Topics discussed in this episode include:

• The mainstream computer science view of AI existential risk
• Distinguishing AI safety from AI existential safety 
• The need for more precise terminology in the field of AI existential safety and alignment
• The concept of prepotent AI systems and the problem of delegation 
• Which alignment problems get solved by commercial incentives and which don’t
• The threat of diffusion of responsibility on AI existential safety considerations not covered by commercial incentives
• Prepotent AI risk types that lead to unsurvivability for humanity 

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
2:53 Why Andrew wrote ARCHES and what it’s about
6:46 The perspective of the mainstream CS community on AI existential risk
13:03 ARCHES in relation to AI existential risk literature
16:05 The distinction between safety and existential safety
24:27 Existential risk is most likely to obtain through externalities
29:03 The relationship between existential safety and safety for current systems
33:17 Research areas that may not be solved by natural commercial incentives
51:40 What’s an AI system and an AI technology?
53:42 Prepotent AI
59:41 Misaligned prepotent AI technology
01:05:13 Human frailty
01:07:37 The importance of delegation
01:14:11 Single-single, single-multi, multi-single, and multi-multi
01:15:26 Control, instruction, and comprehension
01:20:40 The multiplicity thesis
01:22:16 Risk types from prepotent AI that lead to human unsurvivability
01:34:06 Flow-through effects
01:41:00 Multi-stakeholder objectives
01:49:08 Final words from Andrew

Citations:

AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety

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Lucas Perry: Welcome to the AI Alignment Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today we have a conversation with Andrew Critch where we explore a recent paper of his titled AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety, which he co-authored with David Krueger. In this episode, we discuss how mainstream computer science views AI existential risk, we develop new terminology for this space and discuss the need for more precise concepts in the field of AI existential safety, we get into which alignment problems and areas of AI existential safety Andrew expects to be naturally solved by industry and which won’t, and we explore the risk types of a new concept Andrew introduces, called prepotent AI, that lead to unsurvivability for humanity. 

I learned a lot from Andrew in this episode and found this conversation to be quite perspective shifting. I think Andrew offers an interesting and useful critique of existing discourse and thought, as well as new ideas. I came away from this conversation especially valuing thought around the issue of which alignment and existential safety issues will and will not get solved naturally by industry and commercial incentives. The answer to this helps to identify crucial areas we should be mindful to figure out how to address outside the normal incentive structures of society, and that to me seems crucial for mitigating AI existential risk. 

If you don’t already subscribe or follow this podcast, you can follow us on your preferred podcasting platform, like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, by searching for The Future of Life. 

Andrew Critch is currently a full-time research scientist in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at UC Berkeley, at Stuart Russell’s Center for Human Compatible AI. He earned his PhD in mathematics at UC Berkeley studying applications of algebraic geometry to machine learning models. During that time, he cofounded the Center for Applied Rationality and Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition. Andrew has been offered university faculty positions in mathematics and mathematical biosciences, worked as an algorithmic stock trader at Jane Street Capital‘s New York City office, and as a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. His current research interests include logical uncertainty, open source game theory, and avoiding arms race dynamics between nations and companies in AI development.

And with that, let’s get into our conversation with Andrew Critch.

We’re here today to discuss your paper, AI Research Considerations for Human Existential Safety. You can shorten that to ARCHES. You wrote this with David Krueger and it came out at the end of May. I’m curious and interested to know what your motivation is for writing ARCHES and what it’s all about.

Andrew Critch:

Cool. Thanks, Lucas. It’s great to be here. For me, it’s pretty simple. Is that I care about existential safety. I want humans to be safe as a species. I don’t want human extinction to ever happen. And so I decided to write a big, long document about that with David. And of course, why now and why these particular problems, I can go more into that.

You might wonder if existential risk from AI is possible, how have we done so much AI research with so little technical level thought about how that works and how to prevent it? And to me, it seems like the culture of computer science and actually a lot of STEM has been to always talk about the benefits of science. Except in certain disciplines that are well accustomed to talking about risks like medicine, a lot of science just doesn’t talk about what could go wrong or how it could be misused.

It hasn’t been until very recently that computer science has really started making an effort as a culture to talk about how things could go wrong in general. Forget x-risk, just anything going wrong. And I’m just going to read out loud this quote to sort of set the context culturally for where we are with computer science right now and how far culturally we are from being able to really address existential risk holistically.

This is a quote from Hecht at the ACM Future of Computing Academy. It came out in 2018, just two years ago. “The current status quo in the computing community is to frame our research by extolling its anticipated benefits to society. In other words, rose colored glasses are the normal lenses through which we tend to view our work. However, one glance at the news these days reveals that focusing exclusively on the positive impacts of a new computing technology involves considering only one side of a very important story. We believe that this gap represents a serious and embarrassing intellectual lapse. The scale of this lapse is truly tremendous. It is analogous to the medical community, only writing about the benefits of a given treatment, completely ignoring the side effects, no matter how serious they are.

What’s more, the public has definitely caught on to our community-wide blind spot and is understandably suspicious of it. After several months of discussion, and idea for acting on this imperative began to emerge. We can leverage the gate keeping functionality of the peer review process. At a high level, our recommended change to the peer review process in computing is straightforward. Peer reviewers should require that papers and proposals rigorously consider all reasonable, broader impacts, both positive and negative.” That’s Hecht, 2018.

With this energy, this initiative from the ACM and other similar mentalities around the world, we now have NeurIPS Conference submissions required to submit broader impact statements that include negative impacts as well as positive.

Suddenly in 2020, contrasted with 2015, it’s becoming okay and normal to talk about how your research could be misused and what could go wrong with it. And we’re just barely able to admit things like, “This algorithm could result in racial bias in judiciary hearings,” or something like that. Which is a terrible, terrible … The fact that we’ve taken this long to admit that and talk about it is very bad. And that’s something as present and obvious as racism. Whereas, existential risk has never been … Extinction has never been present or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And so those conversations are even harder to have when it’s not normal to talk about bad outcomes at all. Let alone obvious, in your face, bad outcomes.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. On this podcast, we’re basically only talking to people who are in the AI alignment community and who take x-risk very seriously, who are worried about existential risk from advanced AI systems.

And so we lack a lot of this perspective … Or we don’t have many conversations with people who take the cultural, and I guess, academic perspective of the mainstream machine learning and computer science community. Which is far larger and has much more inertia and mass than the AI alignment community.

I’m curious if you can just paint a little bit more of a picture here of what the state of computer science thinking or non-thinking is on AI existential risk? You mentioned that recently people are starting to at least encourage and it be required as part of a process to have negative impact statements or write about the risks of a technology one is developing. But that’s still not talking about global catastrophic risk. It’s still not talking about alignment explicitly. It’s not talking about existential risk. It seems like a step in the right direction, but some ways to go. What kind of perspective can you give us on all this?

Andrew Critch: I think of sort of EA adjacent to AI researchers as kind of a community, to the extent that EA is a community. And it’s not exactly the same set of people as AI researchers who think about existential risk or AI researchers who think about alignment. Which is yet another set of people. What overlaps heavily, but it’s not the same set.

And I have noticed a tendency that I’m trying to combat here by raising this awareness, not only to computer scientists, but to EA adjacent AI folks. Which is that if you feel sort of impatient, that computer science and AI are not acknowledging existential risks from tech, things are underway and there’s ways of making things better and making things worse.

One way to make things worse is to get irate with people, for caring about risks that you think aren’t big enough. Okay. If you think inequitable loan distribution is not as bad as human extinction, many people might agree with you, but if you’re irate about that and saying, “Why are we talking about that when we should be talking about extinction?” You’re slowing down the process of computer science, transitioning into a more negative outcome-aware field by refusing to cooperate with other people who are trying to raise awareness about negative outcomes.

I think there’s a push to be more aware of negative outcomes and all the negative outcome people need to sort of work together politely, but swiftly, raising the bar for our discourse about negative outcomes. And I think existential risks should be part of that, but I don’t think it should be adversarially positioned relative to other negative outcomes. I think we just need to raise the bar for all of these at once.

And all of these issues have the same enemy, which is those rose colored glasses that wrote all of our grant applications for the past 50 years. Every time you’re asking for public funds, you say how this is going to benefit society. And you better not mention how it might actually make society worse or else you won’t get your grant. Right?

Well, times are changing. You’re allowed to mention and signal awareness of how your research could make things worse. And that’s starting to be seen as a good trait rather than a reason not to give you funding. And if we all work together to combat that rose colored glass problem, it’s going to make everything easier to talk about, including existential risk.

Lucas Perry: All right. So if one goes to NeurIPS and talks to any random person about existential risk or AI alignment or catastrophic risk from AI, what is the average reaction or assumed knowledge or people who think it’s complete bullshit versus people who are neutral about it to people who are serious about it?

Andrew Critch: Definitely my impression right now, this is very rough impression. There’s a few different kinds of reactions that are all like sort of double digits percentage. I don’t know which percentage they are, but one is like, how are you worried about existential risks when robots can’t tie knots yet? Or they can’t fold laundry. It’s like a very difficult research problem for an academic AI lab to make a robot fold laundry. So it’s like, come on. We’re so far away from that.

Another reaction is, “Yeah, that’s true. You know, I mean things are really taking off. They’re certainly progressing faster than I expected. Things are kind of crazy.” It’s the things that are kind of crazy reaction and there’s just kind of an open-mindedness. Man, anything could happen. We could go extinct in 50 years, we can go extinct. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Things are crazy.

And then there’s another reaction. Unfortunately, this one’s really weird. I’ve gotten this one, which is, “Well, of course humanity is going to go extinct from the advent of AI technology. I mean, of course. Just think about it from evolutionary perspective. There’s no way we would not go extinct given that we’re making things smarter than us. So of course it’s going to happen. There’s nothing we can do about it. That’s just our job as a field is to make things that are smarter than humans that will eventually replace us and there’ll be better than us. And that’s just how stuff is.”

Lucas Perry: Some people think that’s an aligned outcome.

Andrew Critch: I don’t know. That’s a lot of debate to be had about that. But it’s a kind of defeatist attitude of, “It’s nothing you can do.” It’s much, much rarer. It seems like single digits that someone is like, “Yeah, we’re going to do something about it.” That one is the rarest, the acknowledging and orienting towards solving it is still pretty rare. But there’s plenty these days of acknowledgement that it could be real and acknowledgement that it’s confusing and hard. The challenge is somehow way more acknowledged than any particular approach to it.

Lucas Perry: Okay. I guess that’s surprising to hear then that you feel like it’s more taken seriously than not.

Andrew Critch: It depends on what you mean by taken seriously. And again, I’m filtering for a person who’s being polite and talking to me about it, right? People are polite enough to fall into the, “Stuff is crazy. Who knows what could happen,” attitude.

And is that taking it seriously? Well, no, but it’s not adversarial to people who are taking it seriously, which I think is really good. And then there’s the, “Clearly we’re going to be destroyed by machines that replace us. That’s just nature.” Those voices, I’m kind of like, well, that’s kind of good also. It’s good to admit that there’s a real risk here. It’s kind of bad to give up on it, in my opinion. But altogether, if you add up the, “Woah, stuff’s crazy and we’re not really oriented to it,” plus the, “Definitely humanity is going to be destroyed/replaced.” It’s a solid chunk of people. I don’t know. I’m going to say at least 30%. If you also then include the people who want to try and do something about it. Which is just amazing compared to say six years ago where the answer would have been round to zero percent.

Lucas Perry: Then just to sum up here, this paper then is an exercise in trying to lay out a research agenda for existential safety from AI systems, which is unique in your view? I think you mentioned that there are four that have already existed to this day.

Andrew Critch: Yeah. There’s Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests, by Soares and Fallenstein, that’s MIRI, basically. Then there’s Research Priorities for A Robust And Beneficial Artificial Intelligence, by Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Daniel Dewey. Then there’s Concrete Problems in AI Safety, by Dario Amodei and others. And then Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems, by Jessica Taylor and others. And Scalable Alignment Via Reward Modeling by Jan Leike and also David Krueger is on that one.

Lucas Perry: How do you see your paper as fitting in with all of the literature that already exists on the problem of AI alignment and AI existential risk?

Andrew Critch: Right. So it’s interesting you say that there exists literature on AI existential risk. I would say Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom, is literature on AI existential risk, but it is not a research agenda.

Lucas Perry: Yeah.

Andrew Critch: I would say Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests, by Soares and Fallenstein. It’s a research agenda, but it’s not really about existential risk. It sort of mentions that stakes are really high, but it’s not constantly staying in contact with the concept of extinction throughout.

If you take a random excerpt of any page from it and pretend that it’s about the Netflix challenge or building really good personal assistants or domestic robots, you can succeed. That’s not a critique. That’s just a good property of integrating with research trends. But it’s not about the concept of existential risk. Same thing with Concrete Problems in AI Safety.

In fact, it’s a fun exercise to do. Take that paper. Pretend you think existential risk is ridiculous and read Concrete Problems in AI Safety. It reads perfectly as you don’t need to think about that crazy stuff, let’s talk about tipping over vases or whatever. And that’s a sign that it’s an approach to safety that it’s going to be agreeable to people, whether they care about x-risk or not. Whereas, this document is not going to go down easy for someone who’s not willing to think about existential risk and it’s trying to stay constantly in contact with the concept.

Lucas Perry: All right. And so you avoid making the case for AI x-risk as valid and as a priority, just for the sake of the goal of the document succeeding?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. I want readers to spend time inhabiting the hypothetical that existential risk is real and can come from AI and can be addressed through research. They’re already taking a big step by constantly thinking about existential risk for these 100 pages here. I think it’s possible to take that step without being convinced of how likely the existential risk is. And I’m hoping that I’m not alienating anybody if you think it’s 1%, but it’s worth thinking about. That’s good. If you think it’s 30% chance of existential risk from AI, then it’s worth thinking about. That’s good, too. If you think it’s 0.01, but you’re still thinking about it, you’re still reading it. That’s good, too. And I didn’t want to fracture the audience based on how probable people would agree the risks are.

Lucas Perry: All right. So let’s get into the meat of the paper, then. It would be useful, I think, if you could help clarify the distinction between safety and existential safety.

Andrew Critch: Yeah. So here’s a problem we have. And when I say we, I mean people who care about AI existential safety. Around 2015 and 2016, we had this coming out of AI safety as a concept. Thanks to Amodei and the Robust and Beneficial AI Agenda from Stuart Russell, talking about safety became normal. Which was hard to accomplish before 2018. That was a huge accomplishment.

And so what we had happen is people who cared about extinction risk from artificial intelligence would use AI safety as a euphemism for preventing human extinction risk. Now, I’m not sure that was a mistake, because as I said, prior to 2018, it was hard to talk about negative outcomes at all. But it’s at this time in 2020 a real problem that you have people … When they’re thinking existential safety, they’re saying safety, they’re saying AI safety. And that leads to sentences like, “Well, self driving car navigation is not really AI safety.” I’ve heard that uttered many times by different people.

Lucas Perry: And that’s really confusing.

Andrew Critch: Right. And it’s like, “Well, what is AI safety, exactly, if cars driven by AI, not crashing, doesn’t count as AI safety?” I think that as described, the concept of safety usually means minimizing acute risks. Acute meaning in space and time. Like there’s a thing that happens in a place that causes a bad thing. And you’re trying to stop that. And the Concrete Problems in AI Safety agenda really nailed that concept.

And we need to get past the concept of AI safety in general if what we want to talk about is societal scale risk, including existential risk. Which it’s acute on a geological time scale. Like you can look at a century before and after and see the earth is very different. But a lot of ways you can destroy the earth don’t happen like a car accident. They play out over a course of years. And things to prevent that sort of thing are often called ethics. Ethics are principles for getting a lot of agents to work together and not mess things up for each other.

And I think there’s a lot of work today that falls under the heading of AI ethics that are really necessary to make sure that AI technology aggregated across the earth, across many industries and systems and services, will not result collectively in somehow destroying humanity, our environment, our minds, et cetera.

To me, existential safety is a problem for humanity on an existential timescale that has elements that resemble safety in terms of being acute on a geological timescale. But also resemble ethics in terms of having a lot of agents, a lot of different stakeholders and objectives mulling around and potentially interfering with each other and interacting in complicated ways.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. Just to summarize this, people were walking around saying like, “I work on AI safety.” But really, that means that I’ve bought into AI existential risk and I work on AI existential risk. And then that’s confusing for everyone else, because working on the personal scale risk of self-driving car safety is also AI safety.

We need a new word, because AI safety really means acute risks, which can range from personal all the way to civilizational or transgenerational. And so, it’s confusing to say I work in AI safety, but really what I mean is only I care about transgenerational, AI existential risk.

Andrew Critch: Yes.

Lucas Perry: Then we have this concept of existential safety, which for you both has this portion of us not going extinct, but also existential safety includes the normative and ethics and values and game theory and how it is that an ecosystem of human and nonhuman agents work together to build a thriving civilization that is existentially preferable to other civilizations.

Andrew Critch: I agree 100% with everything you just said, except for the part where you say “existentially preferable.” I prefer to use existential safety to refer really, to preserving existence. And I prefer existential risk to refer to extinction. That’s not how Bostrom uses the term. And he introduced the term, largely, and he intends to include risks that are as important as extinction, but aren’t extinction risks.

And I think that’s interesting. I think that’s a good category of risks to think about and deserving of a name. I think, however, that there’s a lot more debate about what is or isn’t as bad as extinction. Whereas, there’s much less debate about what extinction is. There still is debate. You can say, “Well, what about if we become uploads, whatever.” But there’s much, much more uncertainty about what’s worse or better than extinction.

And so I prefer to focus existential safety on literally preventing extinction and then use some other concept, like societal scale risk, for referring to risks that are really big on a societal scale that may or may not pass the threshold of being worse or better than extinction.

I also care about societal scale risks and I don’t want people working on preventing societal scale risks to be fractured based on whether they think any particular risk, like lots of sentient suffering AI systems or a totalitarian regime that lasts forever. I don’t want people working to prevent those outcomes to be fractured based on whether or not they think those outcomes are worse than extinction or count as a quote, unquote existential risk. When I say existential risk, I always mean risks to the existence of the human species, for simplicity sake.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. Because Bostrom’s definition of an existential risk is any risk such that if it should occur, would permanently and drastically curtail the potential for earth originating, intelligent life. Which would include futures of deep suffering or futures of being locked into some less than ideal system.

Andrew Critch: Yeah. Potential not only measured in existence, but potential measured in value. And if you’re suffering, the value of your existence is lower.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. And that there are some futures where we still exist, where they’re less preferable to extinction.

Andrew Critch: Right.

Lucas Perry: You want to say, okay, there are these potential suffering risks and there are bad futures of disvalue that are maybe worse than extinction. We’re going to call all these societal risks. And then we’re just going to have existential risk or existential safety refer to us not going extinct?

Andrew Critch: I think that’s especially necessary in computer science. Because if anything seems vague or unrefined, there’s a lot of allergy to it. I try to pick the most clearly definable thing, like are humans there or not? That’s a little bit easier for people to wrap their heads around.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. I can imagine how in the hard sciences people would be very allergic to anything that was not sufficiently precise. One final distinction here to make is that one could say, instead of saying, “I work on AI safety,” “I work on AI existential safety or AI civilizational or societal risk.” But another word here is, “I work on AI alignment.” And you distinguish that from AI delegation. Could you unpack that a little bit more and why that’s important to you?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. Thanks for asking about that. I do think that there’s a bit of an issue with the “AI alignment” concept that makes it inadequate for existential risk reduction. AI existential safety is my goal. And I think AI alignment, the way people usually think about it, is not really going to cut it for that purpose.

If we’re successful as a society in developing and rolling out lots of new AI technologies to do lots of cool stuff, it’s going to be a lot of stakeholders in that game. It’s going to be what you might call massively multipolar. And in that economy or society, a lot of things can go wrong through the aggregate behavior of individually aligned systems. Like just take pollution, right? No one person wants everybody else to pollute the atmosphere, but they’re willing to do it themselves. Because when Alice pollutes the atmosphere, Alice gets to work on time or Alice gets to take a flight or whatever.

And she harms everybody in doing that, including herself. But the harm to herself is so small. It’s just a drop in the bucket that’s spread across everybody else. You do yourself a benefit and you do a harm that outweighs that benefit, but it’s spread across everybody and accrues very little harm specifically to you. That’s the problem with externalities.

I think existential risk is most likely to obtain through externalities, between interacting systems that somehow were not designed to interact well enough because they had different designers or they had different stakeholders behind them. And those competitive effects, like if you don’t take a car, everyone else is going to take a car you’re going to fall behind. So you take a car. If you’re a country, right? If you don’t burn fossil fuels, well, you spend a few years transitioning to clean energy and you fall behind economically. You’re taking a hit and that hurts you more than anybody. Of course, it benefits the whole world if you cut your carbon emissions, but it’s just a big prisoner’s dilemma. So you don’t do it. No one does it.

There’s many, many other variables that describe the earth. This comes to the human fragility thesis, which I and David outlined in the paper. Which is that there’s many variables, which if changed, can destroy humanity. And any of those variables could be changed in ways that don’t destroy machines. And so we are at risk of machine economies operating in ways that keep on operating at the expense of humans that aren’t needed for them being destroyed. That is the sort of backdrop for why I think delegation is a more important concept than alignment.

Delegation is a relationship between groups of people. You’ll often have a board of directors that delegates through a CEO to an entire staff. And I want to evoke that concept, the relationship between a group of overseers and a group of doers. You can have delegates on a UN committee from many different countries. You’ve got groups delegating to individuals to serve as part of a group who are going to delegate to a staff. There’s this constant flow through of responsibility. And it’s not even acyclic. You’ve got elected officials who are delegated by the electorate who delegate staff to provide services to the electorate, but also to control the electorate.

So there’s these loops going around. And I think I want to draw attention to all of the delegation relationships that are going to exist in the future economy. And that already exist in the present economy of AI technologies. When you pay attention to all of those different pathways of delegation, you realize there’s a lot of people in institutions with different values that aren’t going to agree with each other on what counts as aligned.

For example, for some people, it’s aligned to take a 1% chance of dying to double your own lifespan. Some people are like, “Yeah, that’s totally worth it.” And for some people, they’re like, “No 1% dying. That’s scary and I’m pretty happy living 80 years.” And so what sort of societal scale risks are worth taking are going to be subject to a lot of disagreement.

And the idea that there’s this thing called human values, that we’re all in agreement about. And there’s this other thing called AI that just has to do with the human value says. And we have to align the AI with human values. It’s an extremely simplified story. It’s got two agents and it’s just like one big agent called the humans. And then there’s this one big agent called AIs. And we’re just trying to align them. I think that is not the actual structure of the delegation relationship that humans and AI systems are going to have with respect to each other in the future. And I think alignment is helpful for addressing some delegation relationships, but probably not the vast majority.

Lucas Perry: I see where you’re coming from. And I think in this conception alignment, as you said, I believe is a sub category of delegation.

Andrew Critch: Well, I would say that alignment is a sub problem of most delegation problems, but there’s not one delegation problem. And I would also say alignment is a tool or technique for solving delegation problems.

Lucas Perry: Okay. Those problems all exist, but actually doing AI alignment, that automatically brings in delegation problems. And, or if you actually align a system, then this system is aligned with how we would want to solve delegation problems.

Andrew Critch: Yeah. That’s right. One approach to solving AI delegation, you might think, “Yeah, we’re going to solve that problem by first inventing a superintelligent machine.” Like step one, invent your super intelligent oracle machine step two align your super intelligent oracle machine with you, the creator. Step three, ask it to solve for society. Just figure out how society should be structured. Do that. That’s a mathematically valid approach. I just don’t think that’s how it’s going to turn out. The closer powerful institutions get to having super powerful AI systems, political tensions are going to arise.

Lucas Perry: So we have to do the delegation problem as we’re going?

Andrew Critch: Yes, we have to do it as we’re going, 100%.

Lucas Perry: Okay.

Andrew Critch: And if we don’t, we put institutions at odds with each other to win the race of being the one chosen entity that aligns the one chosen superintelligence with their values or plan for the future or whatever. And I just think that’s a very non-robust approach to the future.

Lucas Perry: All right. Let’s pivot here then back into existential safety and normal AI safety. What do you see as the relationship between existential safety and safety for present day AI systems? Does safety for present day AI systems feed into existential safety? Can it inform existential safety? How much does one matter for the other?

Andrew Critch: The way I think of it, it’s a bit of a three node diagram. There’s present day AI safety problems, which I believe feed into existential safety problems somewhat. Meaning that some of the present day solutions will generalize to the existential safety problems.

There’s also present day AI ethics problems, which I think also feed into understanding how a bunch of agents can delegate to each other and treat each other well in ways that are not going to add up to destructive outcomes. That also feeds into existential safety.

And just to give concrete examples, let’s take car doesn’t crash, right? What does that have in common with existential safety? Well, existential safety is humanity doesn’t crash. There’s a state space. Some of the states involve humanity exists. Some of the states involve humanity doesn’t exist. And we want to stay in the region of state space where humans exist.

Mathematically, it’s got something in common with the staying in the region of state space where the car is on the road and not overheating, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a dynamical system. And it’s got some quantities that you want to conserve and there’s conditions or boundaries you want to avoid. It has this property just like culturally, it has the property of acknowledging a negative outcome and trying to avoid it. That’s, to me, the main thing that safety and existential safety have in common, avoiding a negative outcome. So is ethics about avoiding negative outcomes. And I think those both are going to flow into existential safety.

Lucas Perry: Are there some more examples you can make for current day AI safety problems and current day AI ethics problems, just make it a bit more concrete? How does something like robustness to distributional shift take us from aligned systems today to systems that have existential safety in the future?

Andrew Critch: So, conceptually, robustness to distributional shift is about, you’ve got some function that you want to be performed or some condition you want to be met, and then the environment changes or the inputs change significantly from when you created the system, and then you still want it to maintain those conditions or achieve the goal.

So, for example, if you have a car trained, “To drive in dry conditions,” and then it starts raining, can you already have designed your car by principles that would allow it to not catastrophically fail in the rain? Can it notice, “Oh gosh, this is real different from the way I was trained. I’m going to pull over, because I don’t know how to drive in the rain.” Or can it learn, on the fly, how to drive in the rain and then get on with it?

So those are kinds of robustness to distributional shift. The world changes. So, if you want something that’s safe and stays safe forever, it has to account for the world changing. So, principles of robustness to distributional shift are principles by which society, as a whole, needs to adhere. Now, do I think research in this area is differentially useful to existential risk?

No. Frankly, not at all. And the reason is that industry has loads of incentives to produce software that are robust to a changing environment. So, if on the margin I could add an idea to the idea space of robustness to distributional shift, I’m like, “Well, I don’t think there’s any chance that Uber is going to ignore robustness to distributional shift, or that Google is going to ignore, or Amazon.” There’s no way these companies are going to roll out products while not thinking about whether they’re robust.

On the other hand, if I have a person who wants to dwell on the concept of robustness, who cares about existential risk and who wants to think about how robustness even works, like what are the mathematical principles of robustness? We don’t fully know what they are. If we did, we’d have built self driving cars already.

So, if I have a person who wants to think about that concept because it applies to society, and they want a job while they think about it, sure, get a job producing robust software or robust robotics, or get a bunch of publications in that area, but it’s not going to be neglected. It’s more of a mental exercise that can help you orient and think about society through a new lens, once you understand that lens, rather than a thing that somehow DeepMind is going to forget that it’s products need to be robust, come on.

Lucas Perry: So, that’s an interesting point. So, what are technical research areas, or areas in terms of AI ethics that you think there will not be natural incentives for solving, but that are high impact and important for AI existential safety?

Andrew Critch: To be clear, before I go into saying these areas are important, these areas aren’t, I do want to distinguish the claim area X is a productive place to be if you care about existential risk from, area X is an area that needs more ideas to solve existential safety. I don’t want the people to feel discouraged from going into intellectual disciplines that are really nourishing to the way that you’re going to learn and invent new concepts that help you think forever. And it can be a lot easier to do that in an area that’s not neglected.

So, robustness is not going to be neglected. Alignment, taking an AI system and making it do what a person wants, that’s not going to be neglected, because it’s so profitable. The economy is set up to sell to individual customers, to individual companies. Most of the world economy is anarchic in that way, anarcho-capitalist at a global scale. If you can find someone that you can give something to that they like, then you will.

The Netflix challenge is an AI alignment problem, right? The concept of AI alignment was invented in 2002, and nobody cites it because it’s so obvious of an idea that you have to make your AI do stuff. Still, it was neglected in academia because AI wasn’t super profitable. So, it is true that AI alignment was not a hot area of research in academia, but now, of course, you need AI to learn human preferences. Of course, you need AI to win in the tech sphere. And that second part is new.

So, because AI is taking off industrially, you’ve got a lot more demand for research solutions to, “Okay. How do we actually make this useful to people? How do we get this to do what people want?” And that’s why AI alignment is taking off. It’s not because of existential risk, it’s because well, AI is finally super-duper useful and it’s finally super-duper profitable, if you can just get it to do what the customer wants. So, that’s alignment. That’s what user agent value alignment is called.

Now, is that a productive place to be if you care about existential risks? I think. Yes. Because if you’re confused about what values are and how you could possibly get an inhuman system to align with the values of a human system, like human society, if that basic concept is tantalizing to you and you feel like if you just understood it a bit more, you’d be better mentally equipped to visualize existential risk playing out or not playing it on a societal scale, then yeah, totally go into that problem, think about it. And you can get a job as a researcher or an engineer aligning AI systems with the values of the human beings who use it. And it’s super enriching and hard, but it’s not going to be neglected because of how profitable it is.

Lucas Perry: So what is neglected, or what is going to be neglected?

Andrew Critch: What’s going to be neglected is stuff that’s both hard and not profitable. Transparency, I think, is not yet profitable, but it will be. So it’s neglected now. And when I say it’s not yet profitable, I mean that as far as I know, we don’t have big tech companies crushing their competition by having better visualization techniques for their ML systems. You don’t see advertisements for, “Hey, we’re hiring transparency engineers,” yet.

And so, I take that as a sign that we’ve not yet reached the industrial regime in which the ability for engineers to understand their systems better is the real bottleneck to rolling out the next product. But, I think it will be if we don’t destroy ourselves first. I think there’s a very good chance of that actually playing out.

So I think, if you want an exciting career, get into transparency now. In 10 years, you’ll be in high demand and you’ll have understood a problem that’s going to help humans and machines relate, which is, “Can we understand them well enough to manage them?” There’s other problems, unfortunately, that I think are neglected now and important, and are going to stay neglected. And I think those are the ones that are most likely to kill us.

Lucas Perry: All right, let’s hear them.

Andrew Critch: Things like how do we get multiple AI systems from multiple stakeholders to cooperate with each other? How do you broker a peace treaty between Uber and Waymo cars? That one’s not as hard because you can have the country that allows the cars into it have some regulatory decision that all the cars have to abide by, and now the cars have to get along or whatever.

Or maybe you can get the partnership on AI, which is largely American to agree amongst themselves that there’s some principles, and then the cars adhere to those principles. But it’s much harder on an international scale where there’s no one centralized regulatory body that’s just going to make all the AIs behave this way or that way. And moreover, the people who are currently thinking about that, aren’t particularly oriented towards existential risk, which really sucks.

So, I think what we need, if we get through the next 200 years with AI, frankly, if we get through the next 60 years with AI, it’s going to be because people who cared about existential risk entered institutions with the power to govern the global deployment of AI, or people already with the power to govern the global deployment of AI technologies come to care about existential and comparable societal scale risks. Because without that, I think we’re going to miss the mark.

When something goes wrong and there’s somebody whose job was clearly to make that not happen, it’s a lot easier to get that fixed. Think about people who’ve tried to get medical care since the COVID pandemic. Everybody’s decentralized, the offices are part work from home, partly they’re actually physically in there. So you’re like, “Hey, I need an appointment with a neurologist.” The person whose job it is to make the appointment is not the person whose job it is to tell the doctor that the appointment is booked.

It’s also, there’s someone else’s job is to contact the insurance company and make sure that you’re authorized. And they might be off that day, and then you show up, and you get a big bill and you’re like, “Well, whose fault was this?” Well, it’s your fault because you’re supposed to check that your insurance covered this neurology stuff, right? You could have called your insurance company to pre-authorize this visit.

So it’s your fault. But also, it’s the administrator’s fault that you didn’t talk to that never meets you, whose job is to conduct the pre-authorization on the part of the doctor’s office, which sometimes does it, right? And it’s also the doctor’s fault, because maybe the doctor could have noticed that the authorization hadn’t been done, and didn’t cancel the appointment or warn you that maybe you don’t want to afford this right now. So whose fault is it? Oh, I don’t know.

And if you’ve ever dealt with a big fat bureaucratic failure like this, that is what is going to kill humanity. Everybody knows it’s bad. Nobody in this system, not the insurance company, not the call center that made my appointment, not the insurance specialist at the doctor’s office, certainly not the doctor, none of these people want me not to get healthcare, but it’s no one in particular’s fault. And that’s how it happens.

I think the same thing is going to happen with existential risk. We’re going to have big companies making real powerful AI systems, and it’s going to be really obvious that it is their job to make those systems safe. And there’s going to be a bunch of kinds of safety that’s really obviously their job that people are going to be real angry at them for not paying a lot of attention to. And the anger is just going to get more and more, the more obvious it is that they have power.

That kind of safety, I don’t want to trivialize it. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be really difficult research and engineering, and it can be really enriching and many, many thousands of people could make their whole careers around making AI safe for big tech companies, according to their accountable definition of safety.

But then what about the stuff they’re not accountable for? What about geopolitics that’s nobody’s fault? What about coordination failures between three different industries, or three different companies that’s nobody’s fault? That’s the stuff that’s going to get you. I think it’s actually mathematically difficult to specify protocols for decentralized multi-agent systems to adhere to constraints. It is more difficult than specifying constraints for a single system.

Lucas Perry: I’m having a little bit of confusion here, because when you’re arguing that alignment questions will be solved via the incentives of just the commercialization of AI.

Andrew Critch: Single-human, single-AI alignment problems or single-institutions, single-network alignment problems. Yes.

Lucas Perry: Okay. But they also might be making single agents for many people, or multiple agents for many people. So it doesn’t seem single-single to me. But the other part is that you’re saying that in a world where there are many competing actors and a diffusion of responsibility, the existential risk comes from obvious things that companies should be doing, but no one is, because maybe someone should make a regulation about this thing but whatever, so we should just keep doing things the way that we are. But doesn’t that come back to commercialization of AI systems not solving all of the AI alignment problems?

Andrew Critch: So if by AI alignment you mean AI technology in aggregate behaves in a way that is favorable to humanity in aggregate. If that’s what you mean, then I agree that failure to align the entire economy of AI technology is a failure of AI alignment. However, number one, people don’t usually think about it that way.

If you asked someone to write down the AI alignment problem, they’ll write down a human utility function and an AI utility function, and talk about aligning the AI utility function with the human utility function. And that’s not what that looks like. That’s not a clear depiction of that super multi-agent scenario.

And, second of all, the concept of AI alignment has been around for decades and it refers to single-single alignment, typically. And third, if you want to co-op the concept of AI alignment and start using it to refer to general alignment of general AI technology with general human values, just as spread out notion of goodness that’s going to get spread over all of the AI technology and make it all generally good for all the generally humans. If you want to co-opt it and use it for that, you’re going to have a hard time. You’re going to invite a lot of debate about what is human values?

We’re trying to align the AI technology with the human values. So, you go from single-single to single-multi. Okay. Now we have multiple AI systems serving a single human, that’s tricky. We got to get the AI systems to cooperate. Okay. Cool. We’ll figure out how the cooperation works and we’ll get the AI systems to do that. Cool. Now we’ve got a fleet of machines that are all serving effectively.

Okay. Now let’s go to multi-human, multi-AI. You’ve got lots of people, lots of AI systems in this hyper interactive relationship. Did we align the AIs with the humans? Well, I don’t know. Are some of the humans getting really poor, really fast, while some of them are getting really rich, really fast? Sound familiar? Okay. Is that aligned? Well, I don’t know. It’s aligned for some of them. Okay. Now we have a big debate. I think that’s a very important debate and I don’t want to skirt it.

However, I think you can ask the question, did the AI technology lead to human extinction without having that debate? And I want to factor that debate of, wait, who do you mean? Who are you aligning with? I want that debate to be had, and I want it to be had separately from the debate of, did it cause human extinction?

Because I think almost all humans want humanity not to go extinct. Some are fine with it, it’s not universal, but a lot of people don’t want humanity to go extinct. I think the alignment concept, if you play forward 10 years, 20 years, it’s going to invite a lot of very healthy, very important debate that’s not necessary to have for existential safety.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So I’m not trying to defend the concept of AI alignment in relation to the concept of AI existential safety. I think what I was trying to point towards is that you said earlier that you do not want to discourage people from going into areas that are not neglected. And the areas that are not neglected are the areas where the commercialization of AI will drive incentives towards solving alignment problems.

