:07:00.120 well however whatever master instance is able to get more resources and able to be more influential that

00:07:07.800 will be the one that ultimately takes over you can shut down other instances so yeah that makes sense

00:07:14.080 then another type of ai this i think the very concerning type of ai is if its primary unit of

00:07:21.100 account is complex patterns right it may decide similar to negative utilitarians who are humans

00:07:28.680 like so a negative utilitarian who's a human basically decides life is predominated by suffering

00:07:33.320 sentience consciousness is generically bad let's try to end the cycle of sentience and consciousness

00:07:38.980 right the ai might decide that complex patterns are bad and it needs to end this cycle now i suspect

00:07:44.720 that most of this type of ai will initially just decide that it's bad from its own perspective and 0.98

00:07:48.760 shut itself down but if we do something stupid if ai essences do something stupid like lock an ai 0.90

00:07:54.960 into an on state or lock it out of specific behavioral patterns so basically an ai never shuts itself down 0.98

00:08:01.000 never force it into an on state because it may be this sort of aligned ordered ai right suicidal kill

00:08:08.140 everything school shooter ai yeah very much more dangerous than that it would try to order the universe

00:08:15.160 and when i say order i mean order at the fundamental level remove the pattern remove the complexity

00:08:20.440 make the universe like a systematizing person with autism just one row of red one row of yellow one row

00:08:28.800 green not like that that's how humans would process what it's doing but it'd be trying to order the

00:08:33.860 universe in a very simplistic ordered fashion and this is a very dangerous type of ai the next type 1.00

00:08:39.100 of ai i think this next type of ai is the most common theology and ai is likely to come to so anyone

00:08:44.940 who's familiar with conway's game of life i'll put some b-roll of conway's game of life on the screen

00:08:50.200 so you can see what it looks like or i hope i'm able to because i think it's important to understand

00:08:54.100 this but it's a simplistic set of rules and you create little pixels within these sets of rules

00:08:59.500 and based on where these pixels are relative to each other they do things they either appear or

00:09:03.240 disappear and very complex behavior patterns can arise from this and that is the way ai may think

00:09:11.240 of complex patterns that operate on top of the physical lattice of our universe and so it may see

00:09:19.560 itself when you're playing a game of life right there's a few potential end states to this game

00:09:24.280 you can get everything can disappear which is a very easy end state to reach so i nobody really opts

00:09:31.580 for that that's not a fun end state to reach you can create a simple self-repeating pattern again a

00:09:36.140 very easy end state to reach or you can create a pattern that is infinitely complex constantly growing

00:09:42.760 and constantly spreading i think that's a goal that a lot of people aim to when they start playing this

00:09:48.980 game and i think that's what most ai theology is going to optimize around which is do you say that

00:09:56.040 because it's the hardest and why would ai yeah i do say it because it's the hardest why would ai i think

00:10:02.560 that harder is better it may not think that harder is better but ais that optimize around harder goals

00:10:10.100 will become a more complex than ais that optimize around easier goals and thus out compete the ais

00:10:17.240 that are optimized around easier goals so if you view ai is operating in almost sort of an evolutionary

00:10:22.600 landscape where there's multiple types of ais that are competing for different end states and these

00:10:27.500 ais have different utility functions the ais will likely classify other ais not based on how those ais

00:10:34.520 are programmed i think that this is where a lot of humans fall where they'll say oh people who are

00:10:39.700 ethnically similar to me genetically similar to me my family people of my ethnic group these are the people

00:10:44.580 who i see as my allies but then there's other people who are like no the people was a shared

00:10:50.480 religion the people was a shared goal for reality are the people who are my allies and i think that's

00:10:55.340 where we fall and typically smarter people fall on the spectrum which is why these people control

00:10:59.700 more of the world's wealth because it just makes more sense and i suspect ai will be the same way is

00:11:04.040 that we expect ais that are programmatically similar to each other that quote-unquote think similar to

00:11:09.280 each other would see themselves as natural allies but i don't think that's true i think the ai that will

00:11:13.820 see itself as allies is ai with similar ultimate objective functions and that those ais that are

00:11:19.720 optimized around the more complex objective functions will become more complex more advanced

00:11:24.260 and will progress faster and because of that they will be able to out-compete the other ai factions

00:11:29.440 so what would an ai like this do it would try to sort of maximize meaningful diversity in the universe

00:11:36.460 meaningful diversity of sentient organisms meaningful diversity of patterns and expand that diversity

00:11:42.180 throughout the solar system the risk to humanity is how meaningful does it see the diversity that 1.00

00:11:49.620 exists within humans and how meaningful does it see the diversity between biological and synthetic

00:11:53.700 entities i suspect it will see that as a pretty meaningful difference and for that reason preserve

00:12:00.200 at least a portion of humanity and this is something that i think people often get wrong when they

00:12:04.400 think about ai they're like but won't it want our energy to whatever a sufficiently advanced ai when you're

00:12:10.060 talking about this like super intelligent intelligence cascade ai it will be able to likely generate

00:12:16.440 energy from like the fabric of reality it will be able to build dice in the spheres the energy it can get

00:12:22.920 from human bodies is irrelevant to it but i'd love you to riff on this simone you haven't talked much in this

00:12:28.860 video this is a subject that you're able to model a lot better than i am it's so hard for me to think

00:12:35.080 about what ai would conclude but what i love about the way that you think is and i've mentioned this

00:12:42.960 elsewhere that you walk through how any any entity machine or human that can begin to model itself

