Cooperative ethics arise immediately in the Prisoner's Dilemma merely by adding an unknown number of iterations to the game. The most efficient strategy is a version of tit-for-tat.
I think we shouldn't confuse efficient strategies with the chosen strategies. What causes Moloch is the inability to see the big picture, to see outside of the self in the collective (maybe Buddhism has a point).
An efficient strategy may very well be something we'd prefer, such as tit-for-tat. But is that the strategy we choose? Looking at the long history of evolution, I'd say no.
In the long run, we've built massively complex human societies that develop intricate technologies. Technologies whose production requires supply chains many thousands of people, and so complex that nobody involved understands all the technologies involves. All so some people can contend that humanity isn't able to see the collective beyond the self.
I would say we have a demonstrated ability of seeing the big picture, and a pretty good track record of making it work.
> I would say we have a demonstrated ability of seeing the big picture, and a pretty good track record of making it work.
alternative explanation, given for the sake of argument:
we have a terrible ability to see the big picture, but have come up with some ingenious constructions where the small picture of each component in the system is correctly calibrated so the big picture outcome is successful. as you yourself pointed out, the supply chains are so complex that nobody involved understands all of it.
now, how would we go about distinguishing between which of these possible interpretations is correct?
thought experiment goes like this: suppose the big picture requires that some actors in the system do not receive satisfactory treatment in their local context, and that the only benefits those actors receive will be indirect, as benefits accrued to other actors in the system, but not to adjacent actors. will those actors still agree to participate or not?
An AI spending a lot of time doing effectively the same thing humans have been doing (read: propagation of immense amounts of suffering) is not really something I'd want to see repeated. It seems rather obvious that these conclusions are very difficult and slow to arrive at at a proper scale, so no AI will have them by default. They'll be aggressive by default, just like your average animal in evolution. The fact that given their own millions of years (sped up) they may eventually arrive at the rudimentary level of cooperation that humans possess does not instill a lot of hope in me.
> I would say we have a demonstrated ability of seeing the big picture, and a pretty good track record of making it work.
A good example that's going to be hard to ignore will be the upcoming climate change due to humans catastrophically failing to see the big picture and focusing on smaller gains within their sub-groups. It really doesn't have much to do with complexity, but it has everything to do with the very same behavior you're seeing the AI execute here.
It's not specifically new technology that's being deliniated by "Moloch". The article is long but explains clearly the (not entirely new) association: Moloch represents the sacrifice of human values on the altar of competitiveness, and is best staved off through coordination.
SSC, while fairly controversial (and I strongly disagree with a LOT of what's on there), is mostly known to HN. At the moment, it has the best summary of the concept that I'm aware of.
> Frankly i don't feel it's productive or rational to attach the name of a biblical villain to new technology.
Well, frankly, I disagree. Humans have an inherent blind spot when it comes to complex systemic forces. We tend to imagine them as weak and irrelevant. Reframing them as villains seems to be necessary to understand their power and reach.
Not to totally sidetrack the discussion, but what are some of the things that you strongly disagree with on SSC? (The Moloch article is one of the most fascinating ones I have read.)
And, by the way, I had not considered the Moloch article as a direct re-framing of a problem until you put it as such. I must say thinking about it in that light I find humanizing `complex systemic forces` a rather novel transformation and quite useful. Even having read the article a few times, I hadn't thought to describe it as such. But morphing a problem from one fairly inscrutable set of phenomena to be a villain allows us to use a different set of mental tools to tackle understanding the problem.
Typically I had though more restrictively about such transformations, for example, viewing a sound's waveform graphically can be illuminating in a certain sense (transforming audio-temporal, to visual-spatial). The biggest issue with the toMoloch transform is that the conversion process is obviously going to be significantly more noisy and provide the author the ability copious amounts of wiggle-room to steer the reader towards their own conclusions. But just expressing the facets of the problem and making its existence more well known has a lot of value. Anyhow thanks for helping me see an article I have gotten quite a bit of insight out of in another way.
> Looking at the long history of evolution, I'd say no.
This entire lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology is worth watching from the beginning, but I've linked to a moment where Sapolsky describes tit-for-tat strategies arising in animals. First example: Vampire Bats.
I think we must be looking at different scales, and I'm probably mixing up terms and not making myself very clear.
Evolution defaults to aggression as that is how it squeezes out fitness, and cooperative behavior is continually at odds with that and only seems to survive on one level up every so often, where evolution just starts treating it as giant agents anyway and the cycle starts again at a higher level. Similarly, we humans still have countries and borders and are only cooperating one level up. Cooperation is still merely being used as a survival tool, rather than an end in itself.
I.e., two people working together are working against another two people, those people if they somehow manage to combine are working against another collective, multiple collectives may combine and then work against other collective, etc... such developments may potentially be worse than just individuals fighting each other.
Similar to the idea that in a first contact situation, there may be an advantage in shooting first, and that often also implies only one iteration. I think shooting first is the default, and needs to be actively fought against.
Cooperation is not the default or preferred state for evolution, even though it's more efficient. To get there, it takes a lot of suffering and bloodshed. A few thousand years AI-caused suffering before it figures out that cooperating is useful more than one level up (if it ever does, as humans have failed so far) is not really what I have in mind when I talk about cooperative ethics. Cooperative ethics should be fundamental, not derived from short-term RoI computed in the moment.
I don't know what you mean when you say "evolution". Certainly, the evolution of mammals shows cooperation as a common, viable strategy - just look at all the species operating in packs/flocks/herds. The little I know of simple organism evolution also seems to suggest cooperation(symbiosis) is an important part in evolving into a complex organism.
But the best part about evolution is that we don't need to replicate blind mutation and strict fitness functions, we can use the proven-to-work strategies as our springboard. And the best part about AI is that we have no ethical issues simulating millions of evolutionary iterations of "bloodshed" until we arrive at an AI that is acceptable to our ethics.
> And the best part about AI is that we have no ethical issues simulating millions of evolutionary iterations of "bloodshed" until we arrive at an AI that is acceptable to our ethics.
If you don't want ethical issues, don't create something that needs a code of ethics. We haven't even figured out how to properly define "acceptable to our ethics" (aka laws and other social structures) for humans.
> And the best part about AI is that we have no ethical issues simulating millions of evolutionary iterations of "bloodshed" until we arrive at an AI that is acceptable to our ethics.
Are we sure this is the case? Once we start attempting to create an AI that follows our modern ethics, we have to start asking questions about AI personhood.
And I for one feel there are deep ethical questions regarding forced iteration/simulation, let alone the violent kind.
Do characters in a story deserve ethical considerations? Is it wrong to re-tell a story of suffering, forcing the helpless characters to live their tragic lives in the imaginations of the listeners?
I guess... Maybe they do, if the story is told vividly enough.
I think we shouldn't confuse efficient strategies with the chosen strategies. What causes Moloch is the inability to see the big picture, to see outside of the self in the collective (maybe Buddhism has a point).
An efficient strategy may very well be something we'd prefer, such as tit-for-tat. But is that the strategy we choose? Looking at the long history of evolution, I'd say no.