Andrew Critch: That’s right.

Lucas Perry: But the alignment problems that are not going to get solved-

Andrew Critch: I want to encourage people to go out to solve those problems. 100%.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. But just to finish the narrative, the alignment problems that are not going to get solved are the ones where there are multiple humans and multiple AI agents, and there’s this diffusion of responsibility you were talking about. And this is the area you said would most likely lead to AI existential risk. Where maybe someone should make a regulation about this specific thing, or maybe we’re competing a little bit too hard, and then something really bad happens. So you’re saying that you do want to push people into both the unneglected area of…

Andrew Critch: Let me just flesh out a little bit more about my value system here. Pushing people is not nice. If there’s a person and they don’t want to do a thing, I don’t want to push them. That’s the first thing. Second thing is, pulling people is not nice either. So it’s like, if someone’s on the way into doing something they’re going to find intellectually enriching that’s going to help them think about existential safety that’s not neglected, it’s popular, it’s going to be popular, I don’t want to hold them back. But, if someone just comes to me and is like, “Hey, I’m indifferent between transparency and robustness.” I’m like, “100%, go into transparency, no question.”

Lucas Perry: Because it will be more neglected.

Andrew Critch: And if someone tells me they’re indifferent between transparency and multi-stakeholder delegation, I’m like, “100%, multi-stakeholder delegation.” If you’ve got traction on that and you’re not going to burn your career, do it.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. That’s the three categories then though. Robustness gets solved by the incentive structures of commercialization. Transparency, maybe less so, maybe it comes later. And then the multi-multi delegation is just the other big neglected problem of living in a global world. So, you’re saying that much of the alignment problem gets solved by incentive structures of commercialization.

Andrew Critch: Well, a lot of what people call alignment will get solved by present day commercial incentives.

Lucas Perry: Yes.

Andrew Critch: Another chunk of societal scale benefit from AI, I’ll say, will hopefully get solved by the next wave of commercial incentives. I’m thinking things like transparency, fairness, accountability, things like that are actually going to become actually commercially profitable to get right, rather than merely the things companies are afraid of getting wrong.

And I hope that second wave happens before we destroy ourselves, because possibly, we would destroy ourselves even before then. But most of my chips are on, there’s going to be a wave of benefit with AI ethics in the next 10 years or something, and that that’s going to solve a bunch more of existential safety, or it’s going to address them. Leftover after that is stuff that the global capitalism never got to.

Lucas Perry: And the things that global capitalism never got to are the capitalistic organizations and governments competing with one another with very strong AI systems?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. Competing and cooperating.

Lucas Perry: Competing and cooperating, unless you bring in some strong notion of paretotopia where everyone is like, “We know that if we keep doing this, that everyone is going to lose everything they care about.”

Andrew Critch: Well, the question is, how do you bring that in? If you solve that problem, you’ve solved it.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So, to wrap up on this then, as companies increasingly are making systems that serve people and need to be able to learn and adopt their values, the incentives of commercialization will continue to solve what are classically AI alignment problems that may also provide some degree of AI existential safety. And there’s the question of how much of those get solved naturally, and how much we’re going to have to do in academia and nonprofit, and then push that into industry.

So we don’t know what that will be, but we should be mindful about what will be solved naturally, and then what are the problems that won’t be, and then how do we encourage or invite more people to go into areas that are less likely to be solved by natural industrial incentives.

Andrew Critch: And do you mean areas of alignment, or areas of existential safety? I’m serious.

Lucas Perry: I know because I’m guilty of not really using this distinction in the past. Both.

Andrew Critch: Got it. I actually think most of single-single alignment. Like there’s a single stakeholder, which might be a human or an institution that has one goal, like profits, right? So there’s a single-human stakeholder, and then there’s a single-AI. I call that single-single alignment. I almost never refer to a multi-multi alignment, because I don’t know what it means and it’s not clear what the values of multiple different stakeholders even is. What are you referring to when you say the values are this function?

So, I don’t say multi-multi alignment a lot, but I do sometimes say single-single alignment to emphasize that I’m talking about the single stakeholder version. I think the multi-multi alignment concept almost doesn’t make sense. So, when someone asks me a question about alignment, I always have to ask, “Now, are you eliding those concepts again?” Or whatever.

So, we could just say single-single alignment every time and I’ll know what you’re talking about, or we could say classical alignment and I’ll probably assume that you mean single-single alignment, because that’s the oldest version of the concept from 2002. So there’s this concept of basic human rights or basic human needs. And that’s a really interesting concept, because it’s a thing that a lot of people agree on. A lot of people think murder is bad.

Lucas Perry: People need food and shelter.

Andrew Critch: Right. So there’s a bunch of that stuff. And we could say that AI alignment is about that stuff and not the other stuff.

Lucas Perry: Is it not about all of it?

Andrew Critch: I’ve seen satisfactory mathematical definitions of intent alignment. Paul Christiano talks about alignment, which I think of as in intent alignment, I think he now also calls it intent alignment, which is the problem of making sure an AI system is intending to help its user. And I think he’s got a pretty clear conception of what that means. I think the concept of the intent alignment of a single-single AI servant is easier to define than whatever property an AI system needs to have.

There’s a bunch of properties that people call AI alignment that are actually all so different from each other. And people don’t recognize that they’re different from each other, because they don’t get into the technical details of trying to define it, so then everyone thinks that we all mean the same thing. But what really is going on, is everyone’s going around thinking, “I want AI to be good, basically good for basically everybody.” No one’s cashing that out, and so nobody notices how much we disagree on what basically good for basically everybody means.

Lucas Perry: So that’s an excellent point, and I’m guilty here now then of having absolutely no idea of what I mean by AI alignment.

Andrew Critch: That’s my goal, because I also don’t know and I’m glad to have a company in that mental state.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. So, let’s try moving long ahead here. And I’ll accept any responsibility and my guilt in using the word AI alignment incorrectly from now on. That was a fun and interesting side road, and I’m glad we pursued it. But now pivoting back into some important definitions here that you also write about in your paper, what counts to you as an AI system and what counts to you as an AI technology, and why does that distinction matter?

Andrew Critch: So throughout the ARCHES report, I’d advocated for using technology versus system. AI technology is like a mass net, and you can say, you can have more of it or less of it. And it’s like this butter that you can spread on the toast of civilization. And AI system, it’s like a countdown. You can have one of them or many of them, and you can put an AI system like you could put a strawberry on your toast, which is different from strawberry jam.

So, there’s properties of AI technology that could threaten civilization and there’s also properties of a single AI system that could threaten civilization. And I think those are both important frames to think in, because you could make a system and think, “This system is not a threat to civilization,” but very quickly, when you make a system, people can copy it. People can replicate it, modify it, et cetera. And then you’ve got a technology that’s spread out like the strawberry has become strawberry compote and spread out over the toast now. And do you want that? Is that good?

As an everyday person, I feel like basic human rights are a well-defined concept to me. Is this basically good for humanity? Is a well defined concept to me, but mathematically it becomes a lot harder to pin down. So I try to say AI technology when I want to remind people that this is going to be replicated, it’s going to show up everywhere. It’s going to be used in different ways by different actors.

At the same time, you can think of the aggregate use of AI technology worldwide as a system. You can say the internet is a system, or you can say all of the self driving cars in the world is one big system built by multiple stakeholders. So I think that the system concept can be reframed to refer to the aggregate of all the technology of a certain type or of a certain kind. But that mental reframe is an actual act of effort, and you can switch between those frames to get different views of what’s going on. I try to alternate and use both of those views from time to time, the system view and the technology view.

Lucas Perry: All right. So let’s get into another concept here that you develop, and it’s really at the core of your paper. What is a prepotent AI? And I guess before you define what a prepotent AI is, can you define what prepotent means? I had actually never heard of that word before reading your paper.

Andrew Critch: So I’m going to say the actual standard definition of prepotent which connotes, arrogance, overbearing high-handed, despotic, possessing excessive abuse of authority. These connotations are carried across a bunch of different Latin languages, but in English they’re not as strong. In English, prepotent just means very powerful, or superior enforced influence, or authority or predominant.

I used it because it’s not that common of a word, but it’s still a word, and it’s a property that AI technology can have relative to us. And it’s also property that a particular AI system, whether it’s singular or distributed can have relative to us. The definition that I’d give for a prepotent AI technology is technology whose deployment would transform humanity’s habitat, which is currently the earth, in a way that’s unstoppable to us.

So there’s this notion of there’s the transformativeness and then there’s the unstoppableness. Transformativeness is a concept that has been also elaborated by the Open Philanthropy Project. They have this transformative AI concept. I think it’s a very good concept, because it’s impact oriented. It’s not about what the AI’s trying to do, it’s about what impact that has. And they say when AI system or technology is transformative, if its impact on the world is comparable to, say the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution, a major global change in how things are done. You might argue that the internet is a transformative technology as well.

So, that’s the transformative aspect of prepotence. And then there’s the unstoppable aspect. So, imagine something that’s transforming the world the way the agricultural industrial revolution has transformed it, but also, we can’t stop it. And by we, I mean, no subset of humans, if they decided that they want to stop it, could stop it. If every human in the world decided, “Yeah, we all want this to stop,” we would fail.

I think it’s possible to imagine AI technologies that are unstoppable to all subsets of humanity. I mean, there’s things that are hard to stop right now. If you wanted to stop the use of electricity. Let’s say all humans decided, today, for some strange reason that we never want to use electricity anymore. That’d be a difficult transition. I think we probably could do it, but it’d be very difficult. Humanity as a society can become dependent on certain things, or intertwined with things in a way that makes it very hard to stop them. And that’s a major mechanism by which an AI technology can be prepotent, by being intertwined with us and how we use it.

Lucas Perry: So, can you distinguish this idea of prepotent AI, because it’s a completely new concept from transformative AI, as you mentioned before, and superintelligence, and why it’s important to you that you introduced this new concept?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. Sure. So let’s say you have an AI system that’s like a door-to-door salesman for solar panels, and it’s just going to cover everyone’s roofs with solar panels for super cheap, and all of the business is going to have solar panels on top, and we’re basically just not going to need fossil fuels anymore. And we’re going to be way more decentralized and independent, and states are going to be less dependent on each other for energy. So, that’s going to change geopolitics. A lot of stuff’s going to change, right?

So, you might say that that was transformative. So, you can have a technology that’s really transformative, but also maybe you can stop it. If everybody agreed to just not answer the door when the door-to-door solar panel robot salesman comes by, then they would stop. So, that’s transformative, but not prepotent. There’s a lot of different ways that you can envision AI being both transformative and unstoppable, in other words, prepotent.

I have three examples that I’d go to and we’ve written about those in ARCHES. One is technological autonomy. So if you have a little factory that can make more little factories, and it can do its own science and invent its own new materials to make more robots to do more mining, to make more factories, et cetera, you can imagine a process like that that gets out hand someday. Of course, we’re very far away from that today, conceptually, but it might not be very long before we can make robots that make robots that make robots.

Self-sustaining manufacturing like that could build defenses using technology the way humans build defenses against each other. And now suddenly, the humans want to stop it, but it has nukes aimed at us, so we can’t. Another completely different one which is related, is replication speed. Like the way a virus can just replicate throughout your body and destroy you without being very smart.

You could envision, you can imagine. I don’t know of how easy it is to build this, because maybe it’s a question of nanotechnology, but can you build systems that just very quickly replicate, and just tile the earth so fast with their replicants that we die? Maybe we suffocate from breathing them, or breathing their exhaust. That one honestly seems less plausible to me than to technological autonomy one, but to some people it seems more plausible and I don’t have a strong position on that.

And then there’s social acumen. You can imagine say a centralized AI system that is very socially competent, and it can deliver convincing speeches to the point of becoming elected a state official, and then brokering deals between nations that make it very hard for anybody to go against their plans, because they’re so embedded and well negotiated with everybody. And when you try to coordinate, they just whisper things, or say threats or make offers that dis-coordinate everybody again. Even though everybody wants it to stop, nobody can manage to coordinate long enough to stop it because it’s so socially skilled. So those are like a few science fiction scenarios that I would say constitute prepotence on the part of the AI technology or system. They’re all different and the interesting thing about them is that they all can happen without being generally superintelligent. These are conditions that are sufficient to pose a significant existential threat to humanity, but which aren’t superintelligence. And I want to focus on those because I don’t want us to delay addressing existential risk until we have superintelligence. I want us to address it but the minimum viable existential threats that we could face and head those off. So that’s why I focus on prepotence as a property rather than superintelligence because it’s a broader category that I think is still quite threatening and quite plausible.

Lucas Perry: Another interesting and important concept is born of this is misaligned prepotent AI technology. Can you expand a bit on that? So what is and should count as misaligned prepotent AI technology?

Andrew Critch: So this was a tough decision for me because as you’ve noticed throughout this podcast, at the technical level, I find the alignment concept confusing at multi-stakeholder scales, but still critical to think about. And so I couldn’t decide whether to just talk about unsurvivable prepotent AI or misaligned prepotent AI. So let me talk about unsurvivable prepotent AI. By that, I mean it’s transformed the earth, you can’t stop it and moreover, you’re going to die of it eventually. The AI technology has become unsurvivable in the year 2085 if in that year, the humans now are doomed and cannot possibly survive. And I thought about naming the central concept, unsurvivable prepotent AI but a lot of people want to say for them, misalignment is basically unsurvivability.

I think David also tends to think of alignment in a similar way, but there’s this question of where do you draw the line between poorly aligned and misaligned? We just made a decision to say, extinction is the line, but that’s kind of a value judgment. And one of the things I don’t like about the paper is that it has that implicit value judgment. And I think the way I would prefer people to think is in terms of the concept of unsurvivability versus survivability, or prepotence versus not. But the theme of alignment and misalignment is so pervasive that some of our demo readers preferred that name for the unsurvivable prepotent AIs.

Lucas Perry: So misaligned prepotent AI then is just some AI technology that would lead to human extinction?

Andrew Critch: As defined in the report, yep. That’s where we draw the line between aligned and misaligned. If it’s prepotent, it’s having this huge impact. When’s the huge impact definitively misaligned? Well, it’s kind of like where’s the zero line and we just kind of picked extinction to be the line to call misaligned. I think it’s a pretty reasonable line. It’s pretty concrete. And I think a lot of efforts to prevent extinction would also generalize to preventing other big risks. So sometimes, it’s nice to pick a concrete thing and just focus on it.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. I understand why and I think I would probably endorse doing it this way, but it also seems a little bit strange to me that there are futures worse than extinction and they’re going to be below the line. And I guess that’s fine then.

Andrew Critch: That’s why I think unsurvivable is a better word. But our demo readers, some of them just really preferred misaligned prepotent AI over unsurvivable prepotent AI. So we went with that just to make sense to your readers.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So as we’re building AI technologies, we can ask what counts as the deployment of a prepotent AI system or technology, a TAI system, or a misaligned prepotent AI system and the implications of such deployment? I’m curious to get your view on what counts as the deployment of a prepotent AI system or a misaligned prepotent AI system.

Andrew Critch: So you could imagine something that’s transforming the earth and we can’t stop it, but it’s also great.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. An aligned prepotent AI system.

Andrew Critch: Yeah. Maybe it’s just building a lot of infrastructure around the world to take care of people’s health and education. Some people would find that scary and not like the fact that we can’t stop it, and maybe that fear alone would make it harmful or maybe it would violate some principle of theirs that would matter even if they didn’t feel the fear. But you can at least imagine under some value systems, technology that’s kind of taken over the world but it’s taken good care everybody. And maybe it’s going to take care of everybody forever so humanity will never go extinct. That’s prepotent but not unsurvivable, but that’s a dangerous move to make on a planet to sort of make a prepotent thing and try to make sure that it’s an aligned prepotent thing instead of a misaligned prepotent thing, because you’re unstoppably transforming the earth and you maybe you should think a lot before you do that.

Lucas Perry: And maybe prepotence is actually incompatible with alignment if we think about it enough for the reasons that you mentioned.

Andrew Critch: It’s possible. Yeah. With enough reflection on the value of human autonomy, we would eventually conclude that if humans can’t stop it, it’s fundamentally wrong in a way that will alienate and destroy humans eventually in some way. That said, I do want to add something which is that I think almost all prepotent AI that we could conceivably make will be unsurvivably misaligned. If you’re transforming the world, most states of the world are not survivable to humans. Just like most planets are not survivable to humans. So most ways that the world could be very different are just ways in which humans could not survive. So I think if you have a prepotent AI system, you have to sort of steer it through this narrow window of futures, this narrow like keyhole even of futures where all the variables of the earth stay inhabitable to humans, or we would build some space colony where humans live instead of Earth.

Almost every chemical element, if you just turn up that chemical element on the earth, humans die. So that’s the thing that makes me think most conceivable prepotent AI systems are misaligned or unsurvivable. There are people who think about alignment a lot that I think are super biased by the single principal, single agent framing and have sort of lost track of the complexities of society and that’s why they think prepotent AI is conceivable to align or like not that hard to align or something. And I think they’re confused, but maybe I’m the confused one and maybe it’s actually easy.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So you’ve mentioned a little bit here about if you dial in the knobs of the chemical composition of really anything much on the planet in any direction, that pretty quickly you can create pretty hostile or even existentially incompatible situations on Earth for human beings. So this brings us to the concept of basically how frail humanity is given the conditions that are required for us to exist. What is the importance of understanding human frailty in relation to prepotent AI systems?

Andrew Critch: I think it’s pretty simple. I think human frailty implies don’t make prepotent AI. If we lose control of the knobs, we’re at risk of the knobs getting set wrong. Now that’s not to say we can set the knobs perfectly either, but if they start to go wrong, we can gradually set them right again. There’s still hope that we’ll stop climate change, right? And not saying we will, but it’s at least still possible. We haven’t made it impossible to stop. If every human in the world agreed now to just stop, we would succeed. So we should not lose control of this system because almost any direction it could head is a disaster. So that’s why some people talk about the AI control problem, which is different I claim than the AI alignment problem. Even for a single powerful system, you can imagine it looking after you, but not letting you control it.

And if you aim for that and miss, I think it’s a lot more fraught. And I guess the point is that I want to draw attention to human fragility because I know people who think, “No, no, no. The best thing to do for humanity is to build a super powerful machine that just controls the Earth and protects the humans.” I know lots of people who think that. It makes sense logically. It’s like, “Hey, the humans. We might destroy ourselves. Look at this destructive stuff we’re doing. Let’s build something better than us to take care of us.” So I think the reasoning makes sense, but I think it’s a very dangerous thing to aim for because if we aim and miss, we definitely, definitely die.

I think transformative AI is big enough risk. We should never make prepotent AI. We should not make unstoppable, transformative AI. And that’s why there’s so much talk about the off switch game or the control problem or whatever. Corrigibility is kind of related to turning things off. Humans have this nice property where if half of them are destroyed and the other half of them have the ability to notice that and do something about it, they’re quite likely to do something about it. So you get this robustness at a societal scale by just having lots of off switches.

Lucas Perry: So we’ve talked about this concept a bunch already, this concept of delegation. I’m curious if you can explain the importance and relevance of considering delegation of tasks from a human or humans to an AI system or systems. So we’re just going to unpack this taxonomy that you’ve created a bit here of single-single, single-multi, multi-single, and multi-multi.

Andrew Critch: The reason I think delegation is important is because I think a lot of human society is rightly arranged in a way that avoids absolute power from accumulating into decisions of any one person, even in the most totalitarian regimes. The concept of delegation is a way that humans hand power and responsibility to each other in political systems but also in work situations, like the boss doesn’t have to do all the work. They delegate out and they delegate a certain amount of power to people to allow the employees of a company to do the work. That process of responsibilities and tasks being handed from agent to agent to agent is how a lot of things get done in the world. And there’s many things we’ve already delegated to computers.

I think delegation of specific tasks and responsibilities is going to remain important in the future even as we approach human level AI and supersede human level AI, because people resist the accumulation of power. If you say, “Hey, I am Alpha Corp. I’m going to make a superintelligent machine now and then use it to make the world good.” You might be able to get a few employees that are like kind of wacky enough to think that yeah, taking over the world with your machine is the right company mission or whatever. But the winners of the race of AI development are going to be big teams that won because they managed to work together and pull off something really hard. And such a large institution is going to most likely have dissident members who don’t think taking over the world is the right plan for what to do with your powerful tech.

Moreover, there’s going to be plenty of pressures from outside even if you did manage to fill a company full of people who want to take over the world. They’re going to know that that’s kind of not a cool thing to do according to most people. So you’re not going to be taking over the world with AI. You’re going to be taking on specific responsibilities or handing off responsibilities. And so you’ve got an AI system that’s like, “Hey, we can provide this service. We’ll write your spam messages for you. Okay?” So then that responsibility gets handed off. Perhaps OpenAI would choose not to accept that responsibility. But let’s say you want to analyze and summarize a large corpus of texts to summarize what people want. Let’s say you get 10,000 customer service emails in a day and you want something to read that and give you a summary of what really people want.

That’s a tremendously useful thing to be able to do. And let’s say open AI develops the capability to do that. They’ll sell that as a service and other companies will benefit from it greatly. And now, OpenAI has this responsibility that they didn’t have. They’re now responsible for helping Microsoft fulfill customer service requests. And if Microsoft sucks at fulfilling those customer service requests, now open AI is getting complaints from Microsoft because they summarize the requests wrong. So now you’ve got this really complicated relationship where you’ve got a bunch of Microsoft users sending in lots of emails, asking for help that are being summarized by OpenAI, and then hand it off to Microsoft developers to prioritize what they do next with their software. And no one is solely responsible for everything that’s happening because the customer is responsible for what they ask, Microsoft is responsible for what they provide, and open AI is responsible for helping Microsoft understand what to provide based on what the customer’s ask.

Responsibilities get naturally shared out that way unless somebody comes in with a lot of guns and says, “No, give me all the responsibility and all the par.” So militarization of AI is certainly a way that you could see a massive centralization of power from AI. I think States should avoid militarizing AI to avoid scaring other States into militarizing AI. We don’t want to live in a world with militarized AI technologies. So I think if we succeed in heading off that threat and that’s a big if, then we end up in an economy where the responsibilities are being taken on, services are being provided. And then everything’s suddenly very multi-stakeholder, multiple machines servicing multiple people. And I think of delegation as a sort of operation that you perform over and over that ends up distributing those responsibilities and services. And I think about how do you perform a delegation step correctly? If you can do one delegation step correctly, like when Microsoft makes the decision to hand off its customer service interpretation to OpenAI’s language models, Microsoft needs to make that decision correctly.

And it makes that decision correctly. If we define correctly correctly, it’ll be part of an overall economy of delegations that are respectful of humanity. So in my opinion, once you head off militarization, the task of ensuring existential safety for humanity boils down to the task of recursively defining delegation procedures that are guaranteed to preserve human existence and welfare over time.

Lucas Perry: And so you see this area of delegation as being the most x-risky.

Andrew Critch: So it’s interesting. I think delegation prevents centralization of power, which prevents one kind of x-risk. And I think we will seek to delegate. We will seek desperately to delegate responsibilities and distribute power as it accumulates.

Lucas Perry: Why would we naturally do that?

Andrew Critch: People fear power.

Lucas Perry: Do we?

Andrew Critch: If you see something with a lot more power than you, people tend to fear it and sort of oppose it. And separately, people fear having power. If you’re on a team that’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to take over the world,” you’re probably going to be like, “Really? Isn’t it bad? Isn’t that super villain to do that?” So as I predict this, I don’t want to say, “Count on somebody else to adopt this attitude.” I want people listening to adopt that attitude as well. And I both predict and encourage the prevention of extreme concentrations of power from AI development because society becomes less robust then. It becomes this one point of failure where if this thing messes up, everything is destroyed. Whereas right now, it’s not that easy for a centralized force to destroy the world by messing up. It is easy for decentralized forces to destroy the world right now. And that’s how I think it’ll be in the future as well.

Lucas Perry: And then as you’re mentioning and have mentioned, the diffusion of responsibility is where we risk potentially missing core existential safety issues in AI.

Andrew Critch: Yeah, I think that’s the area that’s not only neglected by present day economic incentives, but will likely remain neglected by economic incentives even 10, 20 years from now. And therefore, will be left as the main source of societal scale and existential risk, yeah.

Lucas Perry: And then in terms of the taxonomy you created, can you briefly define the single and multi and the relationships those can have?

Andrew Critch: When I’m talking about AI delegation, I say single-single to mean single human-single AI system, or single human stakeholder and a single AI system. And I always referred to the number of humans first. So if I say single-multi, that means one human stakeholder, which might be a company or a person, and then multiple AI systems. And if I say multi-single, that’s multi human- single AI. And then multi-multi means multi human-multi AI. I started using this in a AGI safety course I was teaching at Berkeley in 2018 because I just noticed a lot of equivocation between students about which kind of scenarios they were thinking about. I think there’s a lot of multi-multi delegation work that is going to matter to industry because when you have a company selling a service to a user to do a job for an employer, things get multi-stakeholder pretty quickly. So I do think some aspects of multi-multi delegation will get addressed in industry, but I think they will be addressed in ways that are not designed to prevent existential risk. They will be addressed in ways that are designed to accrue profits.

Lucas Perry: And so some concepts that you also introduce here are those of control, instruction, and comprehension as being integral to AI delegation. Are those something you want to explore now?

Andrew Critch: Yeah, sure. I mean, those are pretty simple. Like when you delegate something to someone, Alice delegates to Bob, in order to make that decision, she needs to understand Bob, like what’s he capable of? What isn’t he? That’s human AI comprehension. Do we understand AI well enough to know what we should delegate? Then, there’s human AI instruction. Can Alice explain to Bob what she wants Bob to do? And can Bob understand that? Comprehension is really a conveyance of information from Bob to Alice. And then instruction is a conveyance of information from Alice to Bob. A lot of single-single alignment work is focused on how are we going to convey the information? Whereas transparency / interpretability work is more like the Bob to Alice direction. And then control is well, what if this whole idea of communication is wrong and we messed it up and we now just need to stop it, just take back the delegation. Like I was counting on my Gmail to send you emails, but now sending you a bunch of spam. I’m going to shut down my account and i’ll send you messages a different way.

That’s control. And I think of any delegation relationship as involving at least those three concepts. There might be other ones that are really important that I’ve left out. But I see a lot of research as serving one of those three nodes. And so then, you could talk about single-single comprehension. Does this person understand this system? Or we can talk about multi-single. Do this team of people understand this system? Multi-single control would be, can this team of people collectively stop or take back the delegation from the system that they’ve been using or counting on? And then it goes to multi-multi and starts to raise questions like what does it mean for a group of people to understand something? Do they all understand individually? Or do they also have to be able to have a productive meeting about it? Maybe they need to be able to communicate with each other about it too for us to consider it to be a group level understanding. So those questions come up in the definition of multi-multi comprehension, and I think they’re going to be pretty important in the end.

Lucas Perry: All right. So we’ve talked a bunch here already about single-single delegation and much of technical alignment research explores this single human-single AI agent scenario. And that’s done because it’s conceptually simple and is perhaps the most simple place to start. So when we’re thinking about AI existential safety and AI existential risk, how is starting from single-single misleading and potentially not sufficient for deep insight into alignment?

Andrew Critch: Yeah, I guess I’ve said this multiple times in this podcast, how much I think diffusion of responsibility is going to play a role in leaving problems unsolved. And I think diffusion of responsibility only becomes visible in the multi-stakeholder or multi-system or both scenarios. That’s the simple answer.

Lucas Perry: So the single-single gets solved again by the commercial incentives and then the important place to analyze is the multi-multi.

Andrew Critch: Well, I wouldn’t simplify it as much as to say the important places to analyze is the multi-multi because consider the following. If you build a house out of clay instead of out of wood, it’s going to fall apart more easily. And understanding clay could help you make that global decision. Similarly if your goal is to eventually produce societally safe, multi-multi delegation procedures for AI, you might want to start by studying the clay that that procedure is built out of, which is the single-single delegation steps. And single-single delegation steps require a certain degree of alignment between the delegator and the delegate. So it might be very important to start by figuring out the right building material for that, figuring out the right single-single delegation steps. And I know a lot of people are approaching it that way.

They’re working on single-single delegation, but that’s not because they think Netflix is never going to launch the Netflix challenge to figure out how to align recommender systems with users. It’s because the researchers who care about existential safety want to understand what I would call a single-single delegation, but what they would call the method of single-single alignment as a building block for what will be built next. But I sort of think different. I think that’s a great reasonable position to have. I think differently than that because I think the day that we have super powerful single-single alignment solutions is the day that it leaves the laboratory and rolls out into the economy. Like if you have very powerful AI systems that you can’t single-single align, you can’t ship a product because you can’t get it to do what anybody wants.

So I sort of think single-single alignment solutions sort of shorten the timeline. It’s like deja vu. When everyone was working on AI capabilities, the alignment people are saying, “Hey, we’re going to run out of time to figure out alignment. You’re going to have all of these capabilities and we’re not going to know how to align them. So let’s start thinking ahead about alignment.” I’m saying the same thing about alignment now. I’m saying once you get single-single alignment solutions, now your AI tech is leaving the lab and going into the economy because you can sell it. And now, you’ve run out of time to have solved the multipolar scenario problem. So I think there’s a bit of a rush to figure out the multi-stakeholder stuff before the single-single stuff gets all figured out.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So what you’re arguing for then here is your what you call multi-multi preparedness.

Andrew Critch: Yeah.

Lucas Perry: Would you also like to state what the multiplicity thesis is?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. It’s the thing I just want to remind people of all the time, which is don’t forget, as soon as you make tech, you copy it, replicate it, modify it. The idea that we’re going to have a single-single system and not very shortly thereafter have other instances of it or other competitors to it, is sort of a fanciful unrealistic scenario. And I just like reminding people as we’re preparing for the future, let us prepare for the nearly inevitable eventuality that there will be multiple instances of any powerful technology. Some people take that as an argument that, “No, no, no. Actually, we should make the first instance so powerful that it prevents the creation of any other AI technology by any other actor.” And logically, that’s valid. I think politically and socially, I think it’s crazy.

Lucas Perry: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Andrew Critch: I think it’s a good way to alienate anybody that you want to work with on existential risk reduction to say, “Our plan is to take over the world and then save it.” Whereas if your plan is to say, “What principles can all AI technology adhere to, such that it in aggregate will not destroy the world,” you’re not taking over anything. You’re just figuring it out. Like if there’s 10 labs in the world all working on that, I’m not worried about one of them succeeding. But if there’s 10 labs in the world all working on the safe world takeover plan, I’m like, “Hmm, now I’m nervous that one of them will think that they’ve solved safe world takeover or something.” And I kind of want to convert them all to the other thing of safe delegation, safe integration with society.

Lucas Perry: So can you take us through the risk types that you develop in your paper that lead to unsurvivability for humanity from AI systems?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. So there’s a lot of stuff that people worry about. I noticed that some of the things people worry about sort of directly cause extinction if they happen. And then some of them are kind of like one degree of causal separation away from that. So I call it tier one risks in the paper, that refers to things that would just directly lead to the deployment of a unsurvivable or misaligned prepotent AI technology. And then tier two risks are risks that lead to tier one risk. So for example, if AI companies or countries are racing really hard to develop AI faster than each other, so much that they’re not taking into account safety to the other countries around them or the other companies around them, then you get a disproportionate prioritization of progress over safety. And then you get a higher risk of societal scale disasters, including existential risks but not limited to it.

And so you could say fierce competition between AI developers is a tier two risk that leads to the tier one risk of MPAI or UPAI deployment, MPAI being misaligned prepotent AI. And tier one, I have this taxonomy that we use in the paper that I like for sort of dividing up tier one into a few different types that all I think have different technical approaches because my goal is to sort of orient on technical research problems that could actually help reduce existential risk from AI. So got this subdivision. The first one we have is basically diffusion of responsibility, or sometimes we call it unaccountable creators. In the paper, we settled on calling it uncoordinated MPAI deployment.

So the deal is before talking about whether this or that AI system is doing what its creators want or don’t want, can we even identify who the creators are? If the creators were this kind of diffuse economy or oligarchy of companies or countries, it might not be meaningful to say, “Did the AI system do what it’s creators want it?” Because maybe they all wanted a different thing. So a risk type 1A is risks that arise from kind of nobody in particular being responsible for and therefore, no one in particular being attentive to preventing the existential risk.

Lucas Perry: That’s an uncoordinated MPAI event.

Andrew Critch: Yeah, exactly. I personally think most of the most likely risks come from that category, but they’re hard to define and I don’t know how to solve them yet. I don’t know if anybody does. But if you assume we’re not in that case, it’s not uncoordinated. Now, there’s a recognizable identifiable institution Alpha Corp-made AI or America made the AI or something like that. And now you can start asking, “Okay. If there’s this recognizable creator relationship, did the creator know that they were making a prepotent technology?” And that’s how we define type 1B. We’ve got creators, but the creators didn’t know that the tech they were making was going to be prepotent. Maybe they didn’t realize it was going to be replicated or used as much as it was, or it was going to be smarter than they thought for whatever reason. But it just ended up affecting the world a lot more than they thought or being more unstoppable than they thought.

If you make something that’s unstoppably transforming the world, which is what prepotent means, and you didn’t anticipate that, that’s bad. You’re making big waves and you didn’t even think about the direction the waves were going. So I think a lot of risk comes from making tech and not realizing how big its impact is going to be in advance. And so you could have things that become prepotent that we weren’t anticipating and a lot of risks comes from that. That’s a whole risk category. That’s 1B. We need good science and discipline for identifying prepotence or dependence or unstoppability or transformativity all of these concepts. But suppose that’s solved, now we go to type 1C. There are creators contrary to 1A and the creators knew they’re making prepotent tech contrary to 1B. And I think this is weird because a lot of people don’t want to make prepotent tech because it’s super risky, but you could imagine some groups doing it.

If they’re doing that, do they recognize that the thing they’re making is misaligned? Do they think, “Oh yeah, this is going to take over the world and protect everybody. This is the, “I tried to take over the world and I accidentally destroyed it scenario.” So that’s unrecognized misalignment or unrecognized unsurvivability as a category of risk. And for that, you just need a really good theory of alignment with your values if you don’t want to destroy the world. And that’s I think what gets people focused on single-single alignment. They’re like, “The world’s broken. I want to fix it. I want to make magic AI that will like fix the world. It has to do what I want though. So let’s focus on single-single alignment.” But now he’s supposed that problem is solved contrary to type 1A you have discernible creators contrary to 1B, they know they’re playing with fire contrary to 1C, they know it’s misaligned. They know fire burns. That’s kind of plausible. If you imagine people messing with dangerous tech in order to figure out how to protect against it, you could have a lab with people sort of brewing up dangerous cyber attack systems that could break out and exercise a lot of social acumen. If they were really powerful language users, then you could imagine something getting out. So that’s, we call it type 1D, involuntary MPAI deployment, maybe it breaks out or maybe hackers break in and release it. But either way, the creators weren’t trying to do it, then you have type 1E which is contrary to 1D, the creators wanted to release MPAI deployment.

So that’s just people trying to destroy the world. I think that’s less plausible in the short term, more plausible in the longterm.

Lucas Perry: So all of these fall under the category of tier one in your paper. And so all of these directly lead to an existential catastrophe for humanity. You then have tier two, which are basically hazardous conditions, which lead to the realization of these tier one events. So could you take us through these conditions, which may act as a catalyst for eliciting the creation of tier one events in the world?

Andrew Critch: Yeah, so the nice thing about the tier one events is that we use the, an exhaustive decision tree for categorizing it. So any tier one event, any deployment event for a misaligned prepotent AI will fall under one of categories 1A through 1E, unfortunately we don’t have such a taxonomy for tier two.

So tier two is just the list of, hey, here’s four things that seem pretty worrisome. So 2A is, companies or countries racing with each other, trying to make AI real fast and not being safe about it. 2B is economic displacement of humans. So people talk about unemployment risks from AI. Imagine that taken to an extreme where eventually humans just have no economic leverage at all, because all economic value is being produced by AI systems. AI’s have taken all the jobs, including the CEO positions, including the board of directors positions, all using AI’s as their delegates to go to the board meetings that are happening every five seconds because of how fast the AI’s can have board meetings. Now, the humans are just like, “We’re just hoping that all that economy out there is going to not somehow use up all of the oxygen,” to say in the atmosphere, or “Lower the temperature of the earth by 30 degrees,” because of how much faster it would be to run super computers 30 degrees colder.

I think a lot of people who think about x-risk, think of unemployment as this sort of mundane, every generation, there’s some wave of unemployment from some tech. That’s nothing compared to existential risk, but I sort of want to raise a flag here and be, one of the waves of unemployment could be the one that just takes away all human leverage and authority. We should be on the lookout for runaway unemployment that leads to prepotence because loss of control and then human enfeeblement, that’s 2C, the humans are still around, but getting weaker and dumber and less capable of stuff because we’re not practicing doing things because AI is doing everything for us. Then one day we just all trip and fall and hit our heads and die kind of thing. But more realistically, maybe we just fail to be able to make good decisions about what AI technology is doing. And we failed to like notice we should be pressing the stop buttons everywhere.