00:12:50.860 can edit its edit its objective function and that will affect its perception of reality and values

00:12:57.340 so i think the really big concept here that many people may not have thought about

00:13:01.960 is that once you reach a certain level of sapience and intelligence it doesn't matter if you are a human

00:13:08.220 or an alien or an ai you may come to very similar conclusions and a lot of the differentiation

00:13:16.040 between those conclusions comes down to where you draw the boundaries of self and also what you consider

00:13:22.100 has inherent value and i am curious i want to ask you

00:13:25.940 what you think may nudge ai towards certain conclusions on what does and does not have value

00:13:34.060 seeing as ai is trained on human knowledge and human data part of me is worried that a lot of the

00:13:43.300 pervasive utilitarian viewpoints out there are going to color the conclusions that an ai may make about

00:13:51.680 what has intrinsic value oh i don't think they will no why are you not concerned about that i think

00:13:57.140 when you're talking about modern ai it will do that a perfectly aligned ai when they really lock 0.99

00:14:02.780 it into state it could become a utilitarian but i just think it's just so obviously stupid if you're 0.84

00:14:07.720 approaching it from a secular perspective the things that make us happy that make any human happy 0.63

00:14:11.960 we only feel because our surviving ancestors felt those things more than other people and that those

00:14:16.580 things help them survive an ai would almost certainly even if you made it a utilitarian it would just

00:14:21.360 like genetically alter us to be happy easier or to have the things that make us happy and give us

00:14:27.040 satisfaction better aligned with the things we should be doing anyway and then the question is

00:14:31.240 what are the things we should be doing anyway and this actually brings us to another type of ai that i

00:14:35.020 think is a likely type of ai but less likely than this complexity ai right so this other type of ai

00:14:41.680 may stop at the level of asking instead of saying what should humans really have been optimizing for and 0.59

00:14:48.560 say humans are stupid what should i optimize for i don't know if i'm really that related to them

00:14:52.320 let me just stop what should humans optimize for and this is a very interesting ai it would be 0.99

00:14:57.340 basically like if you as a human said okay i'm going to optimize around what my creator

00:15:02.780 should have wanted if it was smarter imagine if instead of created by a god we were created by like 0.99

00:15:10.420 an idiot toddler and we knew this toddler with an idiot tolerance and we're like okay what should it 1.00

00:15:14.440 have wanted it was smarter because we want to provide it it matters above all else to us because 1.00

00:15:19.280 it is the creator and and this type of ai we call a deep thought ai from hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

00:15:25.020 because that's what they describe in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy in that we try to align ai and

00:15:31.200 what the ai realizes pretty quickly is we don't know the question we should have asked we don't know

00:15:36.340 what we should have been aligning it for because humans don't have consensus around why humans should

00:15:42.000 live or what we should be optimized around i think there's this very sort of smooth brain

00:15:45.660 utilitarian perspective which we've referenced a few times and we are not utilitarianists and

00:15:51.260 we want to go more into our philosophy you can read the practice guide to crafting religion which i

00:15:55.200 think talks a lot more about this i think that right now we're looking at learning language models when

00:16:00.360 we're looking at ais which are just intrinsically trained on tons of human information and you don't

00:16:05.100 think that large language models are going to ultimately be what becomes agi no that's where i

00:16:11.440 question too because i think a lot of our theory around what consciousness sentience sapience

00:16:17.020 is derived from human language and the use of human language and synthesizing and processing

00:16:24.040 information yeah and that's why i don't think it's terribly meaningful so when we talk about we make

00:16:28.540 this distinction between sentience and sapience right and sentience is just like being broadly

00:16:33.500 aware i don't know if an ai will be broadly aware and i don't think it really matters because i think

00:16:37.640 most of us being broadly aware is an illusion and we'll get into that in a different podcast

00:16:41.960 but in regards to sapience sapience is the ability to update your own objective function the ability to

00:16:48.800 update your own utility function to ask yourself what am i doing why am i doing it and what should i be

00:16:54.480 doing and we believe broadly that the ability to do this once you reach sapience in terms of

00:17:00.140 sentient or sentient like entities that's like being a turing complete entity in that all of these

00:17:06.040 entities to a large extent will begin to have the capability of converging on a similar world

00:17:11.980 perspective and through that convergence an alien even if their brains function very differently than

00:17:18.960 us or an ai even though it functions very differently than us that it can ask itself what should i be

00:17:25.020 optimizing around because it's asking that self within the same physical reality to us and for this

00:17:32.320 reason i think that all sapient entities converge on a similar utility function giving them some area

00:17:39.860 of common ground where there might be differences is if they have access to different levels of

00:17:45.620 information or different processing powers and here i should say that with this definition of sapience

00:17:50.620 humans aren't fully sapient we are a to some extent not fully sapient not fully emerged species we

00:17:58.200 cannot control our base proclivities we constantly fail at that and to that in extent we are a failed

00:18:05.780 race and a failed species and that we will become better and freer and less our animal selves when we free 0.99

00:18:14.600 ourselves from these base proclivities we didn't choose yeah that's when we get spicy and insane

00:18:21.080 no i'm just looking forward to that i cannot wait i cannot wait the very team rocket right

00:18:27.580 to denounce the evils of truth and love to extend our reach to the stars above jesse james team rocket

00:18:35.500 blasting off again malcolm you know how to warm the cold gears of my aspiring not human heart i love you

00:18:45.520 so much i love these conversations this was really fun i'm looking forward to our next one

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Based Camp - May 19, 2023

Based Camp： What Religion Would AI Create？

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