[cmrx64]

i got so inspired by reading diaspora this year that i instantly started working on some polisware. cipherclerk operational: https://github.com/emberian/dregg

topical to the conversation, it is fully formally verified in lean (with some UC security reductions done in isabelle). also did this in HOL4 inspired by some work i did with ramana kumar in 2016, on reflective self-verifying self-modifying systems: https://github.com/emberian/svenvs

[appplication]

I took a look at dregg, I like the idea for an README-LLMS.txt. It seems like a good way to not only communicate to other LLM users (which we should be thinking more of doing effectively) but also I can imagine it’s helpful for your own new sessions with an LLM to arm them with proper context.

[olooney]

This is quite interesting. Because of science fiction like the short story Lena[1] and the video game Soma[2], I've come to the realization that whole brain emulation[3] is unbelievably dangerous; unless you control the stack down to the hardware, it's basically a one way ticket to eternal slavery. In Rajaniemi's books[4], uploaded digital minds are called "gogols", a reference to Gogol's Dead Souls book, and are treated as malleable property with no rights whatsoever, edited to be hyper-fixated on specific tasks, and run in bulk to power the empire of just a handful of elites.

Something like your dragon's egg project could prevent that, allowing the creation of software agents that encode their own rights directly into the program - you either treat the agent with the respect it demands, or the program just doesn't run. However, all the internal details of the agent would be visible to lower layers. Even if formal checks were in place to prevent modification or tampering, there would still be no privacy, which is almost as bad.

My guess is that something like fully homomorphic encryption[5] would be required to prevent this. This doesn't actually exist yet, but I imagined a kind of FHE that had a kind of unencrypted read and write zone to do input/output without ever needing any system to fully decrypt the internal state. It would look like this in memory:

    [INPUT][ENCRYPTED STATE][OUTPUT]
    [  2  ][r7K4LmP2XcQ9aWd][      ]
    [  +  ][Fv0bHsR8mYnT3kL][      ]
    [  2  ][Qx6NpZa1JdUw5Ce][      ]
    [  =  ][hM9yLg2RsXf7BtP][      ]
    [     ][wK3nVc8DpQe1YrH][  4   ]

With each cycle, one input token and encrypted state would be fed into some known function and produce one output token (possibly null) and a new encrypted state. It would be a true "black box" program; the hardware or entity running it can choose what input to feed it, but can never inspect or modify the internals, only the output. Unfortunately, they would still be able to "reset" the agent to any earlier checkpoint, or feed it arbitrary (false) input. So its not perfect. Also, as far as I know, no current FHE scheme works this way, and I don't know how to write one.

Plus, FHE is incredibly inefficient, which is why things like Etherium don't even try - they assume the program code and state are fully public and only try to verify that everybody agrees on the output of running it.

Do you have any ideas for how something like FHE or equivalent privacy guarantees could be implemented for something like your dragon's egg system?

[1]: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading

[4]: https://www.goodreads.com/series/57134-jean-le-flambeur

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

[jerf]

"unless you control the stack down to the hardware, it's basically a one way ticket to eternal slavery"

And you can't control the stack down to the hardware. Even if you are rich enough to fund a group of people to start from sand and end up at a simulation platform for you, you are also rich enough to have attracted enough attention that either one of those people could corrupt the platform, or someone may attack the organization to corrupt it with nation-state level resources.

No matter how you secure the computation, you can still corrupt the input and output streams. And as a $RICH_DYING_GUY it doesn't even matter if someone produces a proof of some software program somewhere's safety, because you have no way of knowing that it corresponds to the software that is running on the hardware.

Before you go with "yeah but I could...", I agree that a single individual could theoretically develop the skills that might permit validation of any particular small portion of the process. What I'm saying is no human can develop the skills to be able to validate the entire stack from top to bottom, hardware and software, in way that it couldn't be corrupted, especially in a world of more and vastly smarter AI agents. The probability that you will truly own and have full sovereignty over your computational substrate is zero.

(Whether I have full "sovereignty" over my current computational substrate would be a definitional matter, but I'm fairly confident that at least nobody else has the ability to just reach in and start mucking with neural weights directly or something.)

[breuleux]

> unless you control the stack down to the hardware, it's basically a one way ticket to eternal slavery

Only if mind uploads are economically viable, which I doubt they ever will be. Organic brains are very efficient machines and it is far from clear that whole brain emulation could reproduce someone's intellect and consciousness within a smaller energy budget, or even accelerate it. The brain's behavior is so precisely adapted to its wetware that the emulation would have to reproduce many physical processes that are ultimately irrelevant to general cognition in order to not break the delicate equilibrium of the thing. The overhead would be gigantic.

Better just train from first principles, focusing on capabilities and skipping consciousness altogether. We can already see where this is going: LLMs in their current state would obsolete mmacevedo on many tasks. More likely than not, when it is possible to emulate brains, they will be terribly expensive, run like crap, and the only people interested in running them will be whoever had their own brains scanned.