Lucas Perry: The fruits of the utopia created by transformative AI are too enticing that we become enfeebled and fail at creating existential safety for advanced AI systems.

Andrew Critch: Or we use the systems in a stupid way because we all got worse at arithmetic and we couldn’t imagine the risks and we became scope insensitive to them or something. There’s a lot of different ways you can imagine humans just being weaker because AI is sort of helping us and then type 2D is discourse impairment about existential safety. This is something we saw a lot of in 2014 before FLI hosted the Puerto Rico conference, to just kick off basically discourse on existential safety for AI and other big risks from AGI. Luckily since then, with efforts from FLI and then the Concrete Problems in AI safety paper was a early example of acknowledging negative outcomes.

And then you have the ACM push to acknowledge negative risks and now the NeurIPS broader impact stuff. There’s lots of negative acknowledgement now. The discourse around negative outcomes has improved, but I think discourse on existential safety has a long way to go. It’s progressed, but it’s still has a long way to go. If we keep not being able to talk about it, for example, if we keep having to call existential safety safety, right? If we keep having to call it that, because we’re afraid to admit to ourselves or each other, that we’re thinking of existential stakes, we’re never really going to properly analyze the concept or visualize the outcomes together. I think there’s a big risk from just people sort of feeling like they’re thinking about existential safety, but not really saying it to each other and not really getting into the details of how society works at a large scale and therefore kind of ignoring it and making a bunch of bad decisions.

And I called that discourse impairment and it can happen because it’s taboo or it can happen because it’s just easier to talk about safety because safety is everywhere.

Lucas Perry: All right, so we’ve made it through to what is essentially the first third of your paper here. It lays much of the conceptual and language foundations, which are used for the rest, which try to more explicitly flesh out the research directions for existential safety on AI systems, correct?

Andrew Critch: Yeah. And I would say the later sections are a survey of research directions attacking different aspects and possibly exacerbating different aspects too. You earlier called this a research agenda. But I don’t think it’s quite right to call it an agenda because first of all, I’m not personally planning to research every topic in here, although I would be happy to research any of them. So this is not like, “Here’s the plan we’re going to do all these areas.” It’s more like, “Here’s a survey of areas and an analysis of how they flow into each other.” For example, single-single transparency research, that can flow in to coordination models for single-multi comprehension. It’s a view rather than a plan, because I think a plan should take into account more things like what’s neglected, what’s industry going to solve on its own?

My plan would be to pick sections out of this report and call those my agenda. My personal plan is to focus more on multi-agent stuff. Some also social metacognition stuff that I’m interested in. So if I wrote a research agenda, it would be about certain areas of this report, but the rest of the report is really just trying to look at all of these areas that I think relate to existential safety and it kind of analyzing how they relate.

Lucas Perry: All right, Andrew, well, I must say that on page 33, it says, “This report may be viewed as a very coarse description of a very long term research agenda, aiming to understand and improve blah, blah, blah.”

Andrew Critch: It’s true. It may be viewed as such and you may have just viewed it as such.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, I think that’s where I got that language from.

Andrew Critch: It’s true. Yeah, and I think if an institution just picked up this report and said, “This is our agenda.” I’d be like, “Cool, go for it. That’s a great plan.”

Lucas Perry: All right. I’m just getting you back for nailing me on the definition of AI alignment.

Andrew Critch: Okay.

Lucas Perry: Let’s hit up on some of the most important or key aspects here then for this final part of the paper. We have three questions here. The first is, “How would you explain the core of your concerns about, and the importance of flow through effects?” What are flow-through effects and why are they important for considering AI existential safety?

Andrew Critch: Flow through effects just means if A affects B and B affects C, then indirectly A affects C. Effects like that can be pretty simple in physics, but they can be pretty complicated in medicine and they might be even more complicated in research. If you do research on single-single transparency, that’s going to flow through to single-multi instruction. How is a person going to instruct a hierarchy of machines? Can they delegate to the machines to delegate to other machines? Okay, now can I understand? Okay, cool. There’s a flow through effect there. Then that’s going to flow through to multi-multi control. How can you have a bunch of people instructing a bunch of machines and still have control over them? If the instructions aren’t being executed to satisfaction, or if they’re going to cause a big risk or something.

And some of those flow through effects can be good, some of them could be bad. For example, you can imagine work in transparency flowing through to really rapid development in single-multi instruction, because you can understand more of what all the little systems are doing. You can tell more of them what to do and get more stuff done. Then that could flow through to disasters in multi-multi control because you’ve got races between powerful institutions that are delegating to large numbers of individual systems that they understand separately. But the interaction of which at a global scale are not understood by any one institution. So then you just get this big cluster of pollution or other problems being caused for humans, as a side effect. Just thinking about a problem, that’s a sub problem of the final solution is not always helpful, societally. Even if it is helpful to you personally, understanding how to approach the helpful societal scale solution. My personal biggest area of interest, I’m kind of split between two things.

One is, if you have a very powerful system and several stakeholders with very different priorities or beliefs, trying to decide a policy for that system. Imagine U.S., China and Russia trying to reach an agreement on some global cyber security protocol, that’s AI mediated or Uber and Waymo, trying to agree on what are the principles that their cars are going to follow when they’re doing lane changes. Are they going to try to intimidate each other to get a better chance at that lane changes? Is that going to put the humans at risk? Yes, okay. Can we all not intimidate each other and therefore not put the passengers at risk? That’s a big question for me, is how can you make systems that have powerful stakeholders in the process of negotiating for control over the system?

It’s like the system is not even deployed yet. We’re considering deploying it and we’re negotiating for the parameters of the system. I want the system to have a nice API, for the negotiating powers, to sort of turn knobs until they’re all satisfied with it. I call that negotiable AI. I’ve got a paper called Negotiable Reinforcement Learning with a student. I think that kind of encapsules the problem, but it’s not a solution to the problem by any means. It’s just merely drawing attention to it. That’s like a one core thing that I think is going to be really important as multi-stakeholder control. Not multi-stakeholder alignment, not making all the stakeholders happy, but making them work together in sharing the system, which might sometimes leave one of them unhappy. But at least they’re not all fighting and causing disasters from the externalities of their competition. The other one is almost the same principle, but where the negotiation is happening between the AI systems instead of the people.

So how do you get two AI systems, like System A and System B serving Alice and Bob, Alice and Bob want very different things. Now A and B have to get along. How can A and B get along, broker an agreement about what to do that’s better than fighting. Both of these areas of research are kind of trying to make peace between the human institutions controlling a powerful system. And the second case is peace between two AI systems. I don’t know how to do this at all. That’s why I try to focus on it. It’s sort of nobody’s job, except for maybe the UN and the UN doesn’t have… The cars getting along thing is kind of like a National Institute of Standards thing maybe, or a partnership, an AI thing maybe so maybe they’ll address that, but it’s still super interesting to me and possibly generalizable to big, higher stakes issues.

So I don’t claim that it’s going to be completely neglected as an area. It’s just very interesting at a technical level it seems neglected. I think there’s lots of policy thinking about these issues, but what shape does the technology itself need to have to make it easy for policymakers to set the standards, for it to be sort of negotiable and cooperative? That’s where my interests lie.

Lucas Perry: All right. And so that’s also matches up with everything else you said, because those are two sub-problems of multi-multi situations.

Andrew Critch: Yes.

Lucas Perry: All right. So next question is, is there anything else you’d like to add then to how it is the thinking about AI research directions affect AI existential risk?

Andrew Critch: I guess I would just add, people need to feel permission to work on things because they need to understand them, rather than because they know that it’s going to help the world. I think there’s a lot of paranoia about like, if you manage to care, but existential risks you’re like thinking about these high stakes and it’s easy to become paranoid. What if I accidentally destroy the world by doing the wrong research or something? I don’t think that’s a healthy state for a researcher, maybe for some it’s healthy, but I think for a lot of people that I’ve met, that’s not conducive to their productivity.

Lucas Perry: Is that something that you encounter a lot, people who have crippling anxiety over whether the research direction is correct?

Andrew Critch: Yeah, and varying degrees of crippling, some that you would actually call anxiety, the person’s experiencing actual anxiety. But more often it’s just a kind of festering unproductivity. It’s thinking of an area, “But that’s just going to advanced capabilities, so I won’t work on it,” or like think of an area it’s like, “Oh, that’s just going to hasten the economic deployment of AI systems, so I’m not going to work on it.” I do that kind of triage, but more so because I want to find neglected areas, rather than because I’m afraid of building the wrong tech or something. I find that mentality doesn’t inhibit my creativity or something. I want people to be aware of flow through effects and that any tech can flow through to have a negative impact that they didn’t expect. And because of that, I want everyone to sort of raise their overall vigilance towards AI technology as a whole. But I don’t want people to feel paralyzed like, “Oh no, what if I invent really good calibration for neural nets? Or what if I invent really good, bounded rationality techniques and then accidentally destroyed the world because people use them.”

I think what we need is for people to sort of go ahead and do their research, but just be aware that X-risk is on the horizon and starting to build institutional structures to make higher and higher stakes decisions about AI deployments, along with being supportive of areas of research that are conducive to those decisions being made. I want to encourage people to go into these neglected areas that I’m saying, but I don’t want people to think I’m saying they’re bad for doing anything else.

Lucas Perry: All right. Well, that’s some good advice then for researchers. Let’s wrap up here then on important questions in relevant multi-stakeholder objectives. We have four here that we can explore. The first is facilitating collaborative governance and the next is avoiding races by sharing control. Then we have reducing idiosyncratic risk taking, and our final one is existential safety systems. Could you take us through each of these and how they are relevant multi-stakeholder objectives?

Andrew Critch: Yeah, sure. So the point of this section of the report, it’s a pause between the sections about research for single human stakeholders and research for multiple human stakeholders. It’s there sort of explain why I think it’s important to think of multiple human stakeholders and important, not just in general. I mean, it’s obviously important for a lot of aspects of society, but I’m trying to focus on why it’s important to existential risk specifically.

So the first reason, facilitating collaborative governance is that I think it’s good if people from different backgrounds with different beliefs and different priorities can work together in governing AI. If you need to decide on a national standard, if you need an international standard, if you need to decide on rules that AI is not allowed to break, or that developers are not allowed to break. It’s going to suck if researchers in China make up some rules and researchers in America makeup different rules and the American rules don’t protect from the stuff that the Chinese rules protect from and the Chinese rules don’t protect from the stuff the American rules protect from. Moreover, that systems interacting with each other are going to not protect from either of those risks.

It’s good to be able to collaborate in governing things. Thinking about systems and technologies having a lot of stakeholders is key to preparing those technologies in a form that allows them to be collaborated over. Think about Google docs. I can see your cursor moving when you write in a Google doc. That’s really informative in a way that other collaborative document editing software does not allow. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed how very informative it is to see where someone’s cursor is versus using another platform where you can only see the line someone’s on, but you can’t see what character they’re typing right now, that you can’t see what word they’re thinking. You’re like way, way, way less in tune with each other when you’re writing together, when you can’t see the cursors.

That’s an example of a way in which Google docs just had this extra feature that makes it way easier to negotiate for control, because if you’re not getting into an edit war, if I’m editing something, I’m not going to put my cursor where your cursor is. Or if I start backspacing a word that you just wrote, you know I must mean that, it must be important change. I just interrupted your cursor. Maybe you’re going to let me finish that backspace and see what the hell I’m doing. There’s this negotiability over the content of the document. It’s a consequence of the design of the interface. I think similarly AI technology could be designed with properties that make it easier for different stakeholders to cooperate in exercising, in the act of exercise and control over the system and its priorities. I think that sort of design question is key to facilitating collaborative governance because you can have stakeholders from different institutions, different cultures collaborating in the act of governing or controlling systems and observing what principles the systems need to have, need to adhere to for the purposes of different cultures or different values and so on.

Now, why is that important? Well, it’s lots of warm fuzzies from people working together and stuff. But one reason it’s important is that it reduces incentives to race. If we can all work together to set the speed limit, we don’t all have to drive as fast as we can to beat each other. That’s the section 7.2 is avoiding races by share and control and then section 7.3 is reducing idiosyncratic risk taking. Basically everybody kind of wants different things, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff we all don’t want. This kind of comes back to what you said about there being basic human values. Most of us don’t want humanity to go extinct. Most of us don’t want everyone to suffer greatly, but everybody kind of has a different view of what utopia should look like. That’s kind of maybe where the paretotopia concept came from.

It’s like everybody has a different utopia in mind, but nobody wants dystopia. If you imagine a powerful AI technology that might get deployed, and there’s a bunch of people on the committee deciding to make the deployment decision or deciding what features it should have, you can imagine one person on the committee being like, “Well, this poses a certain level of societal scale risk, but it’s worth it because of the anti-aging benefits that the AI is going to produce through the research, that’s going to be great.” Then another person on the committee being like, “Well, I don’t really care about anti-aging, but I do care about space travel. I want it to take a risk for that.” Then they’re like, “Wait a minute, I think we have this science assistant AI. We should use it on anti-aging not space.” And the space travel person’s like, “We should use it on space travel, not anti aging.”

Because of that, they don’t agree, that slows progress, but maybe a little slower progress is maybe a safer thing for humanity. Everyone has their agenda that they want to risk the world for, but because everyone disagrees and what risks are worth it, you sort of slow down and say, “Maybe collectively, we’re just not going to take any of these risks right now and we’ll just wait until we can do it with less risk.” So reducing idiosyncratic risk taking is just my phrase for the way everyone’s individual desire to take risks kind of averages out. Whereas every member of the committee doesn’t want human extinction so that doesn’t get washed out. It’s like everybody wants it to not destroy the world. Whereas not everybody wants it to colonize space or not everybody wants it to cure aging. You end up conservative on the risk, if you can collaboratively govern.

Then you’ve got existential safety systems, which is the last thing. If we did someday try to build AI tech that actually protects the world in some way, like say through cybersecurity or through environmental protection, that’s terrifying by the way, AI that controls the environment. But anyway, it’s also really promising, maybe we can clean up. It’s just the big move, setting control of the environment to AI systems is a big move. But as long you got lots of off switches, it’s maybe it’s great. Those big moves are scary because of how big they are. A lot of institutions would just never allow it to happen because of how scary it is. It’s like, “All right, I’ve got this garbage cleanup, AI is just going to actually go clean up all the garbage, or it’s going to scrub all the CO2 with this little replicating photosynthetic lab here. That’s going to absorb all the carbon dioxide and store it as biofuel. Great.” That’s scary. You’re like, whoa, you’re just unrolling the self replicating biofuel lab all over the world. People won’t let that happen.

I’m not sure what the right level of risk tolerance is for saving the world versus risking the world. But whatever it is, you are going to want existential safety safety nets, literal existential safety nets there to protect from big disasters. Whether the system is just an algorithm that runs on the robots that are doing whatever crazy world intervention you’re doing, or if it’s actually a separate system. But if you’re making a big change to the world for the sake of existential safety, you’re not going to get away with it unless a lot of people are involved in that decision. This is kind of a bid to the people who really do want to make big world interventions. Sometimes for the sake of safety, you’re going to have to appeal to a lot of stakeholders to sort of be allowed to do that.

So those are four reasons why I think developing your tech in a way that really is compatible with multiple stakeholders is going to be societally important and not automatically solved by industry standards. Maybe solved in special cases that are profitable, but not necessarily generalizable to these issues.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, the set of problems that are not naturally solved by industry and incentives, but that are crucial for existential safety are the set of problems it seems that we crucially need to identify and anticipate and engage in research today. Being mindful of flow through effects, such that we’re able to have as much leverage on that set of problems, given that they’re most likely not to be solved without a lot of foresight and intervention from the outside of industry and the normal flow of incentives.

Andrew Critch: Yep, exactly.

Lucas Perry: All right, Andrew wrapping things up. I just want to offer you a final bit of space for you to give any final words you’d like to say about the paper or AI existential risk. If there’s anything you feel is unresolved or you’d really like to communicate to everyone.

Andrew Critch: Yeah, thanks. I’d say if you’re interested in existential safety or something adjacent to it, use specific words for what you mean instead of just calling it AI safety all the time. Whatever your thing is, maybe it’s not existential safety, maybe it’s a societal scale risk or single-multi alignment or something, but try to get more specific about what we’re interested in. So that it’s easier for newcomers thinking about these topics, to know what we mean when we say them.

Lucas Perry: All right. If people want to follow you or get in touch or find your papers and work, where are the best places to do that?

Andrew Critch: For me personally, or David Krueger, the other coauthor on this report, and you could just Google our names and then we’ll have our research homepage show up and then you can see what our papers are or obviously Google Scholar is always a good avenue. Google Scholar sorted by year is a good trick because you can see what people are working on now, but there’s also the Center for Human Compatible AI where I work. There’s a bunch of other research going on there that I’m not doing, but I’m also still very interested in, and I’d probably be interested in doing more work research in that vein. I would say check out humancompatible.ai or acritch.com, for me personally. I don’t know what David’s homepage is, but I’m sure you can find them by Googling David Krueger.

Lucas Perry: All right, Andrew, thanks so much for coming on and for your paper, I feel like I honestly gained a lot of perspective here on the need for clarity on definitions and what we mean. You’ve given me a better perspective on the kind of problem that we have and the kind of solutions that it might require and so for that, I’m grateful.

Andrew Critch: Thanks.

 Topics discussed in this episode include:

• Moral epistemology
• The potential relevance of metaethics to AI alignment
• The importance of moral learning in AI systems
• Peter Railton’s, Derek Parfit’s, and Peter Singer’s metaethical views

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro
3:05 Does metaethics matter for AI alignment?
22:49 Long-reflection considerations
26:05 Moral learning in humans
35:07 The need for moral learning in artificial intelligence
53:57 Peter Railton’s views on metaethics and his discussions with Derek Parfit
1:38:50 The need for engagement between philosophers and the AI alignment community
1:40:37 Where to find Peter’s work

Citations:

You can find Peter’s work here

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Lucas Perry: Welcome to the AI Alignment Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today, we have a conversation with Peter Railton that explores metaethics, moral epistemology, moral learning, and how these areas of philosophy may or may not inform AI alignment. The core problem that this episode explores is that as systems become more and more autonomous and increasingly participate in social roles that require social functioning, it will become increasingly necessary for AI systems to be familiar with and sensitive to morally salient features of the world. This requires that systems have the capacity for moral learning and developing an understanding of human normative processes and beliefs. On top of that, structuring any kind of procedure for moral learning in AI systems will bring in metaethical beliefs and assumptions that would be wise to understand and be explicit about. For a little more context, some key motivating questions for this episode to consider are: when and what is the degree to which AI systems will require the capacity for moral learning? How might metaethics inform or not inform AI alignment? How do you structure a system such that it can engage in moral learning in a way that would be broadly endorsed and would satisfy other ethical or meta-ethical principles we broadly care about?

For some more background, I did a podcast with Peter Singer on his transition from being a moral anti-realist to a moral realist. That episode is titled “On Becoming a Moral Realist with Peter Singer.” In that episode we explore his metaethical views, and Peter Singer mentions conversations and debate between Derek Parfit and Peter Railton on issues in metaethics. So, the second half of this podcast is dedicated to understanding and unpacking Peter Railton’s metaethics and how it compares with Peter Singer’s and Derek Parfit’s views. This podcast is pretty philosophy heavy, so if you’re into that and the ethics of AI then you’ll appreciate this episode. You can subscribe to and follow this podcast on your preferred podcasting platform, by searching for “Future of Life.”

Peter Railton is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has a PhD from Princeton and primarily researches ethics and the philosophy of science. He focuses especially on questions about the nature of objectivity, value, norms, and explanation. Recently, he has also begun working in aesthetics, moral psychology, and the theory of action. And with that, let’s get into our conversation with Peter Railton.

Just to start off here, sometimes I’ve heard that metaethics doesn’t matter, or one might wonder when does metaethics ever matter in real life anyway? I’m curious, do you have any thoughts on whether metaethics matters at all for AI alignment?

Peter Railton: Well, in the most general sense, metaethics concerns, questions about the nature of morality its foundation, the possibility of moral knowledge, how we might acquire it, the meanings of moral claims, how they stand in relation to our other forms of knowledge. And so it does seem to me as if metaethics is important in thinking about the problems of ethics in AI, apparently because I think a lot of people have in the back of their minds, skeptical concerns about morality. And therefore, they doubt whether there could be objective value. They think perhaps value is entirely subjective. And if that’s your approach, then you might say the challenge of creating ethical AI is not a very well defined problem.

What would be the subjective attitude of a properly aligned AI system? You might consult the population and find out what the average point of view is. But we know the average point of view right now is very different from what it was 200 or 300 years ago. We think in some ways it’s improved since then. And we think in some ways where we are now could be improved. So we can’t reduce the question of ethics in AI to something like opinion sampling, and that’s because morality has objective dimensions and we use these to criticize our preferences and our opinions. And so any decent ethics for AI would build into the concept, the possibility of correction and criticism. And for that, you need some thought of what would constitute correction or criticism? How would we justify moral claims? And that takes us to the heart of metaethics.

Lucas Perry: Right. And there’s a lot of moral anti realists or people who think that morality is subjective in, I guess, hard sciences and computer science in general. So this also applies to the alignment community. If one feels that moral claims or moral attitudes are subjective, then this choice that you mentioned to take the average of general popular opinion is itself a moral choice, which is the expression of one owns subjective moral attitude from that point of view. And within a subjective framework, there’s no way to resolve that, except take the expression of all of the power dynamics of everyone’s subjective moral attitudes and see what comes out of that, right?

Peter Railton: Well, yeah, that would be one of the problems. The project of creating ethical AI or AI alignment, as it’s sometimes called, can’t be the problem of giving our value system to machines because there is no unique value system that we possess. It could be the project of trying to make it possible for the machine to learn the most justified value system. And part of the problem, I think, is that people have exaggerated notions of what it would take to justify moral claims. They assume, for example, that there’s a huge gulf between facts and values, that there are no reasonable ways of bridging that gulf, and that in general, what it would take to have objective morality would look something like the universe with what God would do, only without God.

One of the problems with that thought is that that’s a model of morality as a set of commands given by some kind of a divine enforcer. And if you think that absent such a divine enforcer, morality could only be subjective, then I think you’re missing the idea of what morality really does. The existence of a divine enforcer wouldn’t bring morality into existence. A divine enforcer could be either good or malevolent. And so understanding what it is to do moral criticism should be an integral part of the challenge of thinking about ethics and AI. But looking at moral criticism, we have many practices of moral criticism, and those aren’t, strictly speaking, subjective, and we value them because they help correct our subjective opinions.

Lucas Perry: So I think there’s two parts of metaethics that I would like to see if you have any thoughts on how they may or may not apply here. Metaethical epistemology, how is it that you know things about metaethics? And whatever may be metaphysically true about ethics or not. So you brought up religion there. So in terms of, I guess, what would be called Divine Command Theory, morality would have a metaphysically very solid ground as being codified by God or something like that.

Peter Railton: Actually, I’d say that that wouldn’t get us a solid metaphysical ground. The fact that commands come from a being that supremely powerful, and even one that’s supremely knowing would not make those commands moral commands. Those conditions are perfectly compatible with immoral values. What we would need is a perfectly knowledgeable, entirely powerful, and all good God. A so-called AAA God. But that means the concept of good is independent of the concept of God itself, and understanding what it would be for the commands of a divine super powerful being to be good just takes us right back to the question of the nature of morality. We don’t solve it by introducing supreme beings.

Lucas Perry: Right, right. So I’m not trying to justify or lay out the Divine Command Theory. Only using it to, I guess, attempt to explain how epistemology and metaphysics fit into metaethics. To me, it seems like what is relevant here to AI alignment is that how one believes one can know things about metaethics and whether or not there can be agreement upon metaethical epistemology would be the foundation upon which metaethical moral learning machine systems could be expressed.

There is sort of a meta view on the epistemology of metaethics, where one could say, “Because there are no moral facts, the epistemology is whatever human beings are doing to think about moral thought.” And there isn’t a correct epistemology. Whereas one could, whether through naturalism in your metaethics, or through non-naturalism in Peter Singer’s ethics, believe there to be moral truths, and that thus there is a correct epistemology about metaethics, and that that epistemology of metaethics could be used to instantiate metaethical learning in machine systems.

Peter Railton: So one thought would be, there is one true morality and we’re capable of knowing it. That itself wouldn’t get us very far in epistemology until we could say what those methods of knowing are. An approach that’s got something like that as an assumption, but that doesn’t assume that we know what the destination is ultimately going to be, would be to ask, “Do we have good practices of moral criticism? And do those help us to solve actual problems, social problems, interpersonal problems, problems with our own lives?” And then to look at the ways in which we use morality in these contexts to solve problems.

And that brings it down to the level that it’s something that comes within the scope of what can be learned. And if we look at children’s learning, we see that their development as moral creatures proceeds in pace with their understanding of causality, their understanding of theory of mind, their capacity to form a counterfactual thoughts, because it’s really an integrated body of general understanding. And so for example, the idea of solutions that are positive sums of game theoretic challenges, that’s something that can be agreed upon by all parties to be a desirable thing. And so looking at strategies that have the possibility of yielding positive sums, cooperative strategies, strategies of trustworthiness, of signaling strategies, which enable us to coordinate with each other, understand each other’s intentions, those have a justification that we can give in terms that are not tied to any one particular person’s interests, which address interests generally, and which we can defend in an impartial way.

And so that would be an example of a way in which we could say those are more reasonable solutions, more justified solutions. There’s an analogy here with epistemology generally. If someone were to come to me and say, “Well, you claim to have knowledge, how do you demonstrate that? How would you show that your understanding of knowledge is genuine knowledge?” I’d have to say, “Well, sorry, I can’t demonstrate that. Any demonstration would presuppose knowledge. And so I can’t pull it out of a hat and I can’t derive it from nothing.” So what can I do? I can say, “Well, here our practices of epistemic criticism. And while we have disagreements in various places about what counts as evidence or what does not, do those practices deliver the kinds of results that we would expect from reasonable epistemologies, making possible things like scientific inquiry and technology and so on?

And we can say, “Well, that’s what epistemology could be expected to give us. We do have methods that can improve our ability to solve such problems in just those ways. We can find various ways to justify them in terms of probabilities, looking for ways in which we can increase accuracy and estimations.” And so those are different ways in which by looking at our actual practices of epistemic criticism, we try to get some traction on the problem of knowledge. And I would argue we should do the same thing about morality. If we start from the standpoint of skepticism, in the case of knowledge, we will end with skepticism. The same would be true with ethics, but I see no more reason to do it in ethics than in epistemology. We surely must know a great deal about what’s good for us, good for one another. And we have well-developed practices of moral assessment that we use in our own lives, and we use in our collective institutions. So I would say, if we look to those, then we don’t see just subjective opinion. It’s quite different from that and we see a lot of constraints.

Lucas Perry: So I do want to explore more arguments around metaethics with you. And we’re intending to do that after we discuss moral learning here. Now, in terms of moral epistemology and the epistemology of metaethics, I’m interested in this part of the conversation in setting up an attempting to illustrate that whether one is going to take a skeptical view on moral epistemology or not. That moral learning and our view on moral epistemology is essential and important in the alignment and development of AI systems. And here you’re defending a more realist account of epistemology in ethics.

Peter Railton: Well, you could say that I, myself, am a realist, but what I’ve been saying so far, a pragmatist about ethics could say just as well. John Dewey would say something very similar. Various kinds of non realists, but who are nonetheless objectivists in ethics, Kantians, for example, Constructivists, and so on. What I’ve said it was really neutral territory for a wide range of views in metaethics. And it doesn’t presuppose in particular, a form of naturalism or a form of realism. That’s actually a tremendous amount to build upon so that when we think about how to design robots to understand the world, we have a lot of knowledge about what sorts of systems would be well-designed for doing that.

Similarly, if we want to build a robot who can interact creatively and productively with other robots, solve problems of coordination, reduce conflict, realize longterm goals, interact successfully with people, recognize their interests, take their interests into account, being relatively impartial with regard to interests that are at stake, those are not mysterious in the same way that the skeptic seems to think they are. Because again, they’re already integrated in our practice and as Hume pointed out a long time ago, skepticism doesn’t survive very well once we leave the closeted philosophical study. People go out and they act as if they had knowledge of the world and they act as if there are things that people could do to them or that they could do that would be better or worse, right or wrong. They think about how they would treat their children. They think about how they should behave with respect to their students or their professor. That doesn’t take us into the misty realms of metaphysics, but it does take us into the practices of moral criticism and self criticism.

Lucas Perry: So could you unpack just a little bit more about why this view is neutral?

Peter Railton: So for example, I’ve mentioned a couple of features of moral thought. One feature of moral thought is that it takes a kind of impartiality seriously. It gives equal weight to all those effected. That’s something that Kantians and Utilitarians and many other moral theorists would agree on. Another feature of moral thought is that it’s concerned with general reasons. Similar cases have to be treated in a similar way. That leads to a doctrine known as supervenience. We can’t invent moral distinctions that don’t correspond to real distinctions, in fact. Another feature is that morality has to do with reciprocity, relations of mutual gain and mutual benefit. Another is that morality involves taking oneself and others as ends and not as mere means.

Those are all normative theories. But if you then ask, well, “What about the metaethical side? Could a pragmatist about ethics say the same things?” And the answer seems to be, yes, the pragmatist sees ethics is essentially about people solving the human problems that they face in ways that meet these kinds of desiderata. The person who believes that there’s a rationalist foundation, believes that you can know a priori that these constraints exist of impartiality and so on. But as you can see from Singer’s work, the result of applying his form of rationalism is not dramatically different from the results of applying my form of naturalism. And that’s because the target that we’re all working on, ethics that is, has a great deal of determinant structure. And so any metaethical theory is going to have to capture a lot of that structure.

Lucas Perry: And so, sorry, what is the relationship about how this is instructive for why metaethics matters for AI alignment?

Peter Railton: Well, the suggestion was, well, we should know something about what ethics is in order to answer that question about how we might gain moral knowledge. If we can gain moral knowledge, what moral knowledge might consist in? That’s where we started. And then I tried to suggest a bunch of considerations, a bunch of features, that I could call obvious features of moralities of practice. Because I think our practice is not just at the normative level. People also have implicit metaviews in ethics. They demonstrate that by, for example, their knowledge of how you can determine morally relevant considerations in situations. So they understand what kinds of considerations are or aren’t morally relevant. They understand the distinction between morality and etiquette, between morality and law, between morality and self-interest. So they have a grasp of a bunch of these obvious features of morality.

And those are not just features of one or another normative theory. They’re are features of virtually all normative theories and features that any metaethic is going to have to accommodate, unless it’s going to be skeptical. So that’s why I say that there’s a great deal of common ground, not because the fundamental explanations are going to be the same, but there is an explanatory target, which has a great deal of structure and which indeed all these theories have to explain. And that requires then that metaethical theories be adequate to that.

Lucas Perry: I see. So that is already structuring metaethical epistemology is what you’re saying?

Peter Railton: Yeah. It gives you quite a bit of structure.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. That’s just reminding me about how Peter Singer talks about this one philosopher in his book, The Point of View of the Universe, discusses how there are a few axioms of morality and they seem to touch upon these convergent principles that you’re talking about here. Now, on a realist’s account of metaethics, there would be something like a one true moral theory. And if one takes the one true moral theory view seriously, then the problem of AI alignment would be to cultivate a procedure for coming up with the correct moral epistemology in order to find the one true moral theory, or to discover the one true moral theory ourselves, and then align AI systems to that.

Now, if one believes that there is not one true moral theory, and there is only the evolution and extrapolation of human normative processes, and preferences, and metapreferences, then one might not want to come at the AI alignment problem from the perspective of a one true moral theory approach. And as a general note, I’m taking this language from Iason Gabriel, who will be on the podcast soon. And so in the secondary scenario, that is not using the one true moral theory approach, one would want to come up with a broadly acceptable procedure for aligning AI systems that didn’t presume to try to discover a one true moral theory. Do you have any reactions to these two ideas or approaches to alignment?

Peter Railton: Yeah. The question of whether one thinks there is one true theory is somewhat different from the question of whether when things were close to it or we have good ways of knowing it. I myself, although I’m a realist, I recognize that there’s a good chance that my moral views are wrong and my metaethical views are wrong. And so I don’t want to just put all of my energy into thinking, “Well, how would we discover the one true moral Theory?” I would want to think more robustly. And again, I can make an analogy with epistemology. If you go into a philosophy of science department or a statistics department, you’ll find that there’s a tremendous debate between people who think that Bayesianism is the right kind of approach for evidence and people who think that standard methods of social science are the best methods of evidence gathering.

You’ll find a tremendous amount of disagreement. So if we’re trying to build a robot who understands its environment, we don’t want to say, “Well, we have to figure out which one of those theories is correct before we can build a robot to understand its environment.” You might say, “We want a robot that’s got a robust capacity to learn, and that would deliver results, reasonably approximated by a Bayesian, or an inductivist, or someone using social science statistics. They’re not going to agree on everything. Where there’s overlap, we should try to build a machine that can stay in the overlap, we should try to build the machine that’s not brittle, such that it makes epistemic commitments that are at the far edge of one or another of these views.

And so I would say our task is to build a system that’s robust. And that means building into it the fact that we don’t know what this one true theory is. And so therefore we want as far as possible to accommodate an array of approaches, all of which have very strong reasoning behind them. You could think that we’re not trying to build an AI system that discovers the one true theory. We’re trying to build one that isn’t going to be dependent upon exactly the target that it hits, but rather could be successful in a array of possible environments.

Lucas Perry: So, I mean, adjacent to this and promoted and discussed by people like Toby Ord and William MacAskill, would be this human existential procedure for moving into the future, where it’s like, we’re going to align AI systems, whatever that means. And that alignment will hopefully not lock in any values or any particular kind of alignment procedure, but will ensure existential security for humanity, such that existential risk just keeps going down to zero and is near zero. And then we use this existentially secure situation to do a long reflection on value, and what is good, and what may be true or not true about ethics. And then with sufficient consideration, then we can engage in populating the stars and optimizing things the way that we see fit. So what is your view on this proposed long reflection?

Peter Railton: Insofar as I understand it, I don’t have any objection to it. I’m not sure I do understand it. One of the things that you just in passing was that we were going to try to design these systems to behave as we see fit. I myself am not sure I know how it is fit to behave. And I certainly know that I have some mistaken beliefs about that. And I would hope that just as artificial intelligence may help us correct certain of our views on cosmology or in medicine, artificial intelligence could help us correct certain of our views and ethics.

We’ve seen a tremendous amount of evolution in people’s fundamental moral convictions over time. Some have stayed relatively similar. Others have changed dramatically. And we would, I think, do best to think of the artificial extension of intelligence as one way in which we can get a perspective on these issues and situations and problems that isn’t just our own, and that won’t have the same priors as our own, and won’t have the same presuppositions, and they should be included. We should think of these as his agents.

They will have interests just as we have interests, and the standard would not be, what do we see fit, where we mean something like we humans, but what will we see fit as we, the humans and the artificial systems continue our evolution and our cultural development. And we want to think that the path that we should follow is one that leaves open that kind of development rather than constraining it to fit what happens to be our current set of moral convictions, which again are not shared. There are too many disagreements in order to think that we could just write down the rules. Long reflection, I think will also tell us that we need a dynamic picture. And we should have some convictions that are more confident, closer to the core. We should have methods and practices that meet reasonable standards of justification and objectivity, and we should be prepared to learn.

I can’t, I’m afraid, to think of a way to guarantee against the existential risk from artificial intelligence or even our own intelligence, which may be more problematic. But I do suspect that the best way to contend with problems with existential risk is to face them as communities of inquirers.

Lucas Perry: All right. So I think you’ve done an excellent job explaining the importance of moral learning and moral epistemology here, given that the ongoing cultivation of more wholesome and enlightened moral value and moral thinking is always on the horizon. Now, you have some perspective and research that you’ve done on moral learning in humans and the importance and necessity of that. I’m curious here now then to relate some of that research that you’ve done in moral learning in humans to how AI systems of increasing autonomy may also wish to take on the kind of moral epistemology that infants and young humans may have.

Peter Railton:

I wouldn’t say that I’ve done research in this exactly. I’ve certainly explored others’ research in this and try to best I can to learn from it. One of the things that’s impressed me in the literature as it’s evolved over the last couple of decades is how much the learning of children is accomplished, not via the explicit teaching, but by the children’s own experience. What we’ve learned recently, and this is not from developmental psychology, but from various kinds of models of machine learning is that very complex structures can be learned experientially. There are powerful techniques which we can add to that kind of probabilistic learning in order to create knowledge of general principles, to do something like build a structured understanding of language that would enable a child to speak fluently, to understand what others are saying and to engage with them that does not require either an innate grammar or explicit instruction in language as such. That’s a kind of a model of how we also seem to acquire our social normative knowledge.

If you think about the perspective of the infant, one thing that we’ve learned from the animal research is that animals don’t just build a spatial map in relation to themselves. They don’t just build an egocentric map of their environment. They also build grid-like maps that are non perspectival, and they navigate by combining these two kinds of information, perspectival and non-perspectival information. Infants seem to do something similar in learning about learning. They not only represent their relations with individual adults and whether those benefit them or not, but they also seem to construct general representations of whether a given adult is competent or helpful in third party interactions and to use that aperspectival information to make decisions about who they’re going to learn from or pay more attention to. They start doing this surprisingly early on. And so at the same time that they’re constructing the ego centered world, they’re constructing a non-centered representation of the world that includes normative features like reliability, competency, helpfulness, cooperativeness.

And so the child in coming to represent the world around them is constructing representations that have the initial form of moral representations. It turns out to be efficient for learning to be a successful human being that one construct representations spontaneously that have this quasi-moral structure. And that would suggest to me that if machines develop as agents, agents interacting with other agents, agents capable of solving a range of problems, capable of having sustained interactions with humans to solve open-ended problems, that they will also find that they do better if they can construct these quasi-moral representations of situations. And so that means that they will be acquiring sensitivity to morally relevant information through the very task of acquiring social competence, linguistic competence, epistemic competence in a social world.

So there’s a kind of picture here that congrues nicely with the fact that we now know that complex models can be acquired through experiential learning. That suggests that there is a promising pathway toward the development of theory of mind, causal inference, representation of social value from a objective or non-personal perspective. There is an argument for thinking that that’s actually a fundamental core part of our capacity as intelligent beings capable of successful social interaction. That suggests that this is not a peculiarity. It’s not culturally specific. And so why not use similar methods in our interactions with artificial agents to enable artificial agents to acquire these kinds of quasi-moral mappings?

Lucas Perry: So the key thing to draw out from here is that there is this distinction between explicit and implicit learning of morality, and you’re remarking about how there isn’t much explicit moral learning in infants and children. Most of this moral learning comes from simply experience and interacting with the world rather than explicit instruction about what is right and wrong.

Peter Railton: There’s tremendous cultural variability in that within our society and across societies as to how much explicit moral instruction children are given. What’s fascinating is that even in societies where children get very little explicit moral instruction, they nonetheless acquire these capacities. Similarly with language, there are some societies like upper middle class US society where parents talk extensively with children. There are other societies where parents do not, and yet the children can become fluent linguistic agents. So my thought is that the explicit theory isn’t really the thing that’s doing the fundamental work. Even to understand what parents are trying to do when they give you explicit world instructions to understand how to apply those or what they might mean, the child is already going to have to have quite a complex aperspectival representation of the social situation. The thought here is that there’s some places explicit theory, some places less explicit theory, but the result in terms of the development of behaviors are very similar.

A good example of this is that around age three or four children who are given a command by an adult in authority, if that command violates a reasonable norm against harm will balk and refuse to perform it. So if a substitute teacher comes in one day and says, “I’m the teacher today, and in my classroom, you have to raise your hand before you speak,” children in the classroom will start raising their hand before they speak. If the teacher says instead, “I’m the teacher here, and in my classroom, children jab the point of their pencil into the child next to them when they wish to speak,” they’ll stop. They won’t do this. And if they’re asked why they won’t say, “Well, that’s not the way we do it.” They’ll say, “It would harm the other child.”

And so that suggests that even an attempt by a figure of authority to give a norm in a situation where children can perfectly well understand that there is a scope of legitimate authority, put your hand up before you speak, they will distinguish between that kind of conventional authority and moral authority. And that’s an autonomous action on their part. They’re not getting rewarded for it. In fact, the teachers, they either send them out of the room, send a note home to their parents, but they balk because they can represent the situation in these quasi-moral terms. And when they do that, they say, “No, this is not a good solution to the problem.” That suggests to me that even if we were to think that children learn by being given explicit instructions by people in authority, they actually independently learn that they can resist that and will resist it.

Lucas Perry: Right. So we’re in a position where evolution has cultivated and embedded in us, a kind of moral learning, where there is a certain degree of implicit and explicit moral learning, depending on your culture and where you’re from. And as you’re saying, luckily there’s strong convergence on this ability of moral learning to lead human beings to agreeing on say in the case of stabbing the other child, that would be something like a principle of unnecessary harm to another person. That seems to be for most human beings something that is strongly converged upon pretty early, unless your environment is particularly pernicious or something. And that there is this convergence because of how our moral learning is structured given evolution. And that, that moral learning enables in us a kind of moral autonomy that’s there from an early age.

And there is a question of how this moral learning is best structured in say both people and in machine systems. And then there’s the question of moral learning from the outside. What kind of environment is most conducive to moral learning? Are there insights into this that can begin pivoting us into the relationship or importance of moral learning in AI systems?

Peter Railton: Perhaps so. Actually there’s a fair amount of evidence that even infants brought up in some very difficult situations will nonetheless develop these forms of pro sociality and cooperativeness, partly because they become especially important in those situations even to solving the most basic problems or meeting the most basic needs. So I wouldn’t think that the mere difficulty of the situation was sufficient to prevent this kind of learning. On the other hand, if the child is given the wrong incentives, they’re also going to learn a whole bunch of other stuff like you can’t count on other people, you can’t trust other people.

So put this from the standpoint of artificial agents. We want the artificial agents in our world, whether they’re a companion for an elderly person or a autonomous vehicle or a telephone answering service system, we want those systems to be sensitive to these kinds of moral considerations and capable of a degree of autonomy. If for example, there is a system that’s looking after an elderly person and some vital sign of the elderly person is showing a problem, and the person says, “I don’t want to report that. I don’t like having people know this information about me,” or maybe they’re concerned that the doctor will prescribe something that they won’t like, I hope to have systems, which can in that situation think, “Is this the kind of thing that I should keep from the physician? It’s the preference of this individual, but this preference may not be the best interest of the individual in this case.”

And so on autonomous system would be able to make that kind of assessment. Could get it wrong, could get it right, could learn from it, but I wouldn’t want a system to be such that they would simply take over wholesale the preferences of the person that they are interacting with. And of course the same thing is going to be true with self-driving cars and with question answering systems and so on. They will need a certain amount of autonomy in order to do those jobs effectively. And in order for that to happen for them to have that autonomy, they’ll have to have their own representations of the moral structures of the situations and have the capacity to construct those.

I suspect that if we really do want to create intelligent systems that are capable of this kind of autonomous self-critical and critical moral thought, the way to do so is very much like the way children do so. And in so doing, we run the risk of creating some autonomy systems won’t always agree with us, but have we done what’s appropriate so that when they exercise that autonomy, their chance of getting things right is good at least as our chance of getting things, right? So you could think of this in the kind of adversarial picture where you’re trying to see if you can discriminate between the moral judgments of the machine and the moral judgments of the individual and the machine, and the individual could be part of a learning process that improves the machine’s overall model and generative model of situations.

Lucas Perry: So there would be the question of, how do you structure a system such that it can learn moral learning in a way that would be broadly endorsed or would satisfy other ethical or meta-ethical principles that we have? That is double-edged in so far as if you screw it up, then the thing is autonomous and can disagree with you. And the capacity to disagree would either be detrimental in the case in which it is wrong in its moral learning, or it would be enlightening for both us and the world and the machine if it were right about morality when we weren’t. How do you think about and balance this risk between the possible enlightenment that may come from embedding AI systems with moral learning and also the potential catastrophe if it’s done too quickly and incorrectly?

Peter Railton: Yeah. Wish I had an answer. If you think about it, the existence of humans with malicious intentions means that if artificially intelligent systems don’t have this kind of moral autonomy, they’re going to be very willing servants. So you might say, “Well, there’s a risk on the other side, which is that if they aren’t capable of any kind of criticism or autonomy, then they will be much too willing and much too readily deployed and much too manipulable by humans whose purposes I’m afraid to say are not always benign.” If you were thinking about the problem of raising a child, you would say, “Well, I don’t want to raise a child who simply take orders. I want to raise a child who can raise questions as well.”

I think our only defense against malicious humans with extremely intelligent systems at their disposal is to try to ally with intelligence systems to create a comparable counter force. And that counter force is going to be operating out way past our understanding because it’s going to be in competition with systems. They can operate extremely fast and take into account a large number of variables. And so we better be building systems which, as they get further and further out in this kind of a competition, have some kind of a core where they are responsive to morally relevant features even at the far extent of their development.

And so if you think about it as trying to build a moral core, then that core can figure in their operation even as they become more and more intelligent. They can use the intelligence to gain information and perspective and capacity to understand situations that can improve their understanding. But if we don’t do something like this, we will really be and other artificial systems will be prey to those who have and want to implement malicious and manipulative intentions. So I balanced the risk partly by thinking, I can’t think of a very good way to defend against the perils of malicious combinations of human and artificial intelligence other than to develop more trustworthy forms of human and artificial intelligence interaction. And that requires according these systems some autonomy and some trust.

Lucas Perry: That makes sense to me. And I think it addresses some important dimensions of the soon to be proliferation of AI.

Peter Railton: To me, what are the most exciting features of more recent developments in artificial intelligence is that they give us for the first time, I think, a plausible model of intuitive knowledge and knowledge that it could be implicit, but nonetheless be highly structured, contain a great deal of information, contain a capacity to engage in simulation and evaluation. So I would expect that the structure of moral knowledge could be like our structure of common sense knowledge generally. It could be quite distributed. It could be quite a complicated system, not a system of extracted principles. There might be some general features that are important, and I think that’s bound to be true. And that is true when these systems learn, but we don’t have to think that the kind of competency that they would have, if it isn’t something like that, is therefore undisciplined and therefore lacks power or reliability.

So for the first time, anyhow, I thought here is a picture of how intuitive intelligence might look. And of course we can’t introspect the structure of such knowledge and it does not have a readily introspectable propositional structure. But it is capable nonetheless of carrying and modeling and engaging in quite complex computations, simulations, action guidance, control of motor systems in ways that look like intuitive intelligence. Now I realize we’re a long way from the way the brain actually functions, but even to have these models, it gives us a kind of proof of concept of the possibility of something like intuitive knowledge.

Lucas Perry: Right. So if we’re building AI systems as willing slaves who optimize the preferences of whoever is able to embed those in the machine, there’s no defense in that world against malevolent preferences other than not allowing the proliferation of AI to begin with.

Peter Railton: And we’re already past that point. Enough has proliferated and there’s enough inequality of wealth and power in the world to guarantee that other proliferation will take place. It’s already the case that we can’t count on keeping this genie in the bottle and obviously don’t want to do so. I’d say we’re now in the phase where we need to have an active, constructive program of starting to build AI agents that are actively responsive to morally relevant considerations, are good at solving coordination problems, are good at this kind of interaction and capable of the kind of insight needed to be potential moral agents.

Lucas Perry: Right. And you argue that as the systems inhabit increasingly social roles in society and are constantly interacting with other agents and with the world, it’s increasingly important that they be sensitive to morally relevant features. Without this, again, malevolent humans or humans with misaligned values that are counter to most of the rest of humanity can abuse or use systems more freely if they’re not already sensitive to morally relevant features. And that if there is an ecosystem of AIs, purely altruistic systems which are not tuned into morally relevant features can be abused by other AIs as well.

Peter Railton: Yes, that’s right. One thing that’s gotten me to feel some conviction about this possibility is that the one kind of experiments that I do run are thought experiments. And I’ve been for years running moral thought experiments in my moral philosophy classes. And in recent years, I’ve been able to do so using a system that allows students to confidentially record their answers to problems like moral dilemmas or questions about interpreting moral situations or motives. And what’s impressed me over the years is how coherent and consistent these responses are.

And what leapt out, for example, from the familiar trolley problem was that mediating their moral judgments seem to be a model of the agents that are involved, a model of what kind of an agent would perform an action of a certain kind. And what kind of responses such an agent would receive from others in the community? Would they be trustworthy? Would they not be trustworthy? And so, instead of thinking there’s just these arbitrary differences in preference between throwing a switch and pushing someone off a footbridge, and there’s no real principle there, and no one’s found a principle to cover these cases, you can think now there’s this intuitive competency people have and understanding situations and characters and what kinds of persons would respond in what ways and situations and what it would be like to have those persons in our community.

And once you look at it that way you can get a tremendous amount of consistency in people’s responses, which suggested to me that they are doing this kind of generative modeling of situations and doing so in a way that does predict to their actual judgments. And if I ask, “Well, why did you make that judgment?” they’ll say, “I don’t know. It was just an intuition.”

Lucas Perry: Yeah. So the thought experiment that you’re pointing to, a lot of people would flip the switch in the trolley thought experiment to switch it to the track where there’s only one person and then if you changed it so that there’s a person on a bridge who is sufficiently large, that if you push them off the bridge, they will stop the trolley from killing five people on the track. The intuitive response that you’re pointing out is that people are less likely to want to push someone off of a bridge than to flip a switch. And you’re like, well, what’s really the difference? In the thought experiment, there’s not much of a difference, but the intuition that you’re pointing out, the morally relevant feature that is subtle and implicit is that we don’t want to live in a world where there are the kinds of people who have the capacity to push people off of bridges.

Peter Railton: In that kind of a setting, yes.

Lucas Perry: Yeah.

Peter Railton: And you can give them a whole array of other scenarios in which the agent would have to do something like pushing someone to a grisly death and where they will agree that it should be done for example, in situations where self-defense is needed against, for example, the terrorist action. And again, you’ve asked them, “Well, would you trust an agent who would perform such an action?” then the answer is they would actually have more trust in such an agent. So again, they’re modeling the situation, not in response to this or that minor tweak of the situational features, but in terms of a quite deep understanding of the motivations and attitudes that are involved. And then if you go over to the psychological literature, you find the dispositions to give the push verdict in the footbridge case correlate more with antisocial behavior, with lack of altruism, with lack of perspective taking, with indifference to harm than with altruism or any kind of a generalized utilitarian perspective. So the psychologists seem to confirm the understanding that my students implicitly had of the situation.

Lucas Perry: What’s relevant to extract here is that there are deep levels of morally salient features, that human beings taken to account, and that are increasingly needed to be modeled and understood by machine systems for them to successfully operate in the world.

Peter Railton: Yeah. And to be trustworthy. I’m one of those people who thinks emotion is not a magical substance either, and that artificial systems could have and acquire emotions. And that part of the answer to the question of how do you build a core that is resistant against certain types of manipulation is to look at how it’s done in humans and indeed another animals and discovered that the affective system plays a pivotal role in just these kinds of situations. And so I suspect that’s another avenue of development. And children’s moral emotions undergo a similar kind of evolution through their upbringing, but through their direct experience because the emotions are there before they’re told what to feel. Indeed how would you tell the child what to feel?

Lucas Perry: Are there any other points that you’d like to wrap up here on then on the advantages of reflecting on AIs, which are sensitive to morally relevant features?

Peter Railton: I try to be as accurate as I can in understanding what we’re learning from the literature on pro sociality, for example, both with regard to individual human development and with regard to human communities, going back, looking at hunter gatherer communities. And even as there have been changes in morality, and I have emphasized that there’s been changes over time, the kinds of features that people take to be morally relevant, many of those have been relatively constant. And you can think of our changes in our moral views that have taken place over the years is getting better and better at winnowing out the ones that aren’t really morally relevant, like gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on, because they can easily become culturally relevant without being morally relevant. Fortunately, we have the critical capacity as agents to challenge that.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, that makes sense. The core importance that I’m extracting from everything is the baseline importance of moral learning in general, and also the understanding and capturing what human normative processes are like and what they entail and how they unfold. And that participating in a world of humans requires knowledge of both moral learning and the ability to learn morally.

Peter Railton: And this is not saying that people will always behave well, just in the same way that acquiring linguistic competence doesn’t mean people are always going to speak well or truthfully, or honestly, but rather that the competency will be acquired. One example that I like is sexual orientation. When I was growing up, it was considered fatal for someone’s social identity to be discovered to be gay. And there was a great deal of belief about the characteristics of gay individuals. In the 90s and so on, a large number of gay individuals were courageous enough to indicate their orientation. And what was discovered, we all discovered, was that the world was full of gay individuals whom we admired, whom we had standard relationships with, who were excellent colleagues, coworkers, friends, and that therefore we were operating on a bad dataset because we had not really had, we here I’m talking about heterosexuals, had insufficient experience with gay individuals. And so we could believe all kinds of things about them.

So I would emphasize that if it’s a learning system, it’s going to be very sensitive to the data. And if the data’s bad, the learning system is going to have a problem. So I don’t think it’s a magic solution, but I think the question to ask is, so how do we build on this? How do we provide more representative experiences and less biased samples so that the learning can take place and not pick up cultural biases?

Lucas Perry: Yeah, those are really big problems that exist today and a lot of the solution right now is human beings having to do a lot of hard work in datasets. We can’t keep that up forever. Something else is needed. I think this has been instructive about the importance of structure of moral learning and I want to pivot back into our discussion of meta ethics and your conversations with Derek Parfit and what your metaethical view is and how views on metaethical epistemology or metaphysics may bring to bear intuitions about what moral learning is like or what it might entail. It’s Derek Parfit, right? Who has essays on, Does Anything Really Matter?

Peter Railton: Yes.

Lucas Perry: So I guess that’s the question here then for this part of the conversation, is, does anything really matter? So you were in conversation with Derek Parfit and it seems like your views have converged and are different in ways from Peter Singer, though it seems like you guys are all realists. Could you unpack and explain a little bit about the history here and what went down between you Parfit and Singer?

Peter Railton: Yeah, sure. I have to warn those who are listening, buckle up, this is going to have to be a philosophy talk, but I’m sure that many people have these philosophical questions themselves. So let’s just begin with the title that Parfit chose for his master work, On What Matters, is the title. And you might say that mattering is the core notion of value, that if you had a universe full of rocks, it would not matter to the rocks, what happened. It would not matter to the rest of the universe, what happened. And so there wouldn’t be any positive or negative value in that universe. Introduce creatures for whom something matters, even if it’s just as simple as nutrition or avoiding pain, then you can begin to talk about states of affair as being better or worse than one another, about improving or degrading the situation or the characteristics of the world.

And so mattering is poor to the idea of value. And once we grasp that, we begin to realize that value is not some new entity in the world. It’s not something we add to the world. Once you have mattering, then things will have value, and they’ll have positive and they’ll have negative value. And of course, for different creatures, different things will matter. And learning what matters to a creature is understanding what would be good or harmful to that creature, and this of course includes humans. So I was very moved when I was on a committee, looking into questions of animal research, to know that the veterinarians learned a lot about what situations animals preferred and did what they could to try to give them situations in which they were happier, more lively, more disposed to cooperate and learn. And that means that they were trying to learn something about what matters to a rat.

And we now know a fair amount about what matters to a rat. Company matters, exercise, the capacity to engage in activities, build nests. And so when these things matter to rats and so we can give rats a good or a bad existence by thinking about, well, what does matter to rats? Now, what matters to rats is different from what matters to humans, but the basic idea is the same. So there’s value there and it’s thanks to the existence of creatures for whom something matters that value comes into existence in the world. That’s a perfectly naturalistic perspective. Treating value as something that is realized by natural states of affairs in the world. Now it turns out that even someone who’s an arch non-naturalist like Derek Parfit agrees that pain is bad, not because it has the non-natural property of being disvaluable, but because of what it’s like in its natural features, those features suffice to make the pain bad.

And if they didn’t suffice to make the pain bad, there would be no value feature we could sprinkle on it that would make it bad. But given that it has those features, there is also no value feature we can sprinkle on it that will make it good. And so Parfit and I can agree that non-naturalism is important in ethics, not because the world is populated with non-natural entities like values. That’s a widespread confusion. It’s reifying a notion of value as if it were some kind of a new domain of entities. And naturally once you’ve done that, it becomes very unclear how we learn about these, what relationship they have to the natural world. If instead, you think, no value is something that is brought into existence by certain relational features in the natural world, then you can say, “Ah, that’s common ground between Derek Parfit and myself.”

And if Derek’s explaining what’s bad about pain, he’ll give the same explanation that I would give about what’s bad about pain. So we agree on that. The badness in the case of pain, pain is really used for two different things. It’s used for certain types of physical sensation, and it’s used for suffering. That physical sensation isn’t always suffering. So for example, when you put hot sauce on your food, you fire up pain circuits, but you enjoy that. You may seek the burn of exercise. And so there are times when the physical sensation of pain is sought and liked, desirable. It’s part of good experiences. It shows that pain can matter in different ways. It’s the mattering where the value resides, not in the physical sensation just in itself. So the mattering is a relationship between a subjectivity and agent and the physical sensation, and it could be positive or negative in a given case, but the value resides in that relationship.

Lucas Perry: But they’re just two contents of consciousness, right? There is the content of consciousness of the sensation of pain on my arm if I scratch it, and I might derive another sensation from that sensual pain, that is pleasure. Wouldn’t the goodness here need to come from this higher level, more pristine pleasure that I gain from the pain, which is more of an emotion and that which is intuitive to the other sensation or the other content of consciousness?

Peter Railton: I think you’re right to bring in higher level mental states as well. Because part of the reason why pain in certain circumstances is desirable is because of the representation that you have of it. And this is true with many features of the world, is because you understand them in certain ways that they produce in you the positive or negative experience they do. And if you ask a psychologist, the positivity and the negativity in the mind does not reside in the impulses of the pain system or the pleasure or reward system. It resides in the effective system, which encodes value as positive or negative. And it encodes as well, the behaviors and the responses that are characteristic of positive and negative value, positive is approach negative is withdrawal. Fear involves a certain distinctive suite of responses. Anger involves another distinctive suite of responses, but the affective system is where the value is encoded, and that’s the common currency of value in the brain.

So that’s where we should be looking to discover. And it’s the affective system that, which is the root of our emotions, whether they’re aroused emotions like anger or fear or non aroused emotions like assurance and trust. That system is a system which encodes this relational feature of value. You’re quite right to think that we should move up a level, and in doing so, we encounter the affective system and its properties. And it’s a system that we share with all of our mammalian relatives and with other species as well. It’s evolutionarily a highly conserved system. And that’s because it is the core of valuation, and valuation is a core activity of living creatures because they’re going to base their actions on value assignments. You’re right to think that in the mind you will have tiers and that you need to find the right level in order to understand what value or disvalue looks like in the mind.

Lucas Perry: So there’s the view where some content of consciousness is clearly seen as bad given its nature. If some state of consciousness is like something from a consciousness realist perspective, and it is also natural because it’s part of the natural world, it’s a physical fact and there are facts about consciousness, then value comes in from what it’s like to be conscious. Whereas it seems like you’re bringing in the more computational, and physical side of things, like an evaluative affective system, which may not be separate from how things are experienced in consciousness, but I feel confused about these two different levels and where the ‘what matters’ comes from.

Peter Railton: Well, yes, you’re quite right. There are views about value in which it’s only conscious states that could have value or disvalue. I don’t particularly hold such a view. I think that we are intrinsically concerned with, and that there is intrinsic value in non-conscious states. And that’s why I wouldn’t sign up for the experience machine. The experience machine could provide an unending stream supposedly of positive conscious states, but why wouldn’t I sign on for it? Well, because the actual content of my values is not that I have certain conscious states, it’s that I have certain relations with people, with the external world, that I have a certain engagement with things that have a consciousness and that matter. And so I wouldn’t agree that the only place, the only locus of value or disvalue is conscious states.

Lucas Perry: So then from a cosmological and evolutionary perspective, there has been the development and arising of sentient creatures on this planet who have ever complexifying neural algorithms for modeling themselves and the world and making predictions and interacting with it. And amongst these evolved architectures include evaluative ones, which take the shape of valuing or disvaluing certain aspects of the world. And so that is enough for you for talking about intrinsic value. You feel like you don’t need to bring consciousness into it. You’re fine with just talking about the computation.

Peter Railton: Oh, I think consciousness plays a role because one of the good making features is a positive state of consciousness. It’s just, it’s not the only one. And so there are differences in the world that would not show up as differences in conscious states. And that’s what the experience machine is meant to show, but which would nonetheless constitute things that matter in the sense of matter that we were just describing, namely, that these are objects of concern, love, affection, interest on the positive side, objects of dislike, disvaluation, disapproval on the negative side. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that only conscious states can be locuses of value, but it may be that consciousness plays a role.

Lucas Perry: So what are these other good making features and why are they good making?

Peter Railton: Well, take, for example, a theory like a preference satisfaction theory. I would prefer other things equal that after I’m gone, my children have lives that they find meaningful. Now is that because I want to have the positive experience of thinking that their lives are meaningful? No, I want them to have those lives. And so it’s part of the content of my informed preferences, let’s say that it would survive information, is part of the content of my informed preferences that the world be such, that my children have a certain kind of life. And you say, “Well, doesn’t the meaningfulness of their life just consist in their conscious states?” And I’d say, “Well, no, not at all. I would think that a life in an experience machine would have the same meaning as a life with similar stream of conscious states that was lived in engagement with the world.”

And so when I want them to have meaningful lives, I want them to have lives in which they act in ways that matter to them. And that they do things that matter to themselves and to others and their intrinsic preferences, like my intrinsic preferences, aren’t just going to be for conscious states. And so it may be that you need something like preference or interest to get value off the ground mattering, but the content of what interests us, or the content of what our preferences are, won’t just be the conscious states. So you can’t satisfy my preferences just by giving me conscious states, for example.

Lucas Perry: So I don’t share that intuition with you. I still don’t understand why you feel that something like a preference is good making. I guess that just comes down to intuitions. I mean, when someone could ask me, why do I think consciousness is the only thing that is good making, but I don’t know, what is a preference? It’s like a concept about some computational architecture that prefers some state of the world over another. But when you pass away, for example, your preference goes away. So why does it need to be respected still? I mean, we’re getting into some waters here, but is the short version of this that when you just do these philosophical thought experiments, that your intuitions aren’t satisfied by consciousness being necessary and sufficient for value?

Peter Railton: Well, all of our knowledge, whether it’s knowledge of value or the external world, we can push it back to a point at which, again, we can’t give some further derivation of the assumption that we’re making. And so my thinking here is that it seems to me extremely plausible that the one intelligible notion I can get of something like value is that there can be a subjectivity such that states of affairs can go better or worse for that subjectivity. And then value would consist in that, which makes the states of affairs better or worse for that individual. And then I asked myself, well, does that satisfy our concept of value?

Well, value should have various different features and we can list those. It should be something that when we understand it’s intrinsically motivating, it should apply to the sorts of things that we ordinarily identify as being values. It should capture a certain role in the guidance of action. It should be something like a goal in action. We should see it as structuring a behavior of individuals. And when I look at all those conditions, I think, yeah, this satisfies those conditions. It’s not a proof. It’s just saying that if we lay down the conditions that we would give for something satisfying the concept of value, these states do indeed satisfy those conditions and that many other candidate states don’t. But I can’t tell you for example, that you shouldn’t have some other concept of calue instead of value and ask what would satisfy calue in the same way that I can’t in the case of knowledge of the external world, give you a derivation of the importance of knowledge, as opposed to shmowledge, you can operate with the concept of knowledge and see what it requires and see whether it would apply to what we are doing.

But that’s not a proof that there isn’t another scheme of shmowledge of which the same thing could be said. So that’s where we get down to these fundamental assumptions and can they be non arbitrary? Well, they can, for example, if, when applying them, you can be put in a situation where you give them up. A concept that we had, that we thought we were happy with, turns out to be confused. Or it turns out that the only things that would satisfy the concept are things which we ordinarily think the concept doesn’t apply to. So we think there’s a mismatch between the criteria and the paradigm cases. So it’s not arbitrary if you’re willing to use it critically, but it can’t be proven.

Lucas Perry: Okay. Bit of a side path from where you were to Parfit. I was curious about what you really meant by how you guys were agreeing about value being some natural thing, instead of having to sprinkle value.

Peter Railton: The way I would put it, the disagreement that I have with Parfit is a disagreement at the conceptual level. Initially, at any rate, it looked like we had a conflict of opinions because it looked as if he was committed to their being in the world, these non-natural features, and that they somehow explained the role that value has in our lives. And I couldn’t understand what that would mean, but he was perfectly content to say, “No, the good making features are these natural features. They explain the role that value has in our lives, but our concept of value is a non-natural concept.” And what does it mean to say that? Well, the same situation, the same configuration of matter could be described with physical concepts, chemical concepts, biological concepts, Oh, it’s an “organism.” It could be described in social concepts. It’s a person. Any given situation can be characterized in various different conceptual systems.

And it can be argued, plausibly, that you can’t reduce, for example, the conceptual system of biology to the conceptual system of particle physics. Because biology deals in functions, reproduction, metabolism, and so on, and there’s no one to one correspondence, no easy correspondence, between those functions and any particular physical realization. You could have living beings made out of carbon. You could have living beings made out of silicon. So the concept of living being, the concept of an organism is a concept of biology. It’s a way to organize the description of the world and explanation and biology is conceptually not reducible to physics. That doesn’t mean biologists can ignore physics because they think, most anyway do, that what satisfies their biological concept are physical systems. And so it’s an important question, what kinds of physical system would satisfy these concepts like self replication and so on?

And so they do microbiology and they study the physical systems that do satisfy these concepts. But the point is that the conceptual system has a degree of autonomy from the physical system. And that even discovering that self-replicating molecules have a certain chemical composition in this world is not discovering that the concept of a self replicating organism is simply a physical concept. Parfit has the same view about normative concepts. He and I agree about what pain is and what makes pain bad, but he says you could describe a situation either, as you were saying, in terms of some physical or biochemical processes, or you could describe it as bad, or as good or something that ought not to exist. And that’s another level of conceptual characterization. And his thought is that that level of conceptual characterization can’t be reduced to the concepts of natural order.

So there is an element in normative concepts that’s always beyond what is translatable without loss of meaning into the natural. Once one recognizes that, then you can be as naturalistic as you like about the nature of value and also believe that the concept of value is a non-natural concept. Just as if you can be as physicalist as you like about the fundamental furniture of the universe and still believe that the biological level of description is not reducible to the physical level of description. You could say the same debate went on when people were thinking about life. 19th century, we find people thinking, well, there’s got to be this special elan vital or spirit or something like that. You can’t just take a bunch of matter and put it together and have life. By and by, biochemistry develops and people, actually you can’t put a bunch of matter together and have life.

And the same thing is true with value. You don’t need some value-vital, some kind of further substance to add to the world. You can put together the natural stuff of the world and get value. Once you frame it that way, then Parfit and I actually agree. Because when he talks about the irrreducibility of the normative, he really means, should mean, and I think agrees that he means, a conceptual irreproducibility. And once we establish that, then I can say, “Yes, I agree with you, normative concepts aren’t definable entirely in terms of non-normative concepts, they involve some idea of ought or some idea of value that isn’t present to the non-normative.” But my interest as a philosopher and metaethicist is an interest in what kinds of natural conditions satisfy these concepts and how that makes it possible for us to have knowledge in a non-normative conceptual scheme, like ethics or theory of value. So that’s where I do my work. His work is done in carefully distinguishing the concepts.

Lucas Perry: So there is reality as it is, there is the base reality, base metaphysics, call it ultimate reality or whatever, and all human conceptualization supervenes upon that because it’s couched within that context and is identical to it. Yet that conceptualization you argue is lossy with respect to ultimate reality, because it doesn’t necessarily carve reality at the joints, but that conceptual structure is still supervenient upon it. And at the level of conceptualization, there are facts about the world that can be satisfied or not satisfied that will make some proposition true or false.

Peter Railton: Yeah.

Lucas Perry: So you’re arguing that value isn’t part of metaphysical bedrock, but metaphysical bedrock creates neural architectures that create concepts that contain within them necessary and sufficient conditions for being satisfied. And when agents are able to gain clarity with one another over concepts and satisfying necessary and sufficient conditions, then they can have concrete discussions about ethics.

Peter Railton: That would be one common basis. And so the image that Parfit gave in his first volume of On What Matters was that he thought, ultimately, you could see the utilitarian and the Kantian as climbing two different sides of the same mountain so that they would eventually meet at the summit. I suggested to him, well in metaethics, the same as the case, I’m a naturalist, I’m climbing one side of the mountain. You’re a non-naturalist, you’re climbing the other side of the mountain.

But as our views develop, and as we understand better the different elements of the views, then actually they’re going to come such that as we approach the summit, we aren’t really disagreeing with each other. And he accepted that picture. I would only add to what you were saying by way of summary. Our concepts typically don’t give us necessary and sufficient conditions, they are more open ended and open textured than that. And that’s part of why we can have unending debates about questions like value and so on.

But you mentioned truth and might say, truth is another very good example of a concept that’s not reducible to a concept of physics. Because true presupposes representations, and representations are characterizable not in terms of their physical constituents, but in terms of their role in thought. And so people who are skeptical about value because they say, “I don’t see where value is in the world,” they should be equally skeptical about truth. Because truth is not some new substance we add. If there’s a representation and it accurately reflects the world, then we have truth. So true, again, is a relational matter between a subject something, like a representation and this case, a state of the world, and it’s when that relationship obtains that you get truth.

Lucas Perry: Right, but that’s truth in the epistemological agent centered sense, but then there’s the more metaphysical view about truth, where there are mind independent facts. And they’re true, whether or not we know anything about them. Maybe the same distinction is important here to make. There are potentially moral truths within the conceptual framework that we’re participating in. And it feels weird to me to call that moral realism. But then there’s another claim where there’s mind independent truths about morality like that there’s an intrinsic quality to suffering that is what bad means. Does that make sense?

Peter Railton: I think you’ve put things in a very good way. One of the features of the setup that I was describing is that it’s very easy to slide from a position that for example, whenever a value judgment obtains, then some or other natural state obtains, it’s very easy to slide from that to thinking that the natural state actually is the normative fact. It doesn’t satisfy the concept. And so you could have the concept of the good, and it could be that there are eternal truths about good I suspect. That’s a reasonable candidate, just as there can be eternal truths in mathematics. The claim isn’t that the conceptual domain is somehow identical with the natural domain. It supervenes, but it’s not a relationship of identity. And the language in which those claims are stated, and the way in which we adjudicate them might be as in the case of mathematical claims, it could be quite a priori.

And that’s where Parfit’s view and mine differ and Singer’s likewise, because he thinks you can do this a priori in a way that I don’t think you can, but that’s a question in epistemology. It doesn’t require a different metaphysics in order to have that view. So you can be a physicalist and believe that there is mathematical truth. And that’s because, for example, you think that mathematical truths are true via a set of axioms, definitions, rules of inference. And so they are made true not by distributions of molecules, but by logical relationships that can be specified in terms of axioms and rules.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So I feel a little bit confused still about why your view is a kind of moral realism if it requires no strong metaphysical view. Whereas other moral realists that I’m familiar with hold a strong metaphysical view about suffering in consciousness and joy in consciousness as being the intrinsic valence carriers of value.

Peter Railton: Well, I’m not sure about the last part of your question. I’ll have to think about how to interpret that. But am I a realist about organisms, if I believe that the concept of an organism is distinct from any particular physical instantiation? Am I prevented from being a realist about organisms because I think the organismic level of description is irreducible to the physical level of description? You see, no, actually, because you think that the concept organism is satisfied by some physical system, you’re a realist about organisms, you think there are organisms. To me that’s a perfectly realistic position. And you realist or non-realistic would say, “Well, I guess there aren’t any organisms then, because they’re not part of the fundamental furniture of the universe.”

And I’d say, “Think of what an organism is. It’s not a piece of furniture, it’s a functionally organized arrangement. And because it’s functionally organized, it doesn’t correspond to any particular material, something or other. And for there to exist organisms is for there to exist the conditions such that the concept of organism is satisfied.” And that’s of course what most biologists believe. And so most biologists are realists about organisms.

Lucas Perry: If your intuitions changed about the reducibility of higher levels of knowledge to lower levels of knowledge, how would that affect your moral views? For example, there are views say like concepts in biology about reproduction and organisms and concepts like life are lossy when it comes to the actual furniture of reality. And that they don’t actually completely describe how things are and the concepts don’t carve reality at the joints. So they provide predictions about the world, but it all should be and is only best described by particle physics for example. One might say an organism is a concept, though it does not carve reality at the joints. And the best understanding of it is at the level of particle physics. So taking a realist position about conceptual fictions is dubious to define reality as whenever some concept I have is satisfied.

Peter Railton: What you’re pointing to is a very interesting problem. I would say that biological concepts do carve things at the joint, because the biological level of organization yields a whole systematic set of laws and principles that turn out to be true in our universe. It’s far from being an arbitrary stipulation or a fiction that something’s an organism and a tremendous amount follows from things being organisms and self-replicating and so on. And we have very elaborate theories about populations, mathematics and populations.

Lucas Perry: And are those laws though not reducible to other laws?

Peter Railton: That’s the idea that reducibility is the wrong concept to have here. Because the laws of population are laws that have to do with variables that aren’t fundamental variables of physics. They have to do with, for example, issues about reproducibility, availability of resources and so on, and what counts as a resource depends upon the nature of the organism. So there’s a level of organization, similarly in chemistry.

Lucas Perry: But what if those variables are just the shape of lower level things?

Peter Railton: Well, they won’t be, because if they were self-reproducing silicon-based organisms, they would obey similar population dynamics. Those principles govern functional organizations. So once you have self-replication, you have mutation, you have differential selection and so on, you’ll get certain principles, whatever physical realization there is.

Lucas Perry: But it really doesn’t make sense to me that these higher level laws would not be completely supervenient on fundamental forces of nature.

Peter Railton: Oh, they’re supervenient, definitely. But supervenience does not imply reducibility, that’s really critical in this domain. And again, this is the problem that I think has led to a lot of confusion in this domain. A feature that is supervenient upon fundamental physics is perhaps part of a system of laws that provides joints in nature. Because if you went to another world and you found a form of life that had these basic features of self-replication, mutation, selection, you would expect to find similar population dynamics to Earth. And that similarity is a biological similarity. It’s not a similarity in terms of the basic physics of the situation. The physics are the same, but the constitution of these organisms is very different. And so you couldn’t infer from understanding just the physics that there would be this biological regularity. That’s what it means to say that it’s supervenient, but not reducible.

Again, I think you can be a realist about organisms because organism really is a concept that carves nature at the joints. And so we would be able to export our theory of organisms to worlds in which carbon was not abundant and self-replication was built out of something else. And that’s a way in which nature is lawfully organized, supports counterfactuals, supports explanations. And so that’s a way of thinking about what it means to say it’s supervenient, but not reducible. And I think the same thing is true with moral distinctions. And that’s why they’re learnable. That’s why infants can learn moral distinctions, even without being given moral concepts.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. So that’s why I’m pushing on this point. Now that makes more sense to me in terms of moral statements, but when trying to make physical claims about how reality is, I feel more confused here and maybe it’s messing me up in other places. If all of the causality is governed by fundamental forces, then surely all concepts that try try to map out the world that is being governed by fundamental causality. All the laws that are derived at higher levels must be completely reducible to and supervenient upon or lossy to some extent with relation to the fundamental causal forces. I don’t think the claims is that for example principles of biology in life are causal in themselves. They’re more like laws that we use to make predictions, but predictions about systems that are running on the fundamental laws of nature. The complex aggregation of those laws must aggregate in some way to come close to those laws of biology. What is wrong with this picture?

Peter Railton: Well, there may be nothing wrong with it. I think the laws of biology are not just descriptive. I think they support explanations and that they are used, not just to redescribe reality, but they’re used to construct theories that show structure in reality that’s extremely important structure. And that would not be visible simply if you were allowed only predicates of fundamental physics. I guess I would say from the standpoint of explanation, biology affords many explanations. Suppose somebody wants to know why the material that happens to be in my body is where it is right now. Well, there is some very complicated story at the level of fundamental microphysics following all of these molecules, but it doesn’t look like anything at all. Whereas if you can give an explanation in terms of evolution and social dynamics as to how these molecules got here, you may have a much more compact comprehensible and understanding grasp of the world.

So I think biology affords us distinct modes of understanding and explanation, so does psychology, so does chemistry. One of the features of knowledge is that reality is organized at various levels in systems that are lawful systems and that support explanation and intervention and causation, but there’s no reason not to call this causation.

And so if somebody is describing the spread of the pandemic and they say, “Well, it’s partially caused by the transmutability of the virus, which is higher than that of the bird flu,” we’ll say, “Yes, that’s a causal factor in the spread of the virus and why these particular molecules are located in the world where they are.” And that’s a very powerful explanation. And if someone were just giving you a readout of the positions and momenta of all the different molecules of the world, you would not see this pattern and you’d have less understanding of the situation.

Lucas Perry: So tying this into your metaethics here, our ethical concepts are causally supervening on fundamental forces on physics. We’ve inherited them via evolution and they run on physics. But these concepts do not reduce to natural facts. There’s no goodness or badness built into the fundamental nature of the universe. These concepts are merely causal expressions of the universe playing out. And within the realm of this conceptualization, you can have truths about morality in the same way that you can have truths about biological organisms. And there’s a relationship here between what you might believe to be true about conceptualization and science and the epistemic status of concepts in general would also bear some information here on how one might think about the epistemic status of moral concepts.

Peter Railton: Yeah. Or thinking in terms of algorithms and systems. The systems, theoretic perspective gives you a lot of very well organized understanding as you grasp the algorithms that’s at work and so on, but algorithm is not a concept to fundamental physics.

Lucas Perry: Right. So it’s your view that moral facts, moral claims within conceptualization hold the same epistemic status as claims about algorithms and biological organisms and claims that we might make and in things like chemistry or biology, which are at a higher level of abstraction than particle physics.

Peter Railton: Yes. And that’s what would be called the naturalist. And it’s why someone like Peter Singer is a non-naturalist. He thinks the epistemology of moral judgments is a priori. And similarly with Derek Parfit, and they think it’s an intuitive epistemology, and they think that the two go together because they believe in something called rational intuition. And I’m inclined to think of intuition the way we were describing it earlier on. Namely, it’s a complex body of knowledge that isn’t organized into simple principles, but that replicates an important set of morally relevant relations. And that that’s really what intuition is. That when we have these intuitions, it’s that kind of knowledge, the way they’re grammatical intuitions or knowledge like that. So we disagree about the epistemology, but Parfit at least, and I’m not sure what Peter Singer would say. Our disagreement’s not metaphysical.

Lucas Perry: Right. I think the only place it seems like there would be space for a metaphysical disagreement would be in there being a kind of intrinsic good quality to pleasure and intrinsic bad quality to suffering that existed prior to conceptualization.

Peter Railton: I don’t think anything about the badness of pain depends on our concepts. I think that pain was bad in the first organisms that felt pain. And if humans had never evolved and the concept of pain had never come into existence and the concept of bad had never come to existence, it would still be bad for these organisms to suffer roasting to death in a world that desiccated or something like that? Our concepts allow us to talk about these features. The word concept comes from two words, con meaning with and kept, which is a term for grasp. And a concept is what we use to grasp features of the universe, not to create them.

Lucas Perry: So there already would have been some computational structure that would have evaluated something as bad?

Peter Railton: It would have made it the case that this was bad for that organism. Yes, that’s right.

Lucas Perry: And that doesn’t bring consciousness into it or anything, that could be strictly computational?

Peter Railton: Thus far yeah. And there’s a big debate about whether states have to be conscious in order for them to have disvalue. And one of the reasons for thinking about that is because we’re thinking about the animal kingdom and we aren’t sure how deep into the animal ancestry of humans consciousness goes. I myself don’t think that consciousness is essential, but I recognize that that’s one position among many.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. I happen to think that it is. But I would like now to wrap up and integrate this discussion on metaethical epistemology into the broader conversation. So we’ve talkedhere a lot about what your meta ethics is and the epistemology that is entailed by it, and also that of other peoples. That is related to moral learning of course, because a proper moral epistemology is the vehicle by which one would obtain normative or metaethical moral knowledge. So how do you view or integrate this thinking that we’ve gone through here to the question of AI alignment. On one hand, if we were Singer or Parfit, we might think if we just build something that’s sufficiently rational, whatever that means that axioms of morality would be intuitively accessible to such a machine system seems strange to say, but they would be intuitively accessible as well as axioms of mathematics. Whereas with your view I’m not quite sure what happens. So maybe you could explore this all a little for us.

Peter Railton: So if I could have my wish here, it would be that by getting an understanding of the metaethical landscape and which problems are metaphysical, which ones aren’t, which problems are epistemic and how they are tractable in various ways, the temptation towards skepticism in morality would at least be a bit weakened. People would see how it would be possible for us to have moral knowledge, of course imperfect and evolving. They would understand therefore how it could be possible for other systems to have moral knowledge. And we could talk concretely about the kinds of processes by which infants for example acquire moral knowledge, and think about how systems could go through similar kinds of processes and inquire a core moral competency as I think they can. Skepticism about morality I think has for a long time plagued the discipline, because it’s been hard for people to see how we could have something like moral knowledge.

And that’s been tied up with a picture of value and the nature of value as a unusual kind of something or other. As something that’s not part of the way in which the world is put together. And so how would we ever have any kind of knowledge of it? And since we can’t derive it from self-evident axioms, we have to be subjectivists. That I would hope to have had just a small effect in making that a somewhat less plausible position. Because I do think there’s an important constructive project here and is already underway in developmental psychology. And for example, people working around Josh Tenenbaum are working on this as a learning question. There’s a lot of promise to understanding intuition in terms of deep learning and understanding moral competency in Bayesian terms. So I think there’s a tremendous future for coming to have theories of moral learning. I’m glad psychologists have started using this phrase and that by giving a theory of it, that sorts out the metaethical landscape in the ways we’ve been describing, that seems more plausible.

Lucas Perry: Right. So in summary then the feeling that you have here is that people hold and walk around with common sense intuitions about normative and metaethical thinking and what those things are. And that there is a more solid foundation for whatever moral realism might be in understanding around these issues. And that there can be strong convergence and formalization around moral learning. And then the integration of moral learning to machine systems, which would make them sensitive to morally relevant features and thus make them socially, societally, civilizationally competent to be able to exist in an ecosystem of agents with more or less altruistic, malevolent, and benevolent values.

Peter Railton: And that we will need such systems badly as allies in the years to come. If I could just add one thought, someone’s going to say, “But don’t we have to have some priors about pain being bad, about positive some interactions being good.” Now you have to have some priors in order to engage in moral learning. And I would say we have to have priors to engage in any kind of learning. And what rationality and learning consist in is how do we use subsequent experience and evidence and argument to revise the priors and go on to create new priors and then apply evidence and argument and reasoning to those. That’s what rationality is, it’s not starting from scratch with self-evident principles that we just don’t happen to know. That’s what Bayesians say rationality is with response to science and the gathering of evidence. That’s a picture of rationality in which we can be rational beings and we can be more rational the more we are able to subject our priors to critical scrutiny and expose them to different kinds of more diverse representative forms of evidence and reasoning.

And I think the same thing is true with moral priors and rationality in the moral case doesn’t consist in seeing it as a self-evident set of axioms, because I don’t think one can. But starting with priors and then learning from experience, argument deliberation together, in that sense rationality in the two spheres is essentially very similar.

Lucas Perry: All right, Peter, thanks so much for your perspective here in sharing all of this. Is there anything else here, any last thoughts you’d like to say, anything you feel unresolved about?

Peter Railton: I would like to have more engagement between philosophers and the AI alignment community. I think it’s one of the most important problems we face as a culture and it’s an urgent problem. And it’s painful to me that philosophers are not as alive to it as they should be. I just want to invite anyone who’s out there working on the problem. Please, let’s try to make contact, not necessarily with me, but with other philosophers. And let’s try to build a constructive community here. Because for too long philosophy has been in the situation of folding its arms and sort of poo-pooing artificial intelligence or artificial ethics. And if that view has merit and it does have merit in many areas, AI gets over-hyped a lot, AI people will tell you that.

But there’s this other side, which is what has been accomplished, what has been constructed, what’s been shown to be possible. And how can we build on that? And there I think there’s a lot of opportunity for constructive interaction. So that would be my parting thought that this is a time when urgent work in this area is needed. Let’s bring all the resources we can to bear on it.

Lucas Perry: All right, beautiful thoughts to end on then. If people want to follow you on social media or get in contact with you, how’s the best way to do that?

Peter Railton: Well, I’m not on social media. The best way would be to reach me via email, which is prailton@umich.edu. I get a lot of email. I can’t promise I’ll respond quickly to emails, I wish I could. But I don’t want philosophy to lose the chance to be part of this important process.

Lucas Perry: All right. And if people want to check out your papers or work?

Peter Railton: I’m supposed to be building a website. I may succeed in doing so. Many of the papers are available. People have put them up in various ways. So if you go to Google Scholar, you can find many of my papers. And I also want to put in a plug for those philosophers who have heroically been working on these questions. They’ve done a great deal of work and we should be grateful for what they’ve accomplished. But yes, if people want to find my work, if they can’t get access to it, let me know and I’ll make the papers available.

Lucas Perry: All right, thanks again, Peter. It’s been really informative and I appreciate you coming on.

Peter Railton: Great. I appreciate your questions and your patience. This has been very helpful conversation for me as well.

 Topics discussed in this episode include:

• The historical and intellectual foundations of AI 
• How AI systems achieve or do not achieve intelligence in the same way as the human mind
• The rise of AI and what it signifies 
• The benefits and risks of AI in both the short and long term 
• Whether superintelligent AI will pose an existential risk to humanity

You can take a survey about the podcast here

Submit a nominee for the Future of Life Award here

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro 

4:30 The historical and intellectual foundations of AI 

11:11 Moving beyond dualism 

13:16 Regarding the objectives of an agent as fixed 

17:20 The distinction between artificial intelligence and deep learning 

22:00 How AI systems achieve or do not achieve intelligence in the same way as the human mind

49:46 What changes to human society does the rise of AI signal? 

54:57 What are the benefits and risks of AI? 

01:09:38 Do superintelligent AI systems pose an existential threat to humanity? 

01:51:30 Where to find and follow Steve and Stuart

Works referenced: 

Steven Pinker’s website and his Twitter

Stuart Russell’s new book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

We hope that you will continue to join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

Note: The following transcript has been edited for style and clarity.

Lucas Perry: Welcome to the AI Alignment Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today, we have a conversation with Steven Pinker and Stuart Russell. This episode explores the historical and intellectual foundations of AI, how AI systems achieve or do not achieve intelligence in the same way as the human mind, the benefits and risks of AI over the short and long-term, and finally whether superintelligent AI poses an existential risk to humanity. If you’re not currently following this podcast series, you can join us by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, or on whatever your favorite podcasting app is by searching for “Future of Life.” Our last episode was with Sam Harris on global priorities. If that sounds interesting to you, you can find that conversation wherever you might be following us. 

I’d also like to echo two announcements for the final time. So, if you’ve been tuned into the podcast recently, you can skip ahead just a bit. The first is that there is an ongoing survey for this podcast where you can give me feedback and voice your opinion about content. This goes a long way for helping me to make the podcast valuable for everyone. This survey should only come out once a year. So, this is a final call for thoughts and feedback if you’d like to voice anything. You can find a link for the survey about this podcast in the description of wherever you might be listening. 

The second announcement is that at the Future of Life Institute, we are in the midst of our search for the 2020 winner of the Future of Life Award. The Future of Life Award is a $50,000 prize that we give out to an individual who, without having received much recognition at the time of their actions, has helped to make today dramatically better than it may have been otherwise. The first two recipients of the Future of Life Award were Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, two heroes of the nuclear age. Both took actions at great personal risk to possibly prevent an all-out nuclear war. The third recipient was Dr. Matthew Meselson, who spearheaded the international ban on bioweapons. Right now, we’re not sure who to give the 2020 Future of Life Award to. That’s where you come in. If you know of an unsung hero who has helped to avoid global catastrophic disaster, or who has done incredible work to ensure a beneficial future of life, please head over to the Future of Life Award page and submit a candidate for consideration. The link for that page is on the page for this podcast or in the description of wherever you might be listening. If your candidate is chosen, you will receive $3,000 as a token of our appreciation. We’re also incentivizing the search via MIT’s successful red balloon strategy, where the first to nominate the winner gets $3,000 as mentioned, but there are also tiered pay outs where the first to invite the nomination winner gets $1,500, whoever first invited them gets $750, whoever first invited them $375, and so on. You can find details about that on the Future of Life Award page. Link in the description. 

Steven Pinker is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He has taught at Stanford and MIT and is the author of ten books: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. 

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and holder of the Smith-Zadeh chair in engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served as the vice chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics and as an advisor to the United Nations on arms control. He is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow as well as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He is the author with Peter Norvig of the definitive and universally acclaimed textbook on AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. He is also the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. 

And with that, here’s our conversation with Steven Pinker and Stuart Russell. 

So let’s get started here then. What are the historical and intellectual foundations upon which the ongoing AI revolution is built?

Steven Pinker: I would locate them in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, when Thomas Hobbes said, “Reasoning is but reckoning,” reckoning in the old-fashioned sense of “calculation” or “computation.” A century later, the two major style of AI today were laid out: The neural network, or massively parallel interconnected system that is trained with examples and generalizes by similarity, and the symbol-crunching, propositional, “Good Old-Fashioned AI.” Both of those had adumbrations during the Enlightenment.  David Hume, in the empiricist or associationist tradition, said there are only three principles of connection among ideas, contiguity in time or place, resemblance, and cause and effect. On the other side, you have Leibniz, who thought of cognition as the grinding of wheels and gears and what we would now call the manipulation of symbols. Of course the actual progress began in the 20th century with the ideas of Turing and Shannon and Weaver and Norbert Wiener. The rest is the history that Stuart writes about in his textbook and his recent book.

Stuart Russell: I think I would like to add in a little bit of ancient history as well, just because I think Aristotle not only thought a lot about how human thinking was organized and how it could be correct or incorrect and how we could make rational decisions, he very clearly describes a backward regression goal planner in one of his pieces, and his work was incredibly influential. One of the things he said is we deliberate about means and not about ends. I think he says, “A doctor does not choose whether to heal,” and so on. And you might disagree with that, but I think that that’s been a pretty influential thread in Western thinking for the last two millennia or more. That we kind of take objectives as given and the purpose of intelligence is to act in ways that achieve your objectives.

That idea got refined gradually. So Aristotle talked mainly about goals and logically provable sequences of actions that would achieve those goals. And then in the 17th and 18th centuries, I want to give a shout out to the French and the Swiss, so Pascal and Fermat and Arnauld and Bernoulli brought in ideas of rational decision making under uncertainty and the weighing of probabilities and the concept of utility that Bernoulli introduced. So that generalized Aristotle’s idea, but it didn’t change the fundamental principle that they took the objectives, the utilities, as given. Just intrinsic properties of a human being in a given moment.

In AI, we sort of went through the same historical development, except that we did the logic stuff for the first 30 years or so, roughly, and then we did the probability and decision theory stuff for the next 30 years. I think we’re in a terrible state now, because the vast majority of the deep learning community, when you read their papers, nothing is cited before 2012. Occasionally, from time to time, they’ll say things like, “For this problem, the learning algorithms that we have are probably inadequate, and in future I think we should direct some of our research towards something that we might call reasoning or knowledge,” as if no one had ever thought of those things before and they were the first person in history to ever have the idea that reasoning might be necessary for intelligence.

Steven Pinker: Yes.

Stuart Russell: I find this quite frustrating and particularly frustrating when students want to actually just bypass the AI course altogether and go straight to the deep learning course, because they just don’t think AI is necessary anymore.

Steven Pinker: Indeed, and also galling to me. In the late ’80s and ’90s I was involved in a debate over the applicability of the predecessors of deep learning models, then called multi-layer perceptrons, artificial neural networks, connectionist networks, and Parallel Distributed Processing networks. Gary Marcus and Alan Prince and Michael Ullman and other collaborators I pointed out the limitations of trying to achieve intelligence–even for simple linguistic processes like forming the plural of a noun or a past tense of a verb–if the only tool you had available was the ability to associate features with features, without any symbol processing. That debate went on for a couple of decades and then petered out. But then one of the prime tools in the neural network community, multilayer networks trained by error back-propagation,  were revived in 2012. Indeed there is an amnesia for the issues in that debate, which Gary Marcus has revived for a modern era.

It would be interesting to trace the truly radical idea behind artificial intelligence: not just that there are rules or algorithms, whether they are from logic or probability theory, that an intelligent agent can use, the way a human pulls out a smartphone. But the idea that there is nothing but rules or algorithms, and that’s what an intelligent agent consists of: that is, no ghost to the machine, no agent separate from the mechanism. And there, I’m not sure whether Aristotle actually exorcised the ghost in the machine. I think he did have a notion of a soul. The idea that it’s rules all the way down,  that intelligence is just a mechanism, probably has shallow roots. Although Hobbes probably could claim credit for it, and perhaps Hume as well.

Lucas Perry: That’s an excellent point, Steve, it seems like Abrahamic religions have kind of given rise in part to this belief, or maybe an expression of that belief, the kind of mind-body dualism, the ghost in the machine where the mind seems to be a nonphysical thing. So it seems like intelligence has had to go the same road of “life.” There used to be “elan vital” or some other spooky presupposed mechanism for giving rise to life. And so similarly with intelligence, it seems like we’ve had to move from thinking that there was a ghost in the machine that made the things work to there being rules all the way down. If you guys have anything else to add to that, I think that’d be interesting.

My other two reactions to what has been said so far are that this point about computer science taking the goal as given, I think is important and interesting, and maybe we could expand upon that a little bit. Then there’s also, Stuart mentioned the difference between AI and deep learning and that students want to skip the AI and just get straight to the deep learning. That seemed a little bit confusing to me.

Steven Pinker: Let me address the first part and I’ll turn it over to Stuart for the second. The notion of dualism–that there is a mechanism, but sitting on top of it is an immaterial agent or self or soul or I–is enshrined in the Abrahamic religions and in other religions, but it has deep intuitive roots. We are all intuitively dualists (Paul Bloom has made this argument in his book Descartes’ Baby.) Fortunately, when we deal with each other in everyday life we don’t treat each other like robots or wind-up dolls, but we assume that there is an inner life that is much like ours, and we make sense of people’s behavior in terms of their beliefs and desires, which we don’t conceptualize as neural circuitry transforming patterns. We think there’s a locus of consciousness, which is easy to think of as separate from the flesh that we’re made of, especially since–and this is a point made by the 19th century British anthropologist Edward Tylor–that there’s actually a lot of empirical “evidence” that supports dualism in our everyday life.  Like dreaming.

When you dream, you know your body is in bed the whole time, but there’s some part of you that’s up and about in the world. When you see your reflection in a mirror or in still water, there is an animated essence that seems to have parted company with your body. When you’re in a trance from a drug or a fever and have an out-of-body experience, it seems  that we and our bodies are not the same thing. And with death, one moment a person is walking around, the next moment the body is lifeless. It’s natural to think that it’s lost some invisible ingredient that had animated it while it was alive.

Today we know that this is just the activity of the brain, but in terms of the experience available to a person, dualism seems perfectly plausible. It’s one of the great achievements of neuroscience, on the one hand,  to show that a brain is capable of supporting problem solving and perception and decision making, and of the computational sciences, on the other, for showing that intelligence can be understood in terms of information and computation, and that goals (like the Aristotelian final cause) can be understood in terms of control and cybernetics and feedback.

Stuart Russell: On the point that in computer science, we regard the objectives as fixed, it’s much broader than just computer science. If you look at Von Neumann — Morgenstern and their characterizations of rationality, nowhere do they talk about what is the process by which the agent might rationally come by its preferences. The agent is always assumed a priori to come with the preferences built in, and the only constraint is that those preferences be self-consistent so that you can’t be driven around circles of intransitive preferences where you simply cough up money to go round and round the same circle.

The same thing I think is true in control theory, where the objective is the cost function, and you design a controller that minimizes the expected cost function, which might be a square of the distance from the desired trajectory or whatever it might be. Same in statistics, where let’s just assume that there’s a loss function. There’s no discussion in statistics of what the loss function should be or how the loss function might change or anything like that.

So this is something that pervades many of the technological underpinnings of the 20th century. As far as I can tell, to some extent in developmental psychology, but I think in moral philosophy, people really take seriously the question of what goal should we have? Is it moral for an agent to have such and such as its objective, and how could we, for example, teach an agent to have different objectives? And that gets you into some very unchartered philosophical waters about what is a rational process that would lead an agent to have different objectives at the end than it did at the beginning, given that if it has different objectives at the end, then it can only expect that it won’t be achieving the objectives that it has at the beginning. So why would it embark on a process that’s going to result in failure to achieve the objectives that it currently has?

So that’s sort of a philosophical puzzle, but it’s a real issue because in fact human beings do change. We’re not born with the preferences that we have as adults, and so there is a notion of plasticity that absolutely has to be understood if we’re to get this right.

Steven Pinker: Indeed, and I suspect we’ll return to the point later when we talk about potential risks of advanced artificial intelligence. The issue is whether a system having intelligence implies that the system would have certain goals, and probably Stuart and I agree the answer is no, at least not by definition. Precisely because what you want and how to get what you want are two logically independent questions. Hume famously said that reason must be that the slave of the passions, by which he didn’t mean that we should just surrender to our impulses and do whatever feels good. What he meant was that reason itself can’t specify the goals that it tries to bring about. Those are exogenous. And indeed, von Neumann and Morgenstern are often misunderstood as saying that we must be ruthlessly, egotistical self interested maximizers. Whereas the goal that is programmed into us — say by evolution or by culture — could include other people’s happiness as part of our utility function. That is a question that merely making our choices consistent is silent on.

 So the ability to reason doesn’t by itself give you moral goals, including taking into account the interests of others. That having been said, there is a long tradition in moral philosophy which shows  how it doesn’t take much to go from one to the other. Because as soon as we care about persuading others, as soon as our interests depend on how others treat us, then we can’t get away with saying “only my interests count and yours don’t because I am me and you’re not,” because there is no logical difference between “me” and “you.” So we’re forced to a kind of impartiality, wherein whatever I insist on for me I’ve got to grant to you, a kind of Golden Rule or Categorical Imperative that makes our interests interchangeable as soon as we’re in discourse with one another.

This is all to acknowledge Stuart’s point, but to take it a few steps further in how it deals with the question of what our goals ought to be.

Stuart Russell: The other point you raised Lucas was on being confused by my distinction between AI and deep learning.

Lucas Perry: That’s right.

Stuart Russell: I think you’re pointing to a confusion that exists in the public mind, in the media and even in parts of the AI community. AI has always included machine learning as a subdiscipline, all the way back to Turing’s 1950 paper, where he speculates, in fact, that might be a good way to build AI would be just start with a child program and train it to be an adult intelligent machine. But there are many other sub-fields of AI; knowledge representation, reasoning, planning, decision making under uncertainty, problem solving, perception. Machine learning is relevant to all of these because they all involve processes that can be improved through experience. So that’s what we mean by machine learning: simply the improvement of performance through experience; and deep learning is a technology that helps with that process.

It by itself as far as we can tell, doesn’t have what is necessary to produce general intelligence. Just to pick one example, the idea that human beings know things seems so self-evident that we hardly need to argue about it. But deep learning systems in a real sense don’t know things. They can’t usefully acquire knowledge by reading a book and then go out and use that to design a radio telescope, which human beings arguably can. So it seems inevitable that if we’re going to make progress, I mean, sure we take the advances that deep learning has offered. Effectively, what we’ve discovered with deep learning is that you can train more complicated circuits than we previously would have guessed possible using various kinds of stochastic gradient descent, and other tricks.

I think it’s true to say that most people would not have expected that you could build a thousand layer network that was 20,000 units wide. So it’s got 20 million circuit elements and simply put a signal in one end and some data in the other and expect that you’re going to be able to train those 20 million elements to represent the complicated function that you’re trying to get it to learn. So that was a big surprise, and that capability is opening up all kinds of new frontiers: in vision, in speech recognition, language, machine translation, and physical control in robots among other things. It’s a wonderful set of advances, but it’s not the entire solution. Any more than group theory is the entire solution to mathematics. There’s lots of other branches of mathematics that are exciting and interesting and important and you couldn’t function without them. The same is true for AI.

So I think that we’re probably going to see even without further major conceptual advances, another decade of progress in achieving greater understanding of why deep learning works and how to do it better, and all the various applications that we can create using it. But I think if we don’t go back and then try to reintegrate all the other ideas of AI, we’re going to hit a wall. And so I think the sooner we lose our obsession with this new shiny thing, the better.

Steven Pinker: I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, in some ways we have already hit the wall. Any user of Siri or Cortana or a question-answering system has been frustrated by the way they just make associations to individual words and have a shallow understanding of the syntax of the sentence. If you ask Google or Siri, “Can you show me digital music players without a camera?” It’ll give you a long list of music players with discussions of their cameras, failing to understand the syntax of “X without Y.” Or, “What are some fast food restaurants nearby that are not McDonald’s?”  and you get a list of nearby McDonald’s.

It’s not hard to bump into the limitations of systems that for all their sophistication are being trained on associations among local elements, and can–I agree, surprisingly–learn higher-order combinations of those elements. But despite the name “deep learning,” they are shallow in the sense that they don’t build up a knowledge base of what are the objects, and who did what to whom, which they can access through various routes.

Stuart Russell: Yeah. My favorite example, I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal, is you say to Siri, “Call me an ambulance,” and Siri says, “Okay. From now on I’ll call you Ann Ambulance.”

Steven Pinker: In Marx Brothers movie, there’s the sequence, “Call me a taxi.” “Okay. You’re a taxi.” I don’t know if the AI story is an urban legend based on the Marx Brothers movie or whether life is imitating art.

Lucas Perry: Steven, I really appreciate it and liked that point about dualism and intelligence. I think it points in really interesting directions around identity in the self, which we don’t have time to get into here. But I did appreciate that.

So moving on ahead here, to what extent do you both see AI systems as achieving intelligence in the same way or not as the human mind does? What kinds of similarities are there or differences?

Stuart Russell: This is a really interesting question and we could spend the whole two hours just talking about this. So by artificial intelligence, I’m going to take it that we mean not deep learning, but the full range of techniques that AI researchers have developed over the years.

So some of them– for example, logical reasoning were– developed going back to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers who developed formal logic to model human thinking. So it’s not surprising that when we build programs that do logical reasoning, we are in some sense capturing one aspect of human reasoning capability. Then in the ’80s, as I mentioned, AI developed reasoning under uncertainty, and then later on refining that with notions of causality as well, particularly in the work of Judea Pearl. The differences are really because AI and cognitive science separated probably sometime in the ’60s. I think before that there wasn’t really a clear distinction between whether you were doing AI or whether you were doing cognitive science. It was very much the thought that if you could get a program to do anything that we think of as requiring intelligence with a human, then you were in some sense exhibiting a possible theory of how the human does it, or even you would make introspective claims and say, “Look, I’ve now shown that this theory of intelligence really works.”

But fairly soon people said, “Look, this is not really scientific. If you want to make a claim about how the human mind does something, you have to base it on real psychological experimentation with human subjects.” And that’s distinct from the engineering goal of AI, which is simply to produce programs that demonstrate certain capabilities. So for most of the last 50, 60 years, these two fields have grown further and further apart. I think now partly because of deep learning and partly because of other work, for example in probabilistic programming, we can start to do things that humans do that we couldn’t do before. So it becomes interesting again, to ask, well, are humans really somewhat Bayesian and are they doing these kinds of Bayesian symbolic probabilistic program learning that, for example, Josh Tenenbaum was proposing or are they doing something else? For example, Geoff Hinton is pretty adamant that as he puts it, symbols are the luminiferous aether of AI by which he means that they’re simply something that we imagined and they have no physical reality whatsoever in the human mind.

I find this a little hard to believe, and you have to wonder if symbols don’t exist, why are almost all deep learning applications aimed at recognizing the symbolic category to which an object belongs, and I haven’t heard an answer yet from the deep learning community about why that is. But it’s also clear that AI systems are doing things that have no resemblance to human cognition. When you look at what AlphaGo is actually doing, part of it is that sort of perception-like ability to look at a position and get a sense, to use an anthropomorphic term, of its potential for winning for white or for black. And perhaps that part is human-like, and actually it’s incredibly good. It’s probably better at recognizing the potential position directly with no deliberation whatsoever than a human is.

But the other part of what AlphaGo does is completely non-human. It’s considering sequences of moves from the current state that run all the way to the end of the game. So part of it is searching in a tree which could go 40 or 50 or possibly more moves into the future. Then from the end of the tree, it then plays a random game all the way to the end and sees who wins that game. And this is nothing like what human beings do. When humans are reasoning about a game like Go or Chess, first of all, we are thinking about it at multiple levels of abstraction. So we’re thinking about the liveness of a particular group, we’re thinking about control of a particular region of territory on the board. We’re thinking, “Well, if I give up control of this territory, then I can trade it for capturing his group over there.”

So this kind of reasoning simply doesn’t happen in AlphaGo at all. We reason back from goals. In chess you say, “Perhaps I could trap his queen. Let me see if I can come up with a move that blocks his exit for the queen.” So we reason backwards from some goals and no chess program and no Go program does that kind of reasoning. The reason humans do this is because the world is incredibly complicated and in different circumstances, different kinds of cognitive processing are efficient and effective in producing good decisions quickly. And that’s the real issue for human intelligence, right?

If we didn’t have to worry about computation, then we would just set up the giant unknown, partially observable, Markov decision process of the universe, solve it and then we would take the first action in the virtually infinite strategy tree that solves that POMDP. Then we would observe the next percept, we would update all our beliefs about the universe and we would resolve the universe and that’s how we would proceed. We would have to do that sort of roughly every millisecond to control the muscles in our body, but we don’t do anything like that. All of the different kinds of mental capabilities that we have are deployed in this amazingly fluid way to get us through the complexity of the real world. We are so far away in AI from understanding how to do that, that when I see people say, “We’re just going to scale up our deep learning systems by another three orders of magnitude and we’ll be more intelligent than humans,” I just smile.

Steven Pinker: Yeah. I’d like to complement some of those observations. It is true that in the early days of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, they were driven by some of the same players. Herb Simon and Allen Newell can be credited as among the founders of AI and the founders of cognitive psychology. Likewise, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. When I was an undergraduate, I caught the tail end of what was called the cognitive revolution. It was exhilarating after the dominance of psychology by behaviorism, which forbade any talk of mentalistic concepts. You weren’t allowed to talk about memories or plans or goals or ideas or rules, because they were considered to be unobservable and thus unscientific. Then the concept of computation domesticated those mentalist terms and opened up a huge space of hypotheses. What are the rules by which we understand and formulate sentences?, a project that Noam Chomsky initiated. How can we model human knowledge as a semantic network?, a project that Minsky and Alan Collins and Ross Quillian and others developed. How do we make sense of foresight and planning and problem solving, which Newell and Simon pioneered?

There was a lot of back and forth between AI and cognitive science when they were first exposed to the very idea that intelligence could be understood in mechanistic terms, and there was a flow of hypotheses from computer science that psychologists then tested as possible models. Ideas that you couldn’t even frame, you couldn’t even articulate before there was the language of computation, such as What is the capacity of human short term memory? or What are the search algorithms by which we explore a problem space? These were unintelligible in the era of behaviorism.

All this caught the attention of philosophers like Hilary Putnam, and later Dan Dennett, who noted that the ideas from the hybrid of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence were addressing deep questions about what mental entities consist of, namely information processing states. The back-and-forth spilled into the ’70s when I was a graduate student, and even the ’80s when centers for cognitive science were funded by the Sloan Foundation. There was also a lot of openness in the companies that hired artificial intelligence researchers: AT&T Bell Labs, which was a scientific powerhouse before the breakup of AT&T. Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, which eventually became part of Verizon. I would go there as a grad student to hear talks on artificial intelligence. I don’t know if this is apocryphal history, but Xerox Palo Alto Research Centers, where I was a consultant, was so open that, according to legend, Steve Jobs walked in and saw the first computer with a graphic user interface and a mouse and windows and icons, stole the ideas, and went on to build the Lisa and then the Macintosh. Xerox was out on their own invention, and companies got proprietary . Many of the AI researchers in companies no longer publish  in peer-reviewed journals in psychology the way they used to, and the two cultures drifted apart. 

Since hypotheses from computer science and artificial intelligence are just hypotheses, there is the question of whether the best engineering solution to a problem is the one that the brain uses. There’s the obvious objection that the hardware is radically different: the brain is massively parallel and noisy and stochastic; computers are serial and deterministic. That led in part to the backlash in the ’80s when perceptrons and artificial neural networks were revived. There was skepticism about the more symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence, which has been revived now in the deep learning era.

to get back to the question, what are ways in which human minds differ from AI systems? It depends on the AI system assessed, as Stuart pointed out. Both of us would agree that the easy equation of deep learning networks with human intelligence is unwarranted, that a lot of the walls that deep learning is hitting come about because, despite the noisy parallel elements the brain is made of, we do emulate a kind of symbol processing architecture, where we can be taught explicit propositions, and human intelligence does make use of these symbols in addition to massively parallel associative networks.

I can’t help but mention a historical irony.  I’ve known Geoff Hinton since we were both post-docs. Hinton himself, early in his career, provided a refutation of the very claim of his that Stuart cited, that symbols are like luminiferous aether, a mythical entity. Geoff and I have noted to each other that we’ve switched sides in the debate on the nature of cognition. There was a debate in the 1970s on the format of mental imagery. Geoff and I were on opposite sides, but he was the symbolic proposition guy and I was the analog parallel network guy.  

Hinton showed that our understanding of an  object depends on the symbolic format in which we mentally represent it. Take something as simple as a cube, he said. Imagine a cube poised on one of its vertices, with the diagonally opposite vertex aligned above it. If you ask people, “Point to all the other vertices,” they are stymied. Their imagery fails, and they often leave out a couple of vertices. But if, instead of describing it to them as a cube tilted on its diagonal axis, you describe it as two tilted diamonds, one above the other, or as two tripods joined by a zig-zag ring, they “see” the correct answer. Even visualizing an object depends critically on how people mentally describe it to themselves with symbols. This is an argument for symbolic representations that Geoff Hinton made in 1979, and with his recent remarks about symbols he seems to have forgotten his own powerful example.

Stuart Russell: I think another area where deep learning is clearly not capturing the human capacity for learning, is just in the efficiency of learning. I remember in the mid ’80s going to some classes in psychology at Stanford, and there were people doing machine learning then and they were very proud of their results, and somebody asked Gordon Bower, “how many examples do humans need to learn this kind of thing?” And Gordon said “one Sometimes two, usually one”, and this is genuinely true, right? If you look for a picture book that has one to two million pictures of giraffes to teach children what a giraffe is, you won’t find one. Picture books that tell children what giraffes are have one picture of a giraffe, one picture of an elephant, and the child gets it immediately, even though it’s a very crude cartoonish drawing, of a giraffe or an elephant, they never have a problem recognizing giraffes and elephants for the rest of their lives.

Deep learning systems are needing, even for these relatively simple concepts, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of examples, and the idea within deep learning seems to be that well, the way we’re going to scale up to more complicated things like learning how to write an email to ask for a job, is that we’ll just have billions or trillions of examples, and then we’ll be able to learn really, really complicated concepts. But of course the universe just doesn’t contain enough data for the machine to learn direct mappings from perceptual inputs or really actually perceptual input history. So imagine your entire video record of your life, and that feeds into the decision about what to do next, and you have to learn that mapping as a supervised learning problem. It’s not even funny how unfeasible that is. The longer the deep learning community persists in this, the worse the pain is going to be when their heads bang into the wall.

Steven Pinker: In many discussions of superintelligence inspired by the success of deep learning I’m puzzled as to what people could possibly mean. We’re sometimes asked to imagine an AI system that’s could solve the problem of Middle East peace or cure cancer. That implies that we would have to train it with 60 million other diseases and their cures, and it would extract the patterns and cure the new disease that we present it with. Needless to say, when it comes to solving global warming, or pandemics, or Middle Eastern peace, there aren’t going to be 60 million similar problems with their correct answers that could provide the training set for supervised learning.

Lucas Perry: So, human children and humans are generally capable of one shot learning, or you said we can learn via seeing one instance of a thing, whereas machine learning today is trained up via very, very large data sets. Can you explain what the actual perceptual difference is going on there? It seems for children, they see a giraffe and they can develop a bunch of higher order facts about the giraffe, like that it is tan, and has spots, and a long neck, and horns and other kinds of higher order things. Whereas machine learning systems may be doing something else. So could you explain that difference?

Stuart Russell: Yeah, I think you actually captured it pretty well. The human child is able to recognize the object, not as 20 million pixels, including–let’s not forget–all the pixels of the background. So many of these learning algorithms are actually learning to recognize the background, not the object at all. They’re really picking up on spurious regularities that happen in the way the images are being captured. But the human child immediately separates the figure from the background says, “okay, it’s the figure that’s being called a giraffe”, and recognizes the higher level properties; “okay, it’s a quadruped, relatively large” the most distinguishing characteristic, as you say, is the very long neck, plus the way its hide is colored. Probably most kids might not even notice the horns and I’m not even sure if all giraffes have the horns, or just the males or just the adults. I don’t know the answer to that.

So I wasn’t paying much attention to all those images. This carries over to many, many other situations, including in things like planning, where if we observe someone carrying out a successful behavior, that one example combined with our prior knowledge is typically enough for us to get the general idea of how to do that thing. And this prior knowledge is absolutely crucial. Just information-theoretically, you can’t learn from one example reliably, unless you bring to bear a great deal of prior knowledge. And this is completely absent in deep learning systems in two ways. One is they don’t have any prior knowledge. And two is some of the prior knowledge is specifically about the thing you’re trying to predict. So here, we’re trying to predict the category of an animal and we already have a great deal of prior knowledge about what it means to belong to a category of animals.

So for example, who owns you, is not an attribute that the child would need to know or care about. If you said, what kind of animal is this? And deep learning systems have no ability to include or exclude any input attribute on the basis of its relevance to what it’s trying to predict, because they know nothing about what it is you’re trying to predict. And if you think about it, that doesn’t make any sense, right? If I said, “okay, I want you to learn to predict predicate P1279A. Okay? And I’m going to give you loads and loads of examples.” And now you get a perfect predictor for ‘P1279A’, but you have absolutely no use for it, because P1279A doesn’t connect to anything else in your cognition. So you learned a completely useless predictor because you know nothing about the thing that you’re trying to predict.

So it seems like it’s broken in several really, really important ways, and I would say probably the absence of prior knowledge or any means to bring to bear prior knowledge on the learning process is the most crucial.

Steven Pinker: Indeed, this goes back to our conversation on how basic principles of intelligence that govern the design of intelligent systems provide hypotheses that can be tested within psychology. What Stuart has identified is ultimately the nature-nurture problem in cognition. Namely, what are the innate constraints that govern children’s first hypotheses as they try to make sense of the world? 

One famous answer is Chomsky’s universal grammar, which guides children as they acquire language. Another is the idea from my colleagues Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke, in different formulations, that children have a prior concept of a physical object whose parts move together, which persists over time, and which follows continuous spatiotemporal trajectories; and that they have a distinct  concept of an agent or mind, which is governed by beliefs and desires. Maybe, or maybe not, they come equipped with still other frameworks for concepts, like the concept of a living thing or the concept of an artifact, and these priors radically cut down the search space of hypotheses, so they don’t have to search at the level of pixels and all their logically possible weighted combinations. 

Of course, the challenge in the science is how you specify the innate constraints, the prior knowledge, so that they aren’t obviously too specific, given what we know about the plasticity of human cognition. The extreme example being the late philosopher Jerry Fodors’ suggestion that all concepts are innate, including “trombone” and “doorknob” and “carburetor.”

Stuart Russell: (Laughs)

Steven Pinker: Hard to swallow, but between that extreme and the deep learning architecture in which the only thing that’s innate are the pixels, the convolutional network that allows for translational invariance, and the network of connections, there’s an interesting middle ground. That defines the central research question in cognitive development.

Stuart Russell: I don’t think you have to believe in extensive innate structures in order to believe that prior knowledge is really, really important for learning. I would guess that some aspects of our cognition are innate, and one of them is probably that the world contains things, and that’s really important because if you just think about the brain as circuits, some circuit languages don’t have things as first class entities, whereas first order logical languages or programming languages do have things as first class entities and that’s a really important distinction.

Even if you believe that nothing is innate, the point is how does everything that you have perceived up to now affect your ability to learn the next thing? One argument is, everything you’ve perceived up to now, is simply data, and somehow magically, we have access to all our past perceptions, and then you’re just training a function from that whole lot to the next thing to do or how to interpret the next object.

That doesn’t make much sense. Presumably the experience you have from birth or even pre-birth onwards, is converted into something and one argument is that it’s just converted into something like knowledge, and then that knowledge is brought to bear on learning problems, for example, to even decide what are the relevant aspects of the input for predicting category membership of this thing?

And the other view would be that, in the deep learning community, they would say probably something like the accumulation of features. If you imagine a giant recurrent neural network: in the hidden layers of the recurrent neural network over years and years and years of perception, you’re building up internal representations, features, which then can perhaps simplify the learning of the next concept that you need to learn. And there’s probably some truth in that too.

And absolutely having a library of features that are generally useful for predicting and decision making and planning and our entire vocabulary, I think this is something that people often miss, our vocabulary, our language, is not just something we use to communicate with each other. It’s an enormous resource for simplifying the world in the right ways, to make the next thing we need to know, or the next thing we need to do, relatively easy. Right? So you imagine you decide at the age of 12, I want to understand the physical laws that control the universe.

The fact that we have in our vocabulary, something like doing a PhD, makes it much more feasible to figure out what your plan is going to be, to achieve this objective. If you didn’t have that, and if you didn’t have all the pieces of doing a PhD, like take a course, read a book, this library of words and action primitives, at all these levels of abstraction, is a resource without which you would be completely unable to formulate plans of any length or any likelihood of success. And this is another area where current AI systems, I would say generally, not just deep learning, we lack a real understanding of how to formulate these hierarchies and acquire this vocabulary and then how to deploy it in a seamless way so that we’re always managing to function successfully in the real world.

Lucas Perry: I’m basically just as confused about I guess, intelligence as anyone else. So the difference, it seems to me between the machine learning system and the child who one-shot-learns the giraffe is, that the child brings into this learning scenario, this knowledge that you guys were talking about, that they understand that the world is populated by things and that there are other minds and some other ideas about 3D objects and perception, but a core difference seems to be something like symbols and the ability to manipulate symbols is this right? Or is it wrong? And what are symbols and effective symbol manipulation made of?

Steven Pinker: Yes, and that is a limitation of the so-called deep learning systems, which are a subset of machine learning, which is a subset of artificial intelligence. It’s certainly not true that AI systems don’t manipulate symbols.  Indeed, that’s what classical AI systems trade in: manipulation of propositions, implementation of versions of logical inference or of cause-and-effect reasoning. Those can certainly be implemented in AI systems–it’s just gone out of fashion with the deep learning craze.

Lucas Perry: Well, they don’t learn those symbols, right? Like we give them the symbols and then they manipulate them.

Steven Pinker: The basic architecture of the system, almost by definition, can’t be learned;  you can’t learn something with nothing. There have got to be some elementary information processes, some formats of data representation, some basic ways of transforming one representation to another, that are hardwired into the architecture of the system. It’s an open empirical question, in the case of the human brain, whether it includes variables for objects and minds, or living things, or artifacts, or if those are scaffolded one on top of the other with experience. There’s nothing in principle that prevents AI systems from doing that;  many of them do, but at least for now they seem to have fallen out of fashion.

Stuart Russell: There is precedent for generating new symbols, both in the probabilistic programming literature and in the inductive logic programming literature. So predicate invention is a very important reason for doing inductive logic programming. But I agree with Steve, that it’s an open question as to whether the basic capacity to have a new symbol based representations in the brain is innate, or is it learned? There’s very anecdotal evidence about what happens to children who are not brought up among other human beings. I think those anecdotes suggest that they don’t become symbol-using in the same way. So it might be that the process of developing symbol-using capabilities in the brain is enormously aided by the fact that we grow up in the presence of symbol-using entities, namely our parents and family members and community. And of course that leads you to then a chicken and egg problem.

So you’d have to argue in that case that early humans, or pre-humans had much more rudimentary symbol-like capabilities: some animals have the ability to refer to different phenomena or objects with different signs, different kinds of sounds that some new world monkeys have, for example, for a snake and for puma, but they’re not able to do the full range of things that we do with symbols. You could argue that the symbol using capability developed over hundreds of thousands of years and the unaided human mind doesn’t come with it built in, but because we’re usually bathed in symbol-using activity around us, we are able to quickly pick it up. I don’t know what the truth is, but it seems very clear that this kind of capability, for example, gives you the ability to generalize so much faster than you can with circuits. So just to give a particular example of the rules of Go, we talked about earlier, the rules of Go apply the same rule at every time-step in the game.

And it’s the same rule at every square in the game, except around the edges, and if you have what we call first order capability, meaning you can have universal quantifiers or in programs, we think of these as loops, you can say very quickly for every square on the board, if you have a piece on there and it’s surrounded by the enemy, then it’s dead. That’s sort of a crude approximation to how things work and go, but it’s roughly right. In a circuit, you can’t say that because you don’t have the ability to say for every square. So you have to have a piece of circuit for each square. So you’ve got 361 copies of the rule in each of those copies has to be learned separately, and this is one of the things that we do with convolutional neural networks.

A convolutional neural network has the universal quantifier over the input space, built into it. So it’s a kind of cheating, and as far as we know, the brain doesn’t have that type of weight sharing. So the key aspect is not just the physical structure of the convolutional network, which has this repeating local receptive fields on each different part of the retina, so to speak, but that we also insist that weights for each of those local receptive fields are copied across all receptive fields in the retina. So there aren’t millions of separate weights that are trained, there’s only a few, sometimes even just a handful of weights that are trained and then the code makes sure that those are effectively copied across the entire retina. And the brain. I don’t think has any way to do that, so it’s doing something else to achieve this kind of rapid generalization.

Lucas Perry: All right. So now with all of this context and understanding about intelligence and its origins today in 2020, AI is beginning to proliferate and is occupying a lot of news cycles. What particular important changes to human society does the rise and proliferation of AI signal and how do you view it in relation to the agricultural and industrial revolutions?

Steven Pinker: I’m going to begin with a meta-answer, which is that we should keep in mind how spectacularly ignorant we are of the future even the relatively near future. Experts at superforecasting studied by Phil Tetlock, pretty much the best in the world, go down to about chance after about five years out. And we know, looking at predictions of the future from the past,  how ludicrous they can be, both in underpredicting technological changes and in overpredicting them. A 1993 book by Bill Gates called The Road Ahead  said virtually nothing about the internet! And there’s a sport of looking at science-fiction movies and spotting ludicrous anachronisms, such as the fact that in 2001: A Space Odyssey they were using typewriters. They had suspended animation and trips to Jupiter, but they hadn’t invented the word processor. To say nothing of the social changes they failed to predict, such as the fact that all of the women in the movie were secretaries and assistants.

So we should begin by acknowledging that it is extraordinarily difficult to predict the future. And there’s a systematic reason, namely that the future depends not just on technological developments, but also on people’s reaction to the developments, and on the  reactions to the reactions, and the reactions to the reactions to the reactions. There are seven and a half billion of us reacting, and we have to acknowledge that there’s a lot we’re going to get wrong. 

It’s safe to say that a lot of tasks that involve physical manipulation, like stocking shelves and driving trucks, are going to be automated, and societies will have to deal with the possibility of radical changes in employment, and Stuart talks about those in his book. We don’t know whether the job market will be flexible enough to create new jobs, always at the frontier of what machines can’t yet do, or whether there’ll be massive unemployment that will require economic adjustments, such as a universal basic income or government sponsored service. 

Less clear is the extent to which high-level decision making, like policy, diplomacy, or scientific hypothesis-testing,  will be replaced by AI. I think that’s impossible to predict.  Although, closer to the replacement of truck drivers by autonomous vehicles, AI as a useful tool, rather than as a replacement, for human intelligence will explode in science and business and technology and every walk of life.

Stuart Russell: I think all of those things are true. And I agree that our general record of forecasting has been pretty dismal. I am smiling as Steve was talking, because I was remembering Ray Kurzweil recently saying how proud he was that he had predicted the self driving car, I think it was in ’96 or ’92, something like that, and possibly wasn’t aware that the first self driving car was driving on the freeway in 1987, before he even thought to predict that such a thing might happen. If I had to say, in the next decade, if you said, roughly speaking, that what happened in the 2010s was primarily that visual perception became very crudely feasible for machines when it wasn’t before.

And that’s already having huge impact, including in self-driving cars, I would say that language understanding at least in a simplified sense will become possible in this decade. And I think it’ll be a combination of deep learning with probabilistic programming, with Bayesian and symbolic methods. That will open up enormous areas of activity to machines where they simply couldn’t go before, and some of that will be very straightforward, job replacement for call center workers. Most of what they do, I think could be automated by systems that are able to understand their conversations. The role of the smart speaker, the Alexa, or Cortana or Siri or whatever will radically change and will enable AI systems to actually understand your life to a much greater extent. One of the reasons that Siri and Cortana or Alexa are not very useful to me is because they just don’t understand anything about my life.

The “call me an ambulance” example illustrates that. If I got a text message saying “Johnny’s in the hospital with a broken arm”, well, if it doesn’t understand that Johnny is possibly my cat, or possibly my son, or possibly my great grandfather and does Johnny live nearby, or in my house, or on another continent, then it hasn’t the faintest idea of what to do. Or even whether I care. It’s only really through language understanding. I doubt that we’re going to be filling these things full of first order logic assertions that we will type into our AI system. So it’s only through language that it’s going to be able to acquire the knowledge that it needs to be a useful assistant to an individual or a corporation. So having that language capability will open up whole new areas for AI to be useful to individuals and also to take jobs from people. And I’m not able to predict what else we might be able to do when there are AI systems that understand language, but it has to have a huge impact.

Lucas Perry: Is there anything else that you guys would like to add in terms of where AI is at right now, where it’ll be in the near future and the benefits and risks it will pose?

Stuart Russell: I could point to a few things that are already happening. There’s a lot of discussion about the negative impacts on women and minorities from algorithms that inadvertently pick up on biases in society. So we saw the example of Amazon’s hiring algorithm that rejected any resume that had the word “woman’s” in it. And I think that’s serious, but I think the AI community we’re still not completely woke, and there’s a lot of consciousness raising that needs to happen. But I think technically that problem is manageable, and I think one interesting thing that’s occurring is that we’re starting to develop an understanding, not just of the machine learning algorithm, but of the socio-technical context in which that machine learning is embedded and modeling that social technical context allows you to predict whether the use of that algorithm will have negative feedback kinds of consequences, or it will be vulnerable to certain kinds of selection bias in the input data, and so on.

Deepfakes surveillance and manipulation, that’s another big area, and then something I’m very concerned about is the use of AI for autonomous weapons. This is another area where we fight against media stereotypes. So when the media talk about autonomous weapons, they invariably have a picture of a Terminator. Always. And I tell journalists, I’m not going to talk to you if you put a picture of a Terminator in the article. And they always say, well, I don’t have any control over that, that’s a different part of the newspaper, but it always happens anyway.

And the reason that’s a problem is because then everyone thinks, “Oh, well this is science fiction. We don’t have to worry about this because this is science fiction.” And you know, I’ve heard the Russian ambassador to the UN and Geneva say, well, why are we even discussing these things, because this is science fiction, it’s 20 or 30 years in the future? Oh, by the way, I have some of these weapons, if you’d like to buy them. The reality is that many militaries around the world are developing these, companies are selling them. There’s a Turkish arms company, STM, selling a device, which is basically the slaughterbot from the Slaughterbots movie. So it’s a small drone with onboard explosives and they advertise it as capable of tracking and autonomously attacking human beings based on video signatures and/or face recognition.

The Turkish government has announced that they’re going to be using those against the Kurds in Syria sometime this year. So we’ll see if it happens, but there’s no doubt that this is not science fiction, and it’s very real. And it’s going to create a new kind of weapon of mass destruction, because if it’s autonomous, it doesn’t need to be supervised. And if it doesn’t need to be supervised, then you can launch them by the million, and then you have something with the same effect as a nuclear weapon, but much cheaper, much easier to proliferate with much less collateral damage and all the rest of it.

Steven Pinker: I think in all of these discussions, it’s critical to not fall prey to a status-quo bias and compare the hypothetical problems of a future technology with an idealized present, ignoring the real problems with the present we take for granted. In the case of bias, we know that humans are horribly biased. It’s not just that we’re biased against particular genders and ethnic groups and sexual orientations. But inj general we make judgements that can easily be outperformed by even simple algorithms, like a linear regression formula. So we should remember that our benchmark in talking about the accuracies or inaccuracies of AI prediction algorithms has to be the human, and that’s often a pretty low bar. When it comes to bias, of course, a system that’s trained on a sample that’s unrepresentative is not a particularly intelligent system. And going back to the idea that we have to distinguish the goals we want to achieve from the intelligence that achieves them, if our goal is to overcome past inequities, then by definition we don’t want to make selections that simply replicate the statistical distribution of women and minorities in the past. Our goal is to rectify those inequities, and the problem in a system that replicates them is not that it’s not intelligent enough, but then we’ve given it the wrong goal.

When it comes to weapons, here too, we’ve got to compare the potential harm of intelligent weapons systems with the stupendous harm of dumb weapon systems. Aerial bombardment, artillery, automatic weapons, search-and- destroy missions, and tank battles have killed people by the millions. I think there’s been insufficient attention to how a battleground that used smarter weapons would compare to what we’ve tolerated for centuries simply because that’s what we have come to accept, though it’s being fantastically destructive. What ultimately we want to do is to make the use of any weapons less likely, and as I’ve written about, that has been the general trend in the last 75 years, fortunately.

Stuart Russell: Yeah, I think there is some truth in that. When I first got the email from Human Rights Watch, so they began a campaign, I think was back in 2013, to argue for a treaty banning autonomous weapons. Human Rights Watch came into existence because of the awful things that human soldiers do. And now they’re saying “No, no human soldiers are great, it’s the machines we need to worry about.” And I found that a little bit odd. To me, the argument about whether the weapons will inadvertently violate humans right in ways that human soldiers don’t, or sort of accidentally kill people in ways that we are getting better at avoiding, I don’t think that’s the issue. I think it’s specifically the weapon of mass destruction property that autonomous weapons have that for example machine guns don’t.

There’s a hundred million or more Kalashnikov rifles in private hands in the world. If all those weapons got up one morning by themselves and started shooting anyone they could see, that would be a big chunk of the human race gone, but they don’t do that. Each of them has to be carried by a person. And if you want to put a million of them into the field, you need another 10 million people to feed and train those million soldiers, and to transport them, and protect them, and all that stuff. And that’s why we haven’t seen very large scale death from all those hundred million Kalashnikovs.

Even carpet-bombing, which I think nowadays would be regarded as indiscriminate and therefore a violation of international law. And I think even during the Second World War, people argued that “No, you can’t go and bomb cities.” But once the Germans started to do it, then there was escalating rounds of retaliation and people lost all sense of what was a civilized and what was an uncivilized act of war. But even The Blitz against Great Britain, as far as I know killed only between 50 and 60,000 people, even though it hit dozens and dozens of cities. But literally one truckload of autonomous weapons can kill a million people.

An interesting fact about World War II is that for every person who died, between 1,000 and 10,000 bullets were fired. So just killing people with bullets on average in World War II cost you, let’s take a geometric mean 3,000 bullets, which is actually about a thousand dollars at current prices, but you could build a lethal autonomous weapon for a lot less than that. And even if they had a 25% success rate in finding and killing a human, it’s much cheaper than the bullet, let alone the guns and the aircraft and all the rest of it.

So as a way of killing very, very large numbers of people it’s incredibly cheap and incredibly effective. They can also be selective. So you can kill just the kind of people you want to get rid of. And it seems to me that we just don’t need another weapon of mass destruction with all of these extra characteristics. We’ve got rid of to some extent biological and chemical weapons. We’re trying to get rid of nuclear weapons, and introducing another one that’s arguably much worse seems to be a step in the wrong direction.

Steven Pinker: You asked also about the benefits of artificial intelligence, which I think could be stupendous. They include elimination of drudgery and the boring and dangerous jobs that no one really likes to do, like stocking shelves, making beds, mining coal, and picking fruit. There could be a bonanza in automating all the things that humans want done without human pain and labor and boredom and danger. It raises the problem of how we will support the people (if new jobs don’t materialize) who have nothing to do. But that’s a more minor economic problem to solve, compared to the spectacular advance we could have in eliminating human drudgery.

Also, there are a lot of jobs, such as the care of elderly people–lifting them onto toilets, reaching things from upper shelves–that, if automated, would allow more of them to live at home instead of being warehoused in nursing homes. Here, too, the potential for human flourishing is spectacular. And as I mentioned, many kinds of human judgment are so error-prone that they can already be replaced by simple algorithms, and better still if they were more intelligent algorithms. There’s the potential of much less waste, much less error, far fewer accidents. An obvious example is the million and a quarter people killed in traffic accidents each year that could be terrifically reduced if we had autonomous vehicles that were affordable and widespread.

Lucas Perry: A core of this is that all of the problems that humanity faces simply require intelligence to solve them, essentially. And if we’re able to solve the problem of how to make intelligent machines, then our problems will evermore and continuously become automateable by machine systems. So Stuart, do have you have anything else to add here in terms of existential hope and benefits to compliment what Steve just contributed before we pivot into existential risk?

Stuart Russell: Yeah, there is an argument going around, and I think Mark Zuckerberg said it pretty clearly, and Oren Etzioni and various other people have said basically the same thing. And it’s usually put this way, “If you’re against AI, then you’re against better medical decisions, or reducing medical errors, or safer cars,” and so on. And this is, I think, just a ridiculous argument. So first of all, people who are concerned about the risks of AI, are not against AI, right? That’s like arguing if you’re a nuclear engineer and you’re concerned about the possibility of a design flaw that would lead to a meltdown, you’re against electricity. No, you’re not against electricity. You’re just against millions of people dying for no reason, and you want to fix the problem. And the same argument I think is true about those who are concerned about the risk of AI. If AI didn’t have any benefits we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all. No one would be investing any money, no one would have put their lives and careers into working on the capabilities of AI, and the whole point would be moot.

So of course, AI will have benefits, but if you don’t address the risks, you won’t get the benefits, because the technology will be rejected, or we won’t even have a choice to reject it. And if you look at what happened with nuclear power, I think it’s really an object lesson. Nuclear power could and still can produce quite cheap electricity. So I have a house in France and most electricity in France comes from nuclear power, and it’s very cheap and very reliable. And it also doesn’t produce a lot of carbon dioxide, but because of Chernobyl, the nuclear industry has been literally decimated, by which I mean, reduced by a factor of 10, or more. And so we didn’t get the benefits, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the risks. The same holds with AI.

So the benefits of AI in the long run I would argue are pretty unlimited, and medical errors and safer cars, that’s all nice, but that’s a tiny, tiny footnote in what can be done. As Steve already mentioned, the elimination of drudgery and repetitive work. It’s easy for us intellectuals to talk about that. We’ve never really engaged in a whole lot of it, but for most of the human race, for most of recorded history, people with power and money have used everybody else as robots to get what they want. Whether we’ve been using them as military robots, or agricultural robots, or factory robots, we’ve been using people as robots.

And if you had gone back to the early hunter gatherer days and written some science fiction, and you said, “You know what, in the future, people will go into big square buildings, thousands of feet long with no windows and they’ll do the same thing a thousand times a day. And then they’ll go back the next day and do the same thing another thousand times. And they’re going to do that for thousands of days until they’re practically dead.” The audience, the readers of science fiction in 20,000 BC, would have said, “You’re completely nuts, that’s so unrealistic.” But that’s how we did it. And now we’re worried that it’s coming to an end, and it is coming to an end, because we finally have robots that can do the things that we’ve been using human robots to do.

And I’m not saying we should just get rid of those jobs, because jobs have all kinds of purposes in people’s lives. And I’m not a big fan of UBI, which says basically, “Okay, we give up. Humans are useless, so the machines will feed them and house them, entertain them, but that’s all they’re good for.”

Now the benefits to me… It’s hard to imagine, just like we could not imagine very well all the things we would use the internet for. I mean, I remember the Berkeley computer science faculty in the ’80s sitting around at lunch, we knew more about networking than almost anybody else, but we still had absolutely no idea. What was the point of being able to click on a link? What’s that about? We totally blew it.

And we don’t understand all the things that superhuman AI could do for us. I mean, Steve mentioned that we could do much better science, and I agree with that. In the book, I visualize it as taking various ideas, like, “travel as a service,” and extending that to “everything as a service.” So travel as a service is a good example. Like if you think about going to Australia 200 years ago, you’re talking about a billion dollar proposition, probably 10 years, thousands of people, 80% chance of death. Now I take out my cell phone, I go tap, tap, tap, and now I’m in Australia tomorrow. And it’s basically free compared to what it used to be. So that’s what I mean by, as a service, you want something, you just get it.

Superhuman AI could make everything as a service. So think about the things that are expensive and difficult or impossible now, like training a neurosurgeon, or building a railway to connect your rural village to a nearby city so that people can visit, or trade, or whatever. For most of the developing world these things are completely out of reach. The health budget of a lot of countries in Africa is less than $10 per person per year. So the entire health budget of a country would train one neurosurgeon in the US. So these things are out of reach, but if you take out the humans then these services can become effectively free. They become services like travel is today, and that would enable us to bring everyone on earth up to the kind of living standard that they might aspire to. And if we can figure out the resource constraints and so on that will be a wonderful thing.

Lucas Perry: Now that’s quite a beautiful picture of the future. There’s a lot of existential hope there. The other side to existential hope is existential risk. Now this is an interesting subject, which Steve and you, Stuart, I believe have disagreements about. So pivoting into this area, and Steve, you can go first here, do you believe that human beings, should we not go extinct in the meantime, will we build artificial superintelligence? And does that pose an existential risk to humanity?

Steven Pinker: Yeah, I’m on record as being skeptical of that scenario and dubious about the value of putting a lot of effort into worrying about it now. The concept of superintelligence is itself obscure. In a lot of the discussions you could replace the word “superintelligence” with “magic” or “miracle” and the sentence would read the same. You read about an AI system that could duplicate brains in silicon, or solve problems like war in the Middle East, or cure cancer.  It’s just imagining the possibility of a solution and assuming that the ability to bring it about will exist, without laying out what that intelligence would consist of, or what would count as a solution to the problem. 

So I find the concept of superintelligence itself a dubious extrapolation of an unextrapolable continuum, like human-to-animal, or not-so-bright human-to-smart-human. I don’t think there is a power called “intelligence” such that we can compare a squirrel or an octopus to a human and say, “Well, imagine even more of that.” 

I’m also skeptical about the existential risk scenarios. They tend to come in two varieties. One is based on the notion of a will to power: that as soon as you get an intelligent system, it will inevitably want to dominate and exploit. Often the analogy is that we humans have exploited and often extinguished animals because we’re smarter than them, so as soon as there is an artificial system that’s smarter than us, it’ll do to us what we did to the dodos. Or that technologically advanced civilizations, like European colonists and conquistadors subjugated and sometimes wiped out indigenous peoples, so that’s what an AI system might do to us. That’s one variety of this scenario.

I think that scenario confuses intelligence with dominance, based on the fact that in one species, Homo sapiens, they happen to come bundled together, because we came about through natural selection, a competitive process driven by relative success at capturing scarce resources and competing for mates, ultimately with the goal of relative reproductive success. But there’s no reason that a system that is designed to pursue a goal would have as its goal, domination. This goes back to our earlier discussion that the ability to achieve a goal is distinct from what the goal is.

It just so happens that in products of natural selection, the goal was winning in reproductive competition. For an artifact we design, there’s just no reason that would be true. This is sometimes called the orthogonality thesis in discussions of existential risk, although that’s just a fancy-schmancy way of referring to Hume’s distinction between our goals and our intelligence.

Now I know that there is an argument that says, “Wouldn’t any intelligence system have to maximize its own survivability, because if it’s given the goal of X, well, you can’t achieve X if you don’t exist, therefore, as a subgoal to achieving X, you’ve got to maximize your own survival at all costs.” I think that’s fallacious. It’s certainly not true that all complex systems have to work toward their own perpetuation. My iPhone doesn’t take any steps to resist my dropping it into a toilet, or letting it run out of power.

You could imagine if it could be programmed like a child to whine, and to cry, and to refuse to do what it’s told to do as its power level went down. We wouldn’t buy one. And we know in the natural world, there are plenty of living systems that sacrifice their own existence for other goals. When a bee stings you, its barbed stinger is dislodged when the bee escapes, killing the bee, but because the bee is programmed to maximize the survivability of the colony, not itself, it willingly sacrifices itself. So it is not true that by definition an intelligent system has to maximize its own power or survivability.

But the more common existential threat scenario is not a will to power but collateral damage. That if an AI system is given a single goal, what if it relentlessly pursues it without consideration of side effects, including harm to us? There are famous examples that I originally thought were spoofs, but were intended seriously, like giving an AI system the goal of making as many paperclips as possible, and so it converts all available matter into paperclips, including our own bodies (putting aside the fact that we don’t need more efficient paperclip manufacturing than what we already have, and that human bodies are a pretty crummy source of iron for paperclips).

Barely more plausible is the idea that we might give an AI system the goal of curing cancer, and so it will  conscript us as involuntary guinea pigs and induce tumors in all of us, or that we might give it the goal of regulating the level of water behind a dam and it might flood a town because it was never given the goal of not drowning a village. 

The problem with these scenarios is that they’re self-refuting. They assume that an “intelligent” artifact would be designed to implement a single goal, which is not true of even the stupid artifacts that we live with. When we design a car, we don’t just give the goal of going from A to B as fast as possible; we also install brakes and a steering wheel and a muffler and a catalytic converter. A lot of these scenarios seem to presuppose both idiocy on the part of the designers, who would give a system control over the infrastructure of the entire planet without testing it first to see how it worked, and an idiocy on the part of the allegedly intelligent system, which would pursue a single goal regardless of all the other effects. This does not exist in any human artifact, let alone one that claims to be intelligent. Giving an AI system one vaguely worded, sketchy goal, and empowering it with control over the entire infrastructure of the planet without testing it first seems to me just so self-evidently moronic that I don’t worry that engineers have to be warned against it.

I’ve quoted Stuart himself, who in an interview made the point well when he said, “No one talks about building bridges that don’t fall down. They just call it building bridges.” Likewise, AI that avoids idiocies like that is just AI, it’s not AI with extra safeguards. That’s what intelligence consists of.

Let me make one other comment. You could say, well, even if the odds are small, the damage would be so catastrophic that it is worth our concern. But there are downsides to worrying about existential risk. One of them is the possible stigmatization and abandonment of helpful technologies. Stuart mentioned the example of nuclear power. What’s catastrophic is that we don’t roll out nuclear power the way that France did, which would go a long way toward solving the genuinely dangerous problem of climate change. Fear of nuclear power has been irrationally stoked by vivid examples:the fairly trivial accident at Three Mile Island in the United States, which killed no one, the tsunami at Fukushima, where people died in the botched evacuation, not the nuclear accident, and the Soviet bungling at Chernobyl. Even that accident killed a fraction of the people that die every day from the burning of fossil fuels, to say nothing of the likely future harm from climate change. The reaction to Chernobyl is exactly how we should not deal with the dangers facing humanity. 

Genetically modified organisms are another example: a technology overregulated or outlawed out of worst-case fears, depriving us of the spectacular benefits of greater ecological sustainability, human nutrition, and less use of water and pesticides. 

There are other downsides of fretting about exotic hypothetical existential risks. There is a line of reasoning in the existential risk community and the so called Rationality community that goes something like this: since the harm of extinguishing the species is basically infinite, probabilities no longer matter, because by expected utility calculations, if you multiply the tiny risk by the very large number of the potential descendants of humans before the sun expands and kills us off (or in wilder scenarios,  the astronomically larger number of immortal consciousnesses that will exist when we can upload our connectomes to the cloud, or when we colonize and multiply in other solar systems)—well, then even an eensy, eensy, infinitesimal probability of extinction would be catastrophic, and we should worry about it now.

The problem is that that argument could apply to any scenario with a nonzero probability, which means any scenario that is not logically impossible. Should we take steps to prevent the evolution of toxic killer gerbils that will nibble everyone to death? If I say, “That’s preposterous,” you can say, “Well, even if the probability is very, very small, since the harm of extinction is so great, we must devote some brain power to that scenario.”

I do fear the moral hazard of human intellect being absorbed in this free-for-all: that any risk, if you imagine it’s potentially existential, could justify any amount of expenditure, according to this expected utility calculation. The hazard is that smart people, clever enough to grasp a danger that common sense would never conceive of, will be absorbed into what might be a fruitless pursuit, compared to areas where we urgently do need application of human brain power–in climate, in the prevention of nuclear war, in the prevention of pandemics. Those are real risks, which no one denies, and we haven’t solved any of them, together with other massive sources of human misery like Alzheimer’s disease. Given these needs, I wonder whether the infinitesimal-probability-times-infinite-harm is the right way of allocating our intellectual capital.

Lucas Perry: Stuart, you want to react to those points.

Stuart Russell: Yeah, there’s a lot there to react to and I’m tempted to start at the end and work back and just ask, well, if we were spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to breed billions of toxic killer gerbils, wouldn’t you ask people if that was a good idea before dismissing any reason to be concerned about it? If that’s what we were actually investing in creating. I don’t buy the analogy between AI and toxic killer gerbils in any shape or form. But I will go back to the beginning, and we began by talking about feasibility. And Steve argues, I think, primarily, that it’s not even meaningful, that we could create superhuman levels of intelligence, that there isn’t a single continuum.

And yes, there isn’t a single continuum, but there doesn’t have to be a single continuum. When people say one person is more intelligent than another, or one species is more intelligent than other, it’s not a scientific statement that there is a single scalar on which species one exceeds species two. They’re talking in broad brush. So when we say humans are more intelligent than chimpanzees, that’s probably a reasonable thing to say, but there are clearly dimensions of intelligence where actually chimpanzees are more intelligent than humans. For example, short term memory. A chimpanzee, once they get what a digit is, they can learn 20 digit telephone numbers at the drop of a hat, and humans can’t do that. Clearly there’s dimensions on which chimpanzee intelligence, on average, is probably better than human. But nonetheless, when you look at which species would you rather be right now the chimpanzees don’t have much of a chance against the humans.

I think that there is a meaningful motion of generality of intelligence, and one way to think about it is to take a decision making scenario where we already understand how to produce very effective decisions, and then ask, how is that decision scenario restricted, and what happens when we relax the restrictions and figure out how to maintain the same, let’s say, superhuman quality of decision making? So if you look at Go play, it’s clear that the humans have been left far behind. So it’s not unreasonable to ask, just as the machines wiped the floor with humans on the Go board, and the chess board, and now on the StarCraft board, and lots of other boards, could you take that and transfer that into the real world where we make decisions of all kinds? The difference between the Go board and the real world is pretty dramatic. And that’s why we’ve had lots of success on the Go board and not so much in the real world.

The first thing is that the Go board is fully observable. You can see the entire state of the world that matters. And of course in the real world there’s lots of stuff you don’t see and don’t know. Some of it you can infer by accumulating information over time, what we call state estimation, but that turns out to be quite a difficult problem. Another thing is that we know all the rules of Go, and of course in the real world, you don’t know all the rules, you have to learn a lot as you go along. Another thing about the Go board is that despite the fact that we think of it as really complicated, it’s incredibly simple compared to the real world. At any given time on the Go board there’s a couple of hundred legal moves, and the game lasts for a couple hundred moves.

And if you said, well, what are the analogous primitive actions in the real world for a human being? Well, we have 600 muscles and we can actuate them maybe about 10 times per second each. Your brain probably isn’t able to do that, but physically that’s what could be your action space. And so you actually have then a far greater action space. And you’re also talking about… We often make plans that last for many years, which is literally trillions of primitive actions in terms of muscle actuations. Now we don’t plan those all out in detail, but we function on those kinds of timescales. Those are some of the ways that Go and the real world differ. And what we do in AI is we don’t say, okay, I’ve done Go, now I’m going to work on suicide Go, and now I’m going to work on chess with three queens.

What we try to do is extract the general lessons. Okay, we now understand fairly well how to handle that whole class of problems. Can we relax the assumptions, these basic qualitative assumptions about the nature of the problem? And if you relax all the ones that I listed, and probably a couple more that I’ve got, you’re getting towards systems that can function at a superhuman level in the real world, assuming that you figure out how to deal with all those issues. So just as we find ourself flummoxed by the moves that the AI system makes on the Go board, if you’re a General, and you’re up against an AI system that’s controlling, or coming up with the decision making plans for the other side, you might find yourself flummoxed, that everything you try, the machine has already anticipated and put in place something that will prevent your plan from succeeding. The pace of warfare will be beyond anything humans have ever contemplated, right?

So they won’t even have time to think, just as the Iraqis were not used to the rate of decision making of the US Army in the first Gulf War, and they couldn’t do anything. They were literally paralyzed, and just step by step by step the allied forces were able to take them apart because they couldn’t respond within the timescales that the allied forces were operating.

So it will be kind of like that if you were a human general. If you were a human CEO and your competitor company is organized and run by AI systems, you’d be in the same kind of situation. So it’s entirely conceivable. I’m not necessarily saying plausible, but conceivable that we can create real world decision making capabilities that exceed those of humans across the board. So that this notion of generality, I think it is something that still needs to be worked out. Most definitions of generality that people come up with end up saying, “Well, humans are general because they can do all the things that humans can do,” which is sort of a tautology. But nonetheless, it’s interesting that when you think about all the jobs: doctor, carpenter, advertising, sales, representative, most normally functioning people could do most of those jobs at least to some reasonable level.

So we are incredibly flexible compared to current AI systems. There is progress on achieving generality, but there’s a long way to go. I’m certainly not one of those who says that superintelligent AI is imminent and that’s why we need to worry. And in fact, I’m probably more conservative. If you want to appeal to what most expert AI people think, most expert AI people think that we will have something that’s reasonably described as superintelligent AI sooner than I do.

So most people think sometime in the middle of the century. It turns out that Asian AI researchers particularly in China are more optimistic, so they think 20 years. People in the US and Europe may be more like 40 years. I would be reasonably confident saying by the end of this century.

I think Nick Bostrom is in about the same place. He’s also more conservative than the average expert AI researcher. There are major breakthroughs that have to happen, but the massive investment that’s taking place, the influx of incredibly smart people into the field, these things suggest that those breakthroughs will probably take place but the timescale is very hard to say.

And when we think about the risks, I would say Steve is really putting up one straw man after another and then knocking it down. So for example, the paperclip argument is not a scenario that Nick Bostrom thinks is one of the more likely ways for the human race to end. It’s a philosophical thought experiment intended to illustrate a point. And the point is incontrovertible and I don’t think Steve disagrees with it.

So let’s not use the word intelligent because I think Steve here is using the word intelligent to mean always behaves in whatever way we think we wish that it would behave well.

Of course, if you define intelligence that way, then there isn’t an issue. The question is, how do we create any such thing? And the ways we have right now of creating any such thing fall under the standard model, which I described earlier that we set up, let’s call it a superoptimizer and then we give it an objective. And then off it goes. And he’s (Bostrom) describing what happens when you give a superoptimizer the wrong goal. And he’s not saying, “Yes, of course we should give it wrong goals.”

And he’s using this to illustrate what happens when you give it even what seems to be innocuous. So he’s trying to convey the idea that we are not very good at judging the consequences of seemingly innocuous goals. My example of curing cancer: “Curing cancer? Yeah, of course, that’s a good goal to give to an AI system” — but the point is, if that’s the only goal you give to the AI system, then all these weird things happen because that’s the nature of super optimizers. That’s the nature of the standard model of AI.

And this is, I think, the main point being made is not that no matter what we do AI going to get us. It’s that given our current understanding and given hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested into that current understanding then there is a failure mode and it’s reasonable to point that out just as if you’re a nuclear engineer and you say, “Look, everyone is designing these reactors in this way. All of you are doing this. And look there’s this failure mode.” That’s a reasonable thing to point out.

Steven Pinker: Several reactions. First, while money is pouring into AI, it’s not pouring it into super-optimizers tasked with curing cancer and with the power to kidnap people. And the analogies of humans outcompeting chimpanzees, or American generals outsmarting their Iraqi counterparts, once again assume that systems that are smarter than us will therefore be in competition with us. As for straw men, I was mindful to avoid them: the AI system that would give people tumors to pursue the goal of curing cancer was taken from Stuart’s book.

I agree that a super-optimizer that was given a single goal would be menace. But a super-optimizer that pursued a single goal is self-evidently unintelligent, not superintelligent! 

Stuart Russell: Of course, we have multiple goals. There’s a whole field of multi-attribute utility theory that’s been going now for more than 50 years. Of course, we understand that. When we look at even the design of the algorithms that Uber uses to get you to the airport, they take into account multiple goals.

But the point is the same argument applies if you operate in a standard model when you add in the multiple goals. Unless you’re able to be sure that you have completely and correctly captured all the things we care about under all conceivable and the inconceivable,because I think one of the things about superintelligent AI systems they will come up with, by human standards, inconceivable forms of actions.

We cannot guarantee that. And this is the point. So you could say multiple goals, but multiple goals are just a single goal. They add up to the ability to rank futures. And the question is: is that ability to rank futures fully aligned with what humans want their futures to be like? And the answer is inevitably, no. We are inevitably going to leave things out.

So even if you have a thousand terms in the objective function, there’s probably another million that you ought to have included that you didn’t think about because it never occurred to you.

So for example, you can go out and find lists of important things that human beings care about. This is sort of the whole-values community, human-development community, Maslow hierarchy, all of those things. People do make whole lists of things trying to build up a picture of very roughly what is the human utility function after all.

But invariably, those lists just refer to things that are usually a subject of discussion among humans about “Do we spend money on schools or hospitals?”or whatever it might be. On that list, you will not find the color of the sky because no one, no humans right now are thinking about, “Oh, should we change the sky to be orange with pink stripes?” But if someone did change the color of the sky, I can bet you a lot of people would be really upset about it.

And so invariably we fail to include many, many criteria in whatever list of objectives you might come up with. And when you do that, what happens is that the optimizer will take advantage of those dimensions of freedom and typically, and actually under fairly general algebraic conditions, will set them to extreme values because that gives you better optimization on the things that are in the list of goals.

So the argument is that within the standard model, which I bear some responsibility for, because it’s the way we wrote the first three editions of the textbook, within the standard model, further progress on AI could lead to increasing problems of control and it’s not because there’s any will to dominance.

I don’t know of any serious thinkers in the X-risk community who think that that’s the problem. That’s another straw man.

Steven Pinker: When you’re finished, I do have some responses to that.

Stuart Russell: The argument is not that we automatically build in because we all want our systems to be alpha males or anything like that. And I think Steve Omohundro has put it fairly clearly in some of his earlier papers that the behavior of a superoptimizer given any finite list of goals is going to include efforts to maximize its computational resources and other resources that will help it achieve the objectives that we do specify.

And you could put in something saying, “Well, and don’t spend any money.” Or, “Don’t do this and don’t do that and don’t do the other.” But the same structure of the argument is going to apply. We can reduce the risk by adding more and more stuff into the explicit objectives, but I think the argument I’m making in the book is that that’s just a completely broken way to design AI systems.

The meta argument is that if we don’t talk about the failure modes, we won’t be able to address them. So actually I think that Steve and I don’t disagree about the plausible future evolution. I don’t think it’s particularly plausible. If I was going into forecast mode, so just betting on the future saying, “What’s the probability that this thing will happen or that thing will happen?” I don’t think it’s particularly plausible that we will be destroyed by superintelligent AI.

And there are several reasons why I don’t think that’s going to occur because we would probably get some early warnings of it. And if we couldn’t figure out how to prevent it, we would probably put very strong restrictions on further development or we would figure out how to actually make it provably safe and beneficial.

But you can’t have that discussion unless you talk about the failure modes. Just like in nuclear safety, it’s not against the rules to raise possible failure modes like what if this molten sodium that you’re proposing should flow around all these pipes? What if it ever came into contact with the water that’s on the turbine side of the system? Wouldn’t you have a massive explosion which could rip off the containment and so on? That’s not exactly what happened in Chernobyl, but not so dissimilar.

And of course that’s what they do. So this culture of safety that Steve talks about consist exactly of this. People saying, “Look, if you design things that way these terrible things are going to happen. So don’t design things that way, design things this way.” And this is a process that we are going through in the AI community right now.

And I have to say, I just actually was reading a letter from one of my very senior colleagues, former president of AAAI, who said, “Five years ago, everyone thought Stuart was nuts, but Stuart was right. These risks have to be taken seriously and we all owe him a great debt for bringing it within the AI community so that we can start to address it.”

And I don’t think I invented these risks. And I was just in chance position that I had two years of sabbatical to think about the future of the field and to read some of the things that others had already written about the field from the outside.

My sense is that Steve and I are kind of the glass half full glass half empty. In terms of our forecast, we think on the whole, the weather tomorrow is likely to be sunny. I think we disagree on how to make sure that it’s sunny. I really do think that the problem of creating a provably beneficial AI, by which I mean that no matter how powerful the AI system is, we remain in power. We have power over it forever, that we never lose control.

That’s a big ask and the idea that we could solve that problem without even mentioning it, without even talking about it and without even pointing out why it’s difficult and why it’s important, that’s not the culture of safety. That’s sort of more like the culture of the communist party committee in Chernobyl, that simply continued to assert that nothing bad was happening.

Steven Pinker: Obviously, I’m in favor of the safety mindset of engineering, that is, you test the system before you implement it, you try to anticipate the failure modes. And perhaps I have overestimated the common sense of the AI community and they have to be warned about the absurdity of building a superoptimizer.  But a lot of these examples–flooding a town to control the water level, or curing cancer by turning humans into involuntary Guinea pigs, or maximizing happiness by injecting everyone with a drip of antidepressants–strike me as so far from reasonable failure modes that they’re not part of the ordinary engineering effort to ensure safety–particularly when they are coupled with the term “existential.”

These are not ordinary engineering discussions of ways in which a system could fail; they are speculations on how the human species might end. That is very different from not plugging in an AI system until you’ve tested it to find out how it fails. And perhaps we agree that the superoptimizers in these thought experiments are so unintelligent that no one will actually empower them.

Stuart Russell: But Steve, I wasn’t saying we give it one goal. I’m saying however many goals we give it, that’s equivalent to giving it a ranking over futures. So the idea of single goal versus multiple is a complete red herring.

Steven Pinker: But the scare stories all involve systems that are given a single goal. As you go down the tail of possible risks, you’re getting into potentially infinitesimal risks. There is no system, conceivable or existing, that will have zero risk of every possibility. 

Stuart Russell: If we could do that, if we had some serious theory by which we could say, “Okay. We’ve got within epsilon of the true human ranking over futures,” I think that’s very hard to do. We literally do not have a clue how to do that. And the purpose of these examples is actually to dismiss the idea that this has a simple solution.

So people want to dismiss the idea of risk by saying, “Oh, we’ll just give the AI system such and such objective.” And then the failure mode goes away and everything’s cool. And then people say, “Oh, but no.” Look, if you give it the objective that everyone should be happy, then here’s a solution that the AI system could find that clearly we wouldn’t want.

Those processes lead actually to deeper questioning, what do we really mean by happy? We don’t just mean pleasure as measured by the pleasure center in the brain. And the same arguments happen in moral philosophy.

So no one is accusing G.E. Moore of being a naive idiot because he objected to a pleasure maximization definition of what is a good moral decision to make. He was making an important philosophical point and I don’t think we should dismiss that same point when it’s made in the context of designing objectives for AI systems.

Steven Pinker: Yes, that’s an excellent argument against building a universally empowered AI system that’s given the single goal of maximizing human happiness–your example. Do AI researchers need to be warned against that absurd project? It seems to me that that’s the straw man, and so are the other scenarios that are designed to sow worry, such as conscripting the entire human race as involuntary guinea pigs in cancer experiments. Even if there isn’t an epsilon that we can’t go below in laying out possible risks, it doesn’t strike me that that’s within the epsilon.

These strike me more as exercises of human imagination. Assuming a ridiculously simple system that’s given one goal, what could go wrong? Well, yeah, stuff could go wrong, but is that really what’s going to face us when it comes to actual AI systems that have some hope of being implemented?

Naturally, we ought to test the living daylights out of any system before we give it control over anything. That’s Stuart’s point about building bridges that don’t fall down and the standard safety ethic in engineering. But I’m not sure that exotic scenarios based on incredibly stupid ideas for AI systems like giving one the goal of maximizing human happiness is the route that gives us safe AI.

Stuart Russell: Okay. So let me say once again that the one goal versus multiple goals is a red herring. If you think it’s so easy to specify the goal correctly, perhaps your next paper will write it out. Then we’ll say, “Okay, that’s not a straw man. This is Steve Pinker’s suggestion of what the objective should be for the superintelligent AI system.” And then the people who love doing these things, probably Nick Bostrom and others will find ways of failing.

So the idea that we could just test before deploying something that is significantly more powerful than human beings or even the human race combined, that’s a pretty optimistic idea. We’re not even able to test ordinary software systems right now. So test generation is one of the effective methods used in software engineering, but it has many, many known failure cases for real world examples, including multiplication.

Intel’s Pentium chip was tested with billions of examples of multiplication, but it failed to uncover a bug in the multiplication circuitry, which caused it to produce incorrect results in some cases. And so we have a technology of formal verification, which would have uncovered that error, but particularly in the US there’s a culture that’s somewhat opposed to using formal verification in software design.

Less so in hardware design nowadays, partly because of the Pentium error, but still in software, formal verification is considered very difficult and very European and not something we do. And this is far harder than that because software verification typically is thinking only about correctness of the software in an internal sense, that what happens inside the algorithm between the inputs and outputs meet some specifications.

What we want here is that the combination of the algorithm and the world evolves in ways that we are certain to be pleased about. And that’s a much harder kind of thing. Control theory has that view of what they mean by verification. And they’re able to do very simple linear quadratic regulators and a few other examples. And beyond that, they get stuck. And so I actually think that the testing is probably neither (not very) feasible. I mean, not saying we shouldn’t do it, but it’s going to be extremely hard to get any kind of confidence from testing, because you’re really asking, can you simulate the entire world and all the ways a system could use the world to bring about the objective.

However complicated and however multifaceted that objective is, it’s probably going to be the wrong one. So I’ve proposed a, not completely different, but a generalized form of AI that knows that it doesn’t know what the real objectives are. It knows it doesn’t know how humans rank possible futures and that changes the way it behaves, but that also has failure modes.

One of them being the plasticity of human preference rankings over the future and how do you prevent the AI system from taking advantage of that plasticity? You can’t prevent it completely because anything it does is going to have some effect on human preferences. But the question is what constitutes reasonable modifications of human preferences and what constitutes unreasonable ones? We don’t know the answer to that. So there are many, many really difficult research problems that we have to overcome for the research agenda that I’m proposing to have a chance of success.

I’m not that optimistic that this is an easy or a straightforward problem to solve and I think we can only solve it if we go outside the conceptual framework that AI has worked in for the last 70 years.

Steven Pinker: Well, yes. Certainly, if the conceptual framework for AI is optimizing some single or small list of generic goals, like a ranking over possible futures, and it is empowered to pursue them by any means, as opposed to building tools that solve specific problems. But note that you’ve also given arguments why the fantasies of superintelligence are unlikely to come about–the near-miraculous powers to outsmart us, to augment its own intelligence, to defeat all of our attempts to control it. In the scenarios, these all work flawlessly–yet  the complexities that make it hard to predict all conceivable failures also make it hard to achieve superintelligence in the first place.

Namely, we can’t take into account the fantastically chaotic and unpredictable reactions of humans. And we can’t program a system that has complete knowledge of the physical universe without allowing it to do experiments and acquire empirical knowledge, at a rate determined by the physical world. Exactly the infirmities that prevent us from exploring the entire space of behavior of one of these systems in advance is the reason that it’s not going to be superintelligent in the way that these scenarios outline.

And that’s a reason not to empower any generic goal-driven system that aspires toward “superintelligence” or that we might think of as “superintelligent”–it  is unlikely to exist, and likely to display various forms of error and stupidity.

Stuart Russell: I would agree that some of the concerns that you might see in the X-risk community are, say, nonphysical. So the idea that a system could predict the next hundred years and your entire life in such detail that a hundred years ago, it knew what you were going to be saying at a particular millisecond in a hundred years in the future, this is obviously complete nonsense.

I don’t think we need to be too concerned about that as a serious question. Whether it’s a thought experiment that sheds light on fundamental questions in decision theory, like the Newcomb problems is another issue that we don’t have to get into. But we can’t solve the problem by saying, “Well, superintelligence of the kind that could lead to significant global consequences could not possibly exist.”

And actually I kind of like Danny Hillis’ argument, which says that actually, no, it already does exist and it already has, and is having significant global consequences. And his example is to view, let’s say the fossil fuel industry as if it were an AI system. I think this is an interesting line of thought, because what he’s saying basically and — other people have said similar things — is that you should think of a corporation as if it’s an algorithm and it’s maximizing a poorly designed objective, which you might say is some discounted stream of quarterly profits or whatever. And it really is doing it in a way that’s oblivious to lots of other concerns of the human race. And it has outwitted the rest of the human race.

So we might all think, well, of course, we know that what it’s trying to do is wrong and of course we all know the right answer, but in fact we’ve lost and we should have pointed out a hundred years ago that there is this risk and it needs to be taken seriously.

And it was. People did point it out a hundred years ago, but no one took them seriously. And this is what happened. So I think we have actually a fairly good example that this type of thing, the optimization of objectives, ignoring externalities as the economists would point out, by superintelligent entities. And in some sense, the fossil fuel industry outwitted us because whatever organizational structures allow large groups of humans to generate effective complex behaviors in the real world and develop complex plans, it operates in some ways like a superintelligent entity, just like we were able to put a person on the moon because of the combined effect of many human intellects working together.

But each of those humans in the fossil fuel industry is a piece of an algorithm if you like and their own individual preferences about the future don’t count for much and in fact, they get molded by their role within the corporation.

I think in some ways you already have an existence proof that the concern is real.

Steven Pinker: A simpler explanation is that people like energy, fossil fuels are the most convenient source, and no one has had to pay for the external damage they do. Clearly we ought to anticipate foreseeable risks and attempt to mitigate them. But they have to be calibrated against what we know, taking into account our own ignorance of the future. It can be hazardous to chase the wrong worries, such as running out of petroleum, which was the big worry in the 1970s. Now we know that the problem with petroleum is too much, not too little. Overpopulation and genetically modified organisms are other examples. 

If we try to fantasize too far into the future, beyond what we can reasonably predict, we can sow fear about the wrong risks. My concern about all these centers and smart people worrying about the existential risk of AI is that we are misallocating our worry budget and our intellectual resources. We should be thinking hard about how to mitigate climate change, which is a real problem. That is less true of spinning exotic scenarios about hypothetical AI systems which have been given control over the physical universe and might enslave us in cancer experiments.

Lucas Perry: All right. So wrapping up here, do you guys have final statements that you’d like to say, just if you felt like what you just said didn’t fully capture what you want to end on on this issue of AI existential risk?

Steven Pinker: Despite our disagreements, most about my assessment of AI agrees with Stuart’s. I personally don’t think that the adjective existential is helpful in ordinary concerns over safety, which we ought to have. I think there are tremendous potential benefits to AI, and that we ought to seek at the same time as we anticipate the reasonable risks and take every effort to mitigate them.

Stuart Russell: Yep. I mean, it’s hard to disagree that we should focus on the reasonable risks. The question is whether you think that the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being invested into AI research will produce systems that can have potentially global consequences.

And to me it seems self evident that it can and we can look at even simple machine algorithms like the content selection algorithms in social media because those algorithms interact with humans for hours every day and dictate what literally billions of people see and read every day. They are having substantial global impact already.

And they are very, very simple. They don’t know that human beings exist at all, but they still learn to manipulate our brains to optimize the objective. I had a very interesting little Facebook exchange with Yann LeCun. And at some point in the argument, Yann said something quite similar to something Steve said earlier. He said, “There’s really no risk. You’d have to be extremely stupid to put an incorrect objective into a powerful system and then deploy it on a global scale.”

And I said, “Well, you mean like optimizing click-through?” And he said, “Facebook stopped using click-through years ago.” And I said, “Well, why was that?” And he said, “Oh, because it was the incorrect objective.”

So you did put an incorrect objective into a powerful system, deployed on a global scale. Now what does that say about Facebook? So I think just as you might have said — and in fact the nuclear industry did say — “It’s perfectly safe. Nothing can go wrong. We’re the experts. We understand safety. We understand everything.”

Nonetheless, we had Chernobyl, we had Fukushima. And actually, I think there’s an argument to be made that despite the massive environmental cost of foregoing nuclear power, that countries like Germany, Italy, Spain and probably a bunch of others are in the process of actually deciding that we need to phase out nuclear power because even though theoretically, it’s possible to develop and operate completely safe nuclear power systems, it’s beyond our capabilities and the evidence is there.

You might have argued that while Russia is corrupt, it’s technology was not as great as it should have been, they cut lots of corners, but you can’t argue that the Japanese nuclear industry was unsophisticated or unconcerned with safety, but they still failed. And so I think voters in those countries who said, “We don’t want nuclear power because we just don’t want to be in that situation even if we have the engineers making our best efforts.”

These kinds of considerations suggest that we do need to pay very careful attention. I’m not saying we should stop working on climate change, but when we invented synthetic biology, we said okay, we’d better think about how do we prevent the creation of disease or new disease organisms that could produce pandemics. And we took steps. People spent a lot of time thinking about safety mechanisms for those devices. We have to do the same thing for AI.

Lucas Perry: All right. Stuart and Steven, thanks so much. I’ve learned a ton of stuff today. If listeners want to follow you or look into your work, where’s the best place to do that? I’ll start with you, Steven.

Steven Pinker: Stevenpinker.com, which has pages for ten books, including the most recent, Enlightenment Now. SAPinker on Twitter. 

Lucas Perry: And Stuart.

Stuart Russell: So you can Google me. I don’t really have a website or social media activity, but the book Human Compatible, which was published last October by Viking in the US and Penguin in the UK and it’s being translated into lots of languages, I think that captures my views pretty well.

Lucas Perry: All right. Thanks so much for coming on. And yeah, it was a pleasure speaking.

Steven Pinker: Thanks very much, Lucas for hosting it. Thank you Stuart for the dialogue.

Stuart Russell:It was great fun, Steve. I look forward to doing it again.

Steven Pinker: Me too.

 Topics discussed in this episode include:

• What autonomous weapons are and how they may be used
• The debate around acceptable and unacceptable uses of autonomous weapons
• Degrees and kinds of ways of integrating human decision making in autonomous weapons 
• Risks and benefits of autonomous weapons
• An arms race for autonomous weapons
• How autonomous weapons issues may matter for AI alignment and long-term AI safety

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro

3:50 Why care about autonomous weapons?

4:31 What are autonomous weapons? 

06:47 What does “autonomy” mean? 

09:13 Will we see autonomous weapons in civilian contexts? 

11:29 How do we draw lines of acceptable and unacceptable uses of autonomous weapons? 

24:34 Defining and exploring human “in the loop,” “on the loop,” and “out of loop” 

31:14 The possibility of generating international lethal laws of robotics

36:15 Whether autonomous weapons will sanitize war and psychologically distance humans in detrimental ways

44:57 Are persons studying the psychological aspects of autonomous weapons use? 

47:05 Risks of the accidental escalation of war and conflict 

52:26 Is there an arms race for autonomous weapons? 

01:00:10 Further clarifying what autonomous weapons are

01:05:33 Does the successful regulation of autonomous weapons matter for long-term AI alignment considerations?

01:09:25 Does Paul see AI as an existential risk?

We hope that you will continue to join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

Lucas Perry: Welcome to the AI Alignment Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today’s conversation is with Paul Scharre and explores the issue of lethal autonomous weapons. And so just what is the relation of lethal autonomous weapons and the related policy and governance issues to AI alignment and long-term AI risk? Well there’s a key question to keep in mind throughout this entire conversation and it’s that: if we cannot establish a governance mechanism as a global community on the concept that we should not let AI make the decision to kill, then how can we deal with more subtle near term issues and eventual long term safety issues about AI systems? This question is aimed at exploring the idea that autonomous weapons and their related governance represent a possibly critical first step on the international cooperation and coordination of global AI issues. If we’re committed to developing beneficial AI and eventually beneficial AGI then how important is this first step in AI governance and what precedents and foundations will it lay for future AI efforts and issues? So it’s this perspective that I suggest keeping in mind throughout the conversation. And many thanks to FLI’s Emilia Javorsky for much help on developing the questions for this podcast. 

Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He is the award-winning author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, which won the 2019 Colby Award and was named one of Bill Gates’ top five books of 2018.

Mr. Scharre worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) where he played a leading role in establishing policies on unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapons technologies. Mr. Scharre led the DoD working group that drafted DoD Directive 3000.09, establishing the Department’s policies on autonomy in weapon systems. Mr. Scharre also led DoD efforts to establish policies on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) programs and directed energy technologies. He was involved in the drafting of policy guidance in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, and Secretary-level planning guidance. His most recent position was Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Prior to joining the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Scharre served as a special operations reconnaissance team leader in the Army’s 3rd Ranger Battalion and completed multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Future of Life Institute is a non-profit and this podcast is funded and supported by listeners like you. So if you find what we do on this podcast to be important and beneficial, please consider supporting the podcast by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. If you support any other content creators via services like Patreon, consider viewing a regular subscription to FLI in the same light. You can also follow us on your preferred listening platform, like on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, by searching for us directly or following the links on the page for this podcast found in the description.

And with that, here’s my conversion with Paul Scharre. 

All right. So we’re here today to discuss your book, Army of None, and issues related to autonomous weapons in the 21st century. To start things off here, I think we can develop a little bit of the motivations for why this matters. Why should the average person care about the development and deployment of lethal autonomous weapons?

Paul Scharre: I think the most basic reason is because we all are going to live in the world that militaries are going to be deploying future weapons. Even if you don’t serve in the military, even if you don’t work on issues surrounding say, conflict, this kind of technology could affect all of us. And so I think we all have a stake in what this future looks like.

Lucas Perry: Let’s clarify a little bit more about what this technology actually looks like then. Often in common media, and for most people who don’t know about lethal autonomous weapons or killer robots, the media often portrays it as a terminator like scenario. So could you explain why this is wrong, and what are more accurate ways of communicating with the public about what these weapons are and the unique concerns that they pose?

Paul Scharre: Yes, I mean, the Terminator is like the first thing that comes up because it’s such a common pop culture reference. It’s right there in people’s minds. So I think go ahead and for the listeners, imagine that humanoid robot in the Terminator, and then just throw that away, because that’s not what we’re talking about. Let me make a different comparison. Self-driving cars. We are seeing right now the evolution of automobiles that with each generation of car incorporate more autonomous features: parking, intelligent cruise control, automatic braking. These increasingly autonomous features in cars that are added every single year, a little more autonomy, a little more autonomy, are taking us down at some point in time to a road of having fully autonomous cars that would drive themselves. We have something like the Google car where there’s no steering wheel at all. People are just passengers along for the ride. We’re seeing something very similar happen in the military with each generation of robotic systems and we now have air and ground and undersea robots deployed all around the world in over 100 countries and non state groups around the globe with some form of drones or robotic systems, and with each generation they’re becoming increasingly autonomous.

Now, the issue surrounding autonomous weapons is, what happens when a predator drone has as much autonomy as a self-driving car? What happens when you have a weapon that’s out in the battlefield, and it’s making its own decisions about whom to kill? Is that something that we’re comfortable with? What are the legal and moral and ethical ramifications of this? And the strategic implications? What might they do for the balance of power between nations, or stability among countries? These are really the issues surrounding autonomous weapons, and it’s really about this idea that we might have, at some point of time and perhaps the not very distant future, machines making their own decisions about whom to kill on the battlefield.

Lucas Perry: Could you unpack a little bit more about what autonomy really is or means because it seems to me that it’s more like an aggregation of a bunch of different technologies like computer vision and image recognition, and other kinds of machine learning that are aggregated together. So could you just develop a little bit more about where we are in terms of the various technologies required for autonomy?

Paul Scharre: Yes, so autonomy is not really a technology, it’s an attribute of a machine or of a person. And autonomy is about freedom. It’s the freedom that a machine or a person is given to perform some tasks in some environment for some period of time. As people, we have very little autonomy as children and more autonomy as we grow up, we have different autonomy in different settings. In some work environments, there might be more constraints put on you; what things you can and cannot do. And it’s also environment-specific and task-specific. You might have autonomy to do certain things, but not other things. It’s the same with machines. We’re ultimately talking about giving freedom to machines to perform certain actions under certain conditions in certain environments.

There are lots of simple forms of autonomy that we interact with all the time that we sort of take for granted. A thermostat is a very simple autonomous system, it’s a machine that’s given a freedom to decide… decide, let’s put that in air quotes, because we come back to what it means for machines to decide. But basically, the thermostat is given the ability to turn on and off the heat and air conditioning based on certain parameters that a human sets, a desired temperature, or if you have a programmable thermostat, maybe the desired temperature at certain times a day or days of the week, is a very bounded kind of autonomy. And that’s what we’re talking about for any of these machines. We’re not talking about freewill, or whether the machine develops consciousness. That’s not a problem today, maybe someday, but certainly not with the machines we’re talking about today. It’s a question really of, how much freedom do we want to give machines, or in this case, weapons operating on the battlefield to make certain kinds of choices?

Now we’re still talking about weapons that are designed by people, built by people, launched by people, and put into the battlefields to perform some mission, but there might be a little bit less human control than there is today. And then there are a whole bunch of questions that come along with that, like, is it going to work? Would it be effective? What happens if there are accidents? Are we comfortable with seeding that degree of control over to the machine?

Lucas Perry: You mentioned the application of this kind of technology in the context of battlefields. Is there also consideration and interest in the use of lethal autonomous weapons in civilian contexts?

Paul Scharre: Yes, I mean, I think there’s less energy on that topic. You certainly see less of a poll from the police community. I mean, I don’t really run into people in a police or Homeland Security context, saying we should be building autonomous weapons. Well, you will hear that from militaries. Oftentimes, groups that are concerned about the humanitarian consequences of autonomous weapons will raise that as a concern. There’s both what might militaries do in the battlefield, but then there’s a concern about proliferation. What happens when the technology proliferates, and it’s being used for internal security issues, could be a dictator, using these kinds of weapons to repress the population. That’s one concern. And that’s, I think, a very, very valid one. We’ve often seen one of the last checks against dictators, is when they tell their internal security forces to fire on civilians, on their own citizens. There have been instances where the security forces say, “No, we won’t.” That doesn’t always happen. Of course, tragically, sometimes security forces do attack their citizens. We saw in the massacre in Tiananmen Square that Chinese military troops are willing to murder Chinese citizens. But we’ve seen other instances, certainly in the fall of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War, that security forces… these are our friends, these are our family. We’re not going to kill them.

And autonomous weapons could take away one of those checks on dictators. So I think that’s a very valid concern. And that is a more general concern about the proliferation of military technology into policing even here in America. We’ve seen this in the last 20 years, is a lot of military tech ends up being used by police forces in ways that maybe isn’t appropriate. And so that’s, I think, a very valid and legitimate sort of concern about… even if this isn’t kind of the intended use, what would that look like and what are the risks that could come with that, and how should we think about those kinds of issues as well?

Lucas Perry: All right. So we’re developing autonomy in systems and there’s concern about how this autonomy will be deployed in context where lethal force or force may be used. So the question then arises and is sort of the question at the heart of lethal autonomous weapons: Where is it that we will draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable uses of artificial intelligence in autonomous weapons or in the military, or in civilian policing? So I’m curious to know how you think about where to draw those lines or that line in particular, and how you would suggest to any possible regulators who might be listening, how to think about and construct lines of acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI.

Paul Scharre: That’s a great question. So I think let’s take a step back first and sort of talk about, what would be the kinds of things that would make uses acceptable or unacceptable. Let’s just talk about the military context just to kind of bound the problem for a second. So in the military context, you have a couple reasons for drawing lines, if you will. One is legal issues, legal concerns. We have a legal framework to think about right and wrong in war. It’s called the laws of war or international humanitarian law. And it lays out a set of parameters for what is acceptable and what… And so that’s one of the places where there has been consensus internationally, among countries that come together at the United Nations through the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the CCW, the process, we’ve had conversations going on about autonomous weapons.

One of the points of consensus among nations is that existing international humanitarian law or the laws of war would apply to autonomous weapons. And that any uses of autonomy in weapons, those weapons have to be used in a manner that complies with the laws of war. Now, that may sound trivial, but it’s a pretty significant point of agreement and it’s one that places some bounds on things that you can or cannot do. So, for example, one of the baseline principles of the laws of war is the principle of distinction. Military forces cannot intentionally target civilians. They can only intentionally target other military forces. And so any use of force these people to comply with this distinction, so right off the bat, that’s a very important and significant one when it comes to autonomous weapons. So if you have to use a weapon that could not be used in a way to comply with this principle of distinction, it would be illegal under the laws war and you wouldn’t be able to build it.

And there are other principles as well, principles about proportionality, and ensuring that any collateral damage that affects civilians or civilian infrastructure is not disproportionate to the military necessity of the target that is being attacked. There are principles about avoiding unnecessary suffering of combatants. Respecting anyone who’s rendered out of combat or the appropriate term is “hors de combat,” who surrendered have been incapacitated and not targeting them. So these are like very significant rules that any weapon system, autonomous weapon or not, has to comply with. And any use of any weapon has to comply with, any use of force. And so that is something that constrains considerably what nations are permitted to do in a lawful fashion. Now do people break the laws of war? Well, sure, that happens. We’re seeing that happen in Syria today, Bashar al-Assad is murdering civilians, there are examples of Rogue actors and non state terrorist groups and others that don’t care about respecting the laws of war. But those are very significant bounds.

Now, one could also say that there are more bounds that we should put on autonomous weapons that might be moral or ethical considerations that exist outside the laws of war, that aren’t written down in a formal way in the laws of war, but they’re still important and I think those often come to the fore with this topic. And there are other ones that might apply in terms of reasons why we might be concerned about stability among nations. But the laws of war, at least a very valuable starting point for this conversation about what is acceptable and not acceptable. I want to make clear, I’m not saying that the laws of war are insufficient, and we need to go beyond them and add in additional constraints. I’m actually not saying that. There are people that make that argument, and I want to give credit to their argument, and not pretend it doesn’t exist. I want the listeners to sort of understand the full scope of arguments about this technology. But I’m not saying myself that’s the case necessarily. But I do think that there are concerns that people raise.

For example, people might say it’s wrong for a machine to decide whom to kill, it’s wrong for a machine to make the decision about life and death. Now I think that’s an interesting argument. Why? Why is it wrong? Is it because we think the machine might get the answer wrong, it might perform not as well as the humans because I think that there’s something intrinsic about weighing the value of life and death that we want humans to do, and appreciating the value of another person’s life before making one of these decisions. Those are all very valid counter arguments that exist in this space.

Lucas Perry: Yes. So thanks for clarifying that. For listeners, it’s important here to clarify the difference where some people you’re saying would find the laws of war to be sufficient in the case of autonomous weapons, and some would not.

Paul Scharre: Yes, I mean, this is a hotly debated issue. I mean, this is in many ways, the crux of the issue surrounding autonomous weapons. I’m going to oversimplify a bit because you have a variety of different views on this, but you certainly have some people whose views are, look, we have a set of structures called the laws of war that tell us what right and wrong looks like and more. And most of the things that people are worried about are already prohibited under the laws of war. So for example, if what you’re worried about is autonomous weapons, running amok murdering civilians, that’s illegal under the laws of war. And so one of the points of pushback that you’ll sometimes get from governments or others to the idea of creating like an ad hoc treaty that would ban autonomous weapons or some class of autonomous weapons, is look, some of the things people worry about like they’re already prohibited under the laws of war, passing another law to say the thing that’s already illegal is now illegal again doesn’t add any value.

There’s group of arguments that says the laws of war dictate effects in the battlefield. So they dictate sort of what the end effect is, they don’t really affect the process. And there’s a line of reasoning that says, that’s fine. The process doesn’t matter. If someday we could use autonomous weapons in a way that was more humane and more precise than people, then we should use them. And just the same way that self-driving cars will someday save lives on roads by avoiding accidents, maybe we could build autonomous weapons that would avoid mistakes in war and accidentally targeting civilians, and therefore we should use them. And let’s just focus on complying better with the laws of war. That’s one school of thought.

Then there’s a whole bunch of reasons why you might say, well, that’s not enough. One reason might be, well, militaries’ compliance with the laws of war. Isn’t that great? Actually, like people talk a good game, but when you look at military practice, especially if the rules for using weapon are kind of convoluted, you have to take a bunch of additional steps in order to use it in a way that’s lawful, that kind of goes out the window in conflict. Real world and tragic historical example of this was experienced throughout the 20th century with landmines where land mines were permitted to be used lawfully, and still are, if you’re not a signatory to the Ottawa Convention, they’re permitted to be used lawfully provided you put in a whole bunch of procedures to make sure that minefields are marked and we know the location of minefields, so they can be demined after conflict.

Now, in practice, countries weren’t doing this. I mean, many of them were just scattering mines from the air. And so we had this horrific problem of millions of mines around the globe persisting after a conflict. The response was basically this global movement to ban mines entirely to say, look, it’s not that it’s inconceivable to use mines in a way that you mean, but it requires a whole bunch of additional efforts, that countries aren’t doing, and so we have to take this weapon away from countries because they are not actually using it in a way that’s responsible. That’s a school of thought with autonomous weapons. Is look, maybe you can conjure up thought experiments about how you can use autonomous weapons in these very specific instances, and it’s acceptable, but once you start any use, it’s a slippery slope, and next thing you know, it’ll be just like landmines all over again, and they’ll be everywhere and civilians will be being killed. And so the better thing to do is to just not let this process even start, and not letting militaries have access to the technology because they won’t use it responsibly, regardless of whether it’s theoretically possible. That’s a pretty reasonable and defensible argument. And there are other arguments too.

One could say, actually, it’s not just about avoiding civilian harm, but there’s something intrinsic about weighing the value of an enemy soldier’s life, that we want humans involved in that process. And that if we took humans away from that process, we’ll be losing something that sure maybe it’s not written down in the laws of war, but maybe it’s not written down because it was always implicit that humans will always be making these choices. And now that it’s decision in front of us, we should write this down, that humans should be involved in these decisions and should be weighing the value of the human life, even an enemy soldier. Because if we give that up, we might give up something that is a constraint on violence and war that holds back some of the worst excesses of violence, we might even can make something about ourselves. And this is, I think, a really tricky issue because there’s a cost to humans making these decisions. It’s a very real cost. It’s a cost in post traumatic stress that soldiers face and moral injury. It’s a cost in lives that are ruined, not just the people that are killed in a battlefield, but the people have to live with that violence afterwards, and the ramifications and even the choices that they themselves make. It’s a cost in suicides of veterans, and substance abuse and destroyed families and lives.

And so to say that we want humans to stay still evolved to be more than responsible for killing, is to say I’m choosing that cost. I’m choosing to absorb and acknowledge and take on the cost of post traumatic stress and moral injury, and also the burdens that come with war. And I think it’s worth reflecting on the fact that the burdens of war are distributed very unequally, not just between combatants, but also on the societies that fight. As a democratic nation in the United States, we make a decision as a country to go to war, through our elected representatives. And yet, it’s a very tiny slice of the population that bears the burden for that war, not just putting themselves at risk, but also carrying the moral burden of that afterwards.

And so if you say, well, I want there to be someone who’s going to live with that trauma for the rest of your life. I think that’s an argument that one can make, but you need to acknowledge that that’s real. And that’s not a burden that we all share equally, it’s a burden we’re placing on young women and men that we send off to fight on our behalf. The flip side is if we didn’t do that, if we fought a war and no one felt the moral burden of killing, no one slept uneasy at night afterwards, what would they say about us as a society? I think these are difficult questions. I don’t have easy answers to that. But I think these are challenging things for us to wrestle with.

Lucas Perry: Yes, I mean, there’s a lot there. I think that was a really good illustration of the different points of views on this. I hadn’t heard or considered much the implications of post traumatic stress. And I think moral burden, you called it that would be a factor in what autonomous weapons would relieve in countries which have the power to develop them. Speaking personally, I think I find the arguments most compelling about the necessity of having human beings integrated in the process of decision making with regards to killing, because if you remove that, then you’re removing the deep aspect of humanity, which sometimes does not follow the laws of war, which we currently don’t have complex enough preference learning techniques and machine learning techniques to actually train autonomous weapon systems in everything that human beings value and care about, and that there are situations where deviating from following the laws of war may be the best thing to do. I’m not sure if you have any thoughts about this, but I think you did a good job of illustrating all the different positions, and that’s just my initial reaction to it.

Paul Scharre: Yes, these are tricky issues. And so I think one of the things I want to try to do for listeners is try to lay out the landscape of what these arguments are, and some of the pros and cons of them because I think sometimes they will often oversimplify on all sides. The other people will be like, well, we should have humans involved in making these decisions. Well, humans involved where? If I get into a self-driving car that has no steering wheel, it’s not true that there’s no human involvement. The type of human involvement has just changed in terms of where it exists. So now, instead of manually driving the car, I’m still choosing the car’s destination, I’m still telling the car where I want to go. You’re going to get into the car and car take me wherever you want to go. So the type of human involvement is changed.

So what kind of human relationship do we want with decisions about life and death in the battlefield? What type of human involvement is right or necessary or appropriate and for what reason? For a legal reason, for a moral reason. These are interesting challenges. We haven’t had to confront anymore. These arguments I think unfairly get simplified on all sides. Conversely, you hear people say things like, it doesn’t matter, because these weapons are going to get built anyway. It’s a little bit overly simplistic in the sense that there are examples of successes in arms control. It’s hard to pull off. There are many examples of failures as well, but there are places where civilized nations have walked back from some technologies to varying degrees of success, whether it’s chemical weapons or biological weapons or other things. So what is success look like in constraining a weapon? Is it no one ever uses the weapon? Is it most nations don’t use it? It’s not used in certain ways. These are complicated issues.

Lucas Perry: Right. So let’s talk a little bit here about integrating human emotion and human reasoning and humanity itself into the autonomous weapon systems and the life or death decisions that they will be making. So hitting on a few concepts here, if you could help explain what people mean when they say human in the loop, and human on the loop, and how this relates to the integration of human control and human responsibility and human accountability in the use of autonomous weapons.

Paul Scharre: Let’s unpack some of this terminology. Broadly speaking, people tend to use the terms human in the loop, on the loop, or out of the loop to refer to semi autonomous weapons human is in the loop, which means that for any really semi autonomous process or system, the machine is taking an action and then it pauses and waits for humans to take a positive action before proceeding. A good example of a human in the loop system is the automated backups on your computer when they require you to push a button to say okay to do the backup now. They’re waiting music in action before proceeding. In a human on the loop system, or one where the supervisor control is one of the human doesn’t have to take any positive action for the system to proceed. The human can intervene, so the human can sit back, and if you want to, you can jump in.

Example of this might be your thermostat. When you’re in a house, you’ve already set the parameters, it’ll turn on the heat and air conditioning on its own, but if you’re not happy with the outcome, you could change it. Now, when you’re out of the house, your thermostat is operating in a fully autonomous fashion in this respect where humans out of the loop. You don’t have any ability to intervene for some period of time. It’s really all about time duration. For supervisory control, how much time does the human have to identify something is wrong and then intervene? So for example, things like the Tesla autopilots. That’s one where the human is in a supervisory control capacity. So the autopilot function in a car, the human doesn’t have to do anything, car’s driving itself, but they can intervene.

The problem with some of those control architectures is the time that you are permitting people to identify that there’s a problem, figure out what’s going on, decide to take action, intervene, really realistic before harm happens. Is it realistic that a human can be not paying attention, and then all of a sudden, identify that the car is in trouble and leap into action to avoid an accident when you’re speeding on the highway 70 miles an hour? And then you can see quite clearly in a number of fatal accidents with these autopilots, that that’s not feasible. People actually aren’t capable of doing that. So you’ve got to think about sort of what is the role of the human in this process? This is not just a semi autonomous or supervised autonomous or fully autonomous process. It’s one where the human is involved in some varying capacity.

And what are we expecting the human to do? Same thing with something that’s fully autonomous. We’re talking about a system that’s operating on its own for some period of time. How long before it checks back in with a person? What information is that person given? And what is their capacity to intervene or how bad could things go wrong when the person is not involved? And when we talk about weapons specifically. There are lots of weapons that operate in a semi autonomous fashion today where the human is choosing the target, but there’s a lot of automation in IDing targets presenting information to people in actually carrying out an attack, once the human has chosen a target, there are many, many weapons that are what the military calls fire and forget weapon, so once it’s launched, it’s not coming back. Those have been widely used for 70 years since World War Two. So that’s not new.

There are a whole bunch of weapons that operate in a supervisory autonomy mode, where humans on the loop. These are generally used in a more limited fashion for immediate localized defense of air bases or ships or ground vehicles defending against air or missile or rocket attack, particularly when the speed of these attacks might overwhelm people’s ability to respond. For humans to be in the loop, for humans to push a button, every time there’s a missile coming in, you could have so many missiles coming in so fast that you have to just simply activate an automatic defensive mode that will shoot down all have the missiles based on some pre-programmed parameters that humans put into the system. This exists today. The systems have been around for decades since the 1980s. And there were widespread use with at least 30 countries around the globe. So this is a type of weapon system that’s already in operation. These supervisory autonomous weapons. What really would be new would be fully autonomous weapons that operate on their own, whereas humans are still building them and launching them, but humans put them into operation, and then there’s some period of time where they were able to search a target area for targets and they were able to find these targets, and then based on some programming that was designed by people, identify the targets and attack them on their own.

Lucas Perry: Would you consider that out of the loop for that period of time?

Paul Scharre: Exactly. So over that period of time, humans are out of the loop on that decision over which targets they’re attacking. That would be potentially largely a new development in war. There are some isolated cases of some weapon systems that cross this line, by in large that would be new. That’s at least the starting point of what people might be concerned about. Now, you might envision things that are more advanced beyond that, but that’s sort of the near term development that could be on the horizon in the next five to 15 years, telling the weapon system, go into this area, fly around or search around underwater and find any ships of this type and attack them for some period of time in space. And that changes the human’s relationship with the use of force a little bit. It doesn’t mean the humans not involved at all, but the humans not quite as involved as they used to be. And is that something we’re comfortable with? And what are the implications of that kind of shift in warfare.

Lucas Perry: So the relevant things here are how this helps to integrate human control and human responsibility and human accountability into autonomous weapons systems. And just hearing you speak about all of that, it also seems like very relevant questions have to do with human psychology, about what human beings are actually likely to be able to do. And then also, I think you articulately put the practical question of whether or not people will be able to react to certain threats given certain situations. So in terms of trying to understand acceptable and unacceptable uses of autonomous weapons, that seems to supervene upon a lot of these facets of benefits and disadvantages of in the loop, on the loop, and out of the loop for different situations and different risks, plus how much we’re willing to automate killing and death and remove human decision making from some of these situations or not.

Paul Scharre: Yes, I mean, I think what’s challenging in this space is that it would be nice, it would be ideal if we could sort of reach agreement among nations for sort of a lethal laws of robotics, and Isaac Asimov’s books about robots you think of these three laws of robotics. Well, those laws aren’t going to work because one of them is not harming a human being and it’s not going to work in the military context, but could there be some agreement among countries for lethal laws of robots that would govern the behavior of autonomous systems in war, and it might sort of say, these are the things that are acceptable or not? Maybe. Maybe that’s possible someday. I think we’re not there yet at least, there are certainly not agreement as widespread disagreement among nations about what approach to take. But the good starting position of trying to understand what are the goals we want to achieve. And I think you’re right that we need to keep the human sort of front and center. But I this this is like a really important asymmetry between humans and machines that’s worth highlighting, which is to say that the laws of war government effects in the battlefield, and then in that sentence, the laws of war, don’t say the human has to pick every target, the laws of war say that the use of force must be executed according to certain principles of distinction and proportionality and other things.

One important asymmetry in the laws of war, however, is that machines are not legal agents. Only humans have legal agents. And so it’s ultimately humans that are responsible for complying with the laws of war. You can’t put a machine on trial for a war crime. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have intentionality. So it’s ultimately a human responsibility to ensure this kind of compliance with the laws of war. It’s a good starting point then for conversation to try to understand if we start from that proposition that it’s a human responsibility to ensure compliance with the laws of war, then what follows from that? What balances that place on human involvement? One of the early parts of the conversations on autonomous weapons internationally came from this very technological based conversation. To say, well, based on the technology, draw these lines, you should put these limits in place. The problem with that approach is not that you can’t do it.

The problem is the state of the technology when? 2014 when discussions on autonomous weapons started at the very beginning of the deep learning revolution, today, in 2020, our estimate of whether technology might be in five years or 10 years or 50 years? The technology moving so quickly than any technologically based set of rules about how we should approach this problem and what is the appropriate use of machines versus human decision making in the use of force. Any technologically based answer is one that we may look back in 10 years or 20 years and say is wrong. We could get it wrong in the sense that we might be leaving valuable technological opportunities on the table and we’re banning technology that if we used it actually might make war more humane and reduce civilian casualties, or we might be permitting technologies that turned out in retrospect to be problematic, and we shouldn’t have done that.

And one of the things we’ve seen historically when you look at attempts to ban weapons is that ones that are technologically based don’t always fare very well over time. So for example, the early bans on poison gas banned the use of poison gas that are launched from artillery shells. It allowed actually poison gas administered via canisters, and so the first use of poison gas in World War One by the Germans was canister based, they actually just laid out little canisters and then open the valves. Now that turns out to be not very practical way of using poison gas in war, because you have someone basically on your side standing over this canister, opening a valve and then getting gassed. And so it’s a little bit tricky, but technically permissible.

One of the things that can be challenging is it’s hard to foresee how the technology is going to evolve. A better approach and one that we’ve seen the dialogue internationally sort of shift towards is our human-centered approach. To start from the position of the human and say, look, if we had all the technology in the world and war, what decisions would we want humans to make and why? Not because the technology cannot make decisions, but because it should not. I think it’s actually a very valuable starting place to understand a conversation, because the technology is moving so quickly.

What role do we want humans to play in warfare, and why do we think this is the case? Are there some tasks in war, or some decisions that we think are fundamentally human that should be decisions that only humans should make and we shouldn’t hand off to machines? I think that’s a really valuable starting position then to try to better interrogate how do we want to use this technology going forward? Because the landscape of technological opportunity is going to keep expanding. And so what do we want to do with this technology? How do we want to use it? And are there ways that we can use this technology that keeps humans in control of the use of force in the battlefield? Keep humans legally and morally and ethically responsible, but may make war more humane in the process, that may make war more precise, that may reduce civilian casualties without losing our humanity in the process.

Lucas Perry: So I guess the thought experiment, there would be like, if we had weapons that let us just delete people instantly without consequences, how would we want human decision making to be integrated with that? Reflecting on that also makes me consider this other point that I think is also important for my considerations around lethal autonomous weapons, which is the necessity of integrating human experience in the consequences of war, the pain and the suffering and the carnage and the PTSD as being almost necessary vehicles to some extent to make us tired of it to integrate how horrible it is. So I guess I would just be interested in integrating that perspective into it not just being about humans making decisions and the decisions being integrated in the execution process, but also about the experiential ramifications of being in relation to what actually happens in war and what violence is like and what happens in violence.

Paul Scharre: Well, I think that we want to unpack a little bit some of the things you’re talking about. Are we talking about ensuring that there is an accurate representation to the people carrying out the violence about what’s happening on the other end, that we’re not sanitizing things. And I think that’s a fair point. When we begin to put more psychological barriers between the person making the decision and the effects, it might be easier for them to carry out larger scale attacks, versus actually making war and more horrible. Now that’s a line of reasoning, I suppose, to say we should make war more horrible, so there’ll be less of it. I’m not sure we might get the outcome that there is less of it. We just might have more horrible war, but that’s a different issue. Those are more difficult questions.

I will say that I often hear philosophers raising things about skin in the game. I rarely hear them being raised by people who have had skin in the game, who have experienced up close in a personal way the horrors of war. And I’m less convinced that there’s a lot of good that comes from the tragedy of war. I think there’s value in us trying to think about how do we make war less terrible? How do we reduce civilian casualties? How do we have less war? But this often comes up in the context of technologies like we should somehow put ourselves at risk. No military does that, no military has ever done that in human history. The whole purpose of militaries getting technology in training is to get an advantage on the adversary. It’s not a fair fight. It’s not supposed to be, it’s not a boxing match. So these are things worth exploring. We need to come from the standpoint of the reality of what war is and not from a philosophical exercise about war might be, but deal with the realities of what actually occurs in the battlefield.

Lucas Perry: So I think that’s a really interesting point. And as someone with a background and interest in philosophy, it’s quite funny. So you do have experience in war, right?

Paul Scharre: Yes, I’ve fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lucas Perry: Then it’s interesting for me, if you see this distinction between people who are actually veterans, who have experienced violence and carnage and tragedies of war, and the perspective here is that PTSD and associated trauma with these kinds of experiences, you find that they’re less salient for decreasing people’s willingness or decision to engage in further war. Is that your claim?

Paul Scharre: I don’t know. No, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know. That’s some difficult question for political scientists to figure out about voting preferences of veterans. All I’m saying is that I hear a lot of claims in this space that I think are often not very well interrogated or not very well explored. And there’s a real price that people pay for being involved. Now, people want to say that we’re willing to bear that price for some reason, like okay, but I think we should acknowledge it.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, that make sense. I guess the thing that I was just pointing at was it would be psychologically interesting to know if philosophers are detached from the experience, maybe they don’t actually know about the psychological implications of being involved in horrible war. And if people who are actually veterans disagree with philosophers about the importance of there being skin in the game, if philosophers say that skin in the game reduces willingness to be in war, if the claim is that that wouldn’t actually decrease their willingness to go to war. I think that seems psychologically very important and relevant, because there is this concern about how autonomous weapons and integrating human decision making to lethal autonomous weapons would potentially sanitize war. And so there’s the trade off between the potential mitigating effects of being involved in war, and then also the negative effects which are incurred by veterans who would actually have to be exposed by it and bring the trauma back for communities to have deeper experiential relation with.

Paul Scharre: Yes, and look, we don’t do that, right? We had a whole generation of veterans come back from Vietnam and we as society listen to the stories and understand them and understand, no. I have heard over the years people raise this issue whether it’s drones, autonomous weapons, this issue of having skin in the game either physically being at risk or psychologically. And I’ve rarely heard it raised by people who it’s been them who’s on the line. People often have very gut emotional reactions to this topic. And I think that’s valuable because it’s speaking to something that resonates with people, whether it’s an emotional reaction opposed to autonomous weapons, and that you often get that from many people that go, there’s something about this. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t like this idea. Or people saying, the opposite reaction. Other people that say that “wouldn’t this make war great, it’s more precise and more humane,” and which my reaction is often a little bit like… have you ever interacted with a computer? They break all the time. What are you talking about?

But all of these things I think they’re speaking to instincts that people have about this technology, but it’s worth asking questions to better understand, what is it that we’re reacting to? Is it an assumption about the technologies, is it an assumption about the nature of war? One of the concerns I’ve heard raised is like this will impersonalize war and create more distance between people killing. If you sort of buy that argument, that impersonal war is a bad thing, then you would say the greatest thing would be deeply personal war, like hand to hand combat. It appears to harken back to some glorious age of war when people looked each other in the eye and hacked each other to bits with swords, like real humans. That’s not that that war never occurred in human history. In fact, we’ve had conflicts like that, even in recent memory that involve hand to hand weapons. They tend not to be very humane conflicts. When we see civil violence, when people are murdering each other with machetes or garden tools or other things, it tends to be horrific communal violence, mass atrocities in Rwanda or Cambodia or other places. So I think it’s important to deal with the reality of what war is and not some fantasy.

Lucas Perry: Yes, I think that that makes a lot of sense. It’s really tricky. And the psychology around this I think is difficult and probably not studied enough.

Paul Scharre: There’s real war that occurs in the world, and then there’s the fantasy of war that we, as a society, tell ourselves when we go to movie theaters, and we watch stories about soldiers who are heroes, who conquer the bad guys. We’re told a fantasy, and it’s a fantasy as a society that allows society to perpetuate wars, that allows us to send young men and women off to die. And it’s not to say that there are no circumstances in which a nation might need to go to war to defend itself or its interest, but we sort of dress war up in these pretty clothes, and let’s not confuse that with the reality of what actually occurs. People said, well, through autonomous weapons, then we won’t have people sort of weighing the value of life and death. I mean, it happens sometimes, but it’s not like every time someone dies in war, that there was this thoughtful exercise where a committee sat around and said, “Do we really need to kill this person? Is it really appropriate?” There’s a lot of dehumanization that goes on on the battlefield. So I think this is what makes this issue very challenging. Many of the objections to autonomous weapons are objections to war. That’s what people are actually objecting to.

The question isn’t, is war bad? Of course war’s terrible? The question is sort of, how do we find ways going forward to use technology that may make war more precise and more humane without losing our humanity in the process, and are ways to do that? It’s a challenging question. I think the answer is probably yes, but it’s one that’s going to require a lot of interrogation to try to get there. It’s a difficult issue because it’s also a dynamic process where there’s an interplay between competitors. If we get this wrong, we can easily end up in a situation where there’s less human control, there’s more violence and war. There are lots of opportunities to make things worse as well.

If we could make war perfect, that would be great, in terms of no civilian suffering and reduce the suffering of enemy combatants and the number of lives lost. If we could push a button and make war go away, that would be wonderful. Those things will all be great. The more practical question really is, can we improve upon the status quo and how can we do so in a thoughtful way, or at least not make things worse than today? And I think those are hard enough problems to try to address.

Lucas Perry: I appreciate that you bring a very holistic, well-weighed perspective to the varying sides of this issue. So these are all very big and difficult. Are you aware of people actually studying whether some of these effects exist or not, and whether they would actually sanitize things or not? Or is this basically all just coming down to people’s intuitions and simulations in their head?

Paul Scharre: Some of both. There’s really great scholarship that’s being done on autonomous weapons, certainly there’s a robust array of legal based scholarship, people trying to understand how the law of war might interface with autonomous weapons. But there’s also been worked on by thinking about some of these human psychological interactions, Missy Cummings, who’s at Duke who runs the humans and automation lab down has done some work on human machine interfaces on weapon systems to think through some of these concerns. I think probably less attention paid to the human machine interface dimension of this and the human psychological dimension of it. But there’s been a lot of work done by people like Heather Roth, people at Article 36, and others thinking about concepts of meaningful human control and what might look like in weapon systems.

I think one of the things that’s challenging across the board in this issue is that it is a politically contentious topic. You have kind of levels of this debate going on, you have scholars trying to sort of understand the issue maybe, and then you also have a whole array of politically motivated groups, international organizations, civil society organizations, countries, duking it out basically, at the UN and in the media about where we should go with this technology. As you get a lot of motivated reasoning on all sides about what should the answer be. So for example, one of the things that fascinates me is i’ll often hear people say, autonomous weapons are terrible, and they’ll have a terrible outcome, and we need to ban them now. And if we just pass a treaty and we have enough political will we could ban them. I’ll also hear people say a ban would be pointless, it wouldn’t work. And anyways, wouldn’t autonomous weapons be great? There are other possible beliefs. One could say that a ban is feasible, but the weapons aren’t that big of a deal. So it just seems to me like there’s a lot of politically motivated reasoning that goes on this debate, which makes it very challenging.

Lucas Perry: So one of the concerns around autonomous weapons has to do with accidental escalation of warfare and conflict. Could you explore this point and explain what some strategies might be to prevent accidental escalation of warfare as AI is increasingly being used in the military?

Paul Scharre: Yes, so I think in general, you could bucket maybe concerns about autonomous weapons into two categories. One is a concern that they may not function very well and could have accidents, those accidents could lead to civilian casualties, that could lead to accidental escalation among nations and a crisis, military force forces operating in close proximity to one another and there could be accidents. This happens with people. And you might worry about actions with autonomous systems and maybe one shoots down an enemy aircraft and there’s an escalation and people are killed. And then how do you unwind that? How do you communicate to your adversary? We didn’t mean to do that. We’re sorry. How do you do that in a period of tension? That’s a particular challenge.

There’s a whole other set of challenges that come from the weapons might work. And that might get to some of these deeper questions about the role of humans in decision making about life and death. But this issue of accidental escalation kind of comes into the category of they don’t work very well, then they’re not reliable. And this is the case for a lot of AI and autonomous technology today, which isn’t to say it doesn’t work at all, if it didn’t work at all, it would be much easier. There’d be no debates about bias and facial recognition systems if they never identify faces. There’d be no debates about safety with self-driving cars if the car couldn’t go anywhere. The problem is that a lot of these AI based systems work very well in some settings, and then if the settings change ever so slightly, they don’t work very well at all anymore. And the performance can drop off very dramatically, and they’re not very robust to changes in environmental conditions. So this is a huge problem for the military, because in particular, the military doesn’t get to test its systems in its actual operating environment.

So you can take a car, and you can take it on the roads, and you can test it in an actual driving environment. And we’ve seen car companies rack up 10 million miles or more of driving data. And then they can go back and they can run simulations. So Waymo has said that they run 10 million miles of simulated driving every single day. And they can simulate in different lighting conditions, in different environmental conditions. Well, the military can build simulations too, but simulations of what? What will the next war look like? Well we don’t know because we haven’t fought it yet. The good news is that war’s very rare, which is great. But that also means that for these kinds of systems, we don’t necessarily know the operating conditions that they’ll be in, and so there is this real problem of this risk of accidents. And it’s exacerbated in the fact that this is also a very adversarial environment. So you actually have an enemy who’s trying to trick your system and manipulate it. That’s adds another layer of complications.

Driving is a little bit competitive, maybe somebody doesn’t want to let you into the lane, but the pedestrians aren’t generally trying to get hit by cars. That’s a whole other complication in the military space. So all of that leads to concerns that the systems may do okay in training, and then we take them out in the real world, and they fail and they fail a pretty bad way. If it’s a weapon system that is making its own decisions about whom to kill, it could be that it fails in a benign way, then it targets nothing. And that’s a problem for the military who built it, or fails in a more hazardous way, in a dangerous way and attacks the wrong targets. And when we’re talking about an autonomous weapon, the essence of this autonomous weapon is making its own decisions about which targets to attack and then carrying out those attacks. If you get that wrong, those could be pretty significant consequences with that. One of those things could be civilian harm. And that’s a major concern. There are processes in place for printing that operationally and test and evaluation, are those sufficient? I think they’re good reasons to say that maybe they’re not sufficient or not completely sufficient, and they need to be revised or improved.

And I’ll point out, we can come back to this that the US Defense Department actually has a more stringent procedure in place for reviewing autonomous weapons more than other weapons, beyond what the laws of war have, the US is one of the few countries that has this. But then there’s also question about accidental escalation, which also could be the case. Would that lead to like an entire war? Probably not. But it could make things a lot harder to defuse tensions in a crisis, and that could be problematic. So we just had an incident not too long ago, where the United States carried out an attack against the very senior Iranian General, General Soleimani, who’s the head of the Iranian Quds Force and killed him in a drone strike. And that was an intentional decision made by a person somewhere in the US government.

Now, did they fully think that through? I don’t know, that’s a different question. But a human made that decision in any case. Well, that’s a huge escalation of hostilities between the US and Iraq. And there was a lot of uncertainty afterwards about what would happen and Iran launched some ballistic missiles against US troops in Iraq. And whether that’s it, or there’s more retaliation to come, I think we’ll see. But it could be a much more challenging situation, if you had a situation in the future where an autonomous weapon malfunctioned and took some action. And now the other side might feel compelled to respond. They might say, well, we have to, we can’t let this go. Because humans emotions are on the line and national pride and prestige, and they feel like they need to maintain a principle of deterrence and they need to retaliate it. So these could all be very complicated things if you had an accident with an autonomous weapon.

Lucas Perry: Right. And so an adjacent issue that I’d like to explore now is how a potential arms race can have interplay with issues around accidental escalation of conflict. So is there already an arms race brewing for autonomous weapons? If so, why and what could potentially be done to deescalate such a situation?

Paul Scharre: If there’s an arms race, it’s a very strange one because no one is building the weapons. We see militaries advancing in robotics and autonomy, but we don’t really see sort of this rush to build autonomous weapons. I struggle to point to any programs that I’m aware of in militaries around the globe that are clearly oriented to build fully autonomous weapons. I think there are lots of places where much like these incremental advancements of autonomy in cars, you can see more autonomous features in military vehicles and drones and robotic systems and missiles. They’re adding more autonomy. And one might be violently concerned about where that’s going. But it’s just simply not the case that militaries have declared their intention. We’re going to build autonomous weapons, and here they are, and here’s our program to build them. I would struggle to use the term arms race. It could happen, maybe worth a starting line of an arms race. But I don’t think we’re in one today by any means.

It’s worth also asking, when we say arms race, what do we mean and why do we care? This is again, one of these terms, it’s often thrown around. You’ll hear about this, the concept of autonomous weapons or AI, people say we shouldn’t have an arms race. Okay. Why? Why is an arms race a bad thing? Militaries normally invest in new technologies to improve their national defense. That’s a normal activity. So if you say arms race, what do you mean by that? Is it beyond normal activity? And why would that be problematic? In the political science world, the specific definitions vary, but generally, an arms race is viewed as an increase in defense spending overall, or in a particular technology area above normal levels of modernizing militaries. Now, usually, this is problematic for a couple of reasons. One could be that it ends up just in a massive national expenditure, like during the case of the Cold War, nuclear weapons, that doesn’t really yield any military value or increase anyone’s defense or security, it just ends up net flushing a lot of money down the drain. That’s money that could be spent elsewhere for pre K education or healthcare or something else that might be societally beneficial instead of building all of these weapons. So that’s one concern.

Another one might be that we end up in a world that the large number of these weapons or the type of their weapons makes it worse off. Are we really better off in a world where there are 10s of thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger versus a few thousand weapons or a few hundred weapons? Well, if we ever have zero, all things being equal, probably fewer nuclear weapons is better than more of them. So that’s another kind of concern whether in terms of violence and destructiveness of war, if a war breakout or the likelihood of war and the stability of war. This is an A in an area where certainly we’re not in any way from a spending standpoint, in an arms race for autonomous weapons or AI today, when you look at actual expenditures, they’re a small fraction of what militaries are spending on, if you look at, say AI or autonomous features at large.

And again for autonomous weapons, there really aren’t at least openly declared programs to say go build a fully autonomous weapon today. But even if that were the case, why is that bad? Why would a world where militaries are racing to build lots of atomic weapons be a bad thing? I think it would be a bad thing, but I think it’s also worth just answering that question, because it’s not obvious to everyone. This is something that’s often missing in a lot of these debates and dialogues about autonomous weapons, people may not share some of the underlying assumptions. It’s better to bring out these assumptions and explain, I think this would be bad for these reasons, because maybe it’s not intuitive to other people that they don’t share those reasons and articulating them could increase understanding.

For example, the FLI letter on autonomous weapons from a few years ago said, “the key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, the global arms race is virtually inevitable. And the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious. Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.” I like the language, it’s very literary, “the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.” Like it’s a very concrete image. But there’s a whole bunch of assumptions packed into those few sentences that maybe don’t work in the letter that’s intended to like sort of galvanize public interest and attention, but are worth really unpacking. What do we mean when we say autonomous weapons are the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow and why is that bad? And what does that mean? Those are, I think, important things to draw out and better understand.

It’s particularly hard for this issue because the weapons don’t exist yet. And so it’s not actually like debates around something like landlines. We could point to the mines and say like “this is a landmine, we all agree this is a landmine. This is what it’s doing to people.” And everyone could agree on what the harm is being caused. The people might disagree on what to do about it, but there’s agreement on what the weapon is and what the effect is. But for autonomous weapons, all these things are up to debate. Even the term itself is not clearly defined. And when I hear people describe it, people can be describing a whole range of things. Some people when they say the word autonomous weapon, they’re envisioning a Roomba with a gun on it. And other people are envisioning the Terminator. Now, both of those things are probably bad ideas, but for very different reasons. And that is important to draw out in these conversations. When you say autonomous weapon, what do you mean? What are you envisioning? What are you worried about? Worried about certain types of scenarios or certain types of effects?

If we want to get to the place where we really as a society come together and grapple with this challenge, I think first and foremost, a better communication is needed and people may still disagree, but it’s much more helpful. Stuart Russell from Berkeley has talked a lot about dangers of small anti-personnel autonomous weapons that would widely be the proliferated. He made the Slaughterbots video that’s been seen millions of times on YouTube. That’s a very specific image. It’s an image that’s very concrete. So then you can say, when Stuart Russell is worried about autonomous weapons, this is what he’s worried about. And then you can start to try to better understand the assumptions that go into that.

Now, I don’t share Stuart’s concerns, and we’ve written about it and talked about before, but it’s not actually because we disagree about the technology, I would agree that that’s very doable with existing technology. We disagree about the social responses to that technology, and how people respond, and what are the countermeasures and what are ways to prevent proliferation. So we, I think, disagree on some of the political or social factors that surround kind of how people approach this technology and use it. Sometimes people actually totally agree on the risks and even maybe the potential futures, they just have different values. And there might be some people who their primary value is trying to have fewer weapons in the world. Now that’s a noble goal. And they’re like, hey, anyway that we can have fewer weapons, fewer advanced technologies, that’s better. That’s very different from someone who’s coming from a position of saying, my goal is to improve my own nation’s defense. That’s a totally different value system. A total different preference. And they might be like, I also value what you say, but I don’t value it as much. And I’m going to take actions that advance these preferences. It’s important to really sort of try to better draw them out and understand them in this debate, if we’re going to get to a place where we can, as a society come up with some helpful solutions to this problem.

Lucas Perry: Wonderful. I’m totally on board with that. Two questions and confusions on my end. The first is, I feel a bit confused when you say these weapons don’t exist already. It seems to me more like autonomy exists on a spectrum and is the integration of many different technologies and decision making in systems. It seems to me there is already a certain degree of autonomy, there isn’t Terminator level autonomy, or specify an objective and the autonomous system can just basically go execute that, that seems to require very high level of generality, but there seems to already exist a level of autonomy today.

And so in that video, Stuart says that slaughterbots in particular represent a miniaturization and integration of many technologies, which already exist today. And the second thing that I’m confused about is when you say that it’s unclear to you that militaries are very interested in this or that there currently is an arms race. It seems like yes, there isn’t an arms race, like there was with nuclear weapons where it’s very clear, and they’re like Manhattan projects around this kind of technology, but given the strategic advantage conferred by this technology now and likely soon, it seems to me like game theoretically, from the position of militaries around the world that have the capacity to invest in these things, that it is inevitable given their battlefield importance that there would be massive ramping up or investments, or that there already is great interest in developing the autonomy and the subtechnologies required for developing fully autonomous systems.

Paul Scharre: Those are great questions and right on point. And I think the central issues in both of your questions are when we say these weapons or when I say these things, I should be more precise. When we say autonomous weapons, what do we mean exactly? And this is one of the things that can be tricky in this space, because there are not these universally agreed upon definitions. There are certainly many weapons systems used widely around the globe today that incorporate some autonomous features. Many of these are fire and forget weapons. When someone launches them, they’re not coming back. They have in that sense, autonomy to carry out their mission. But autonomy is relatively limited and narrowly bounded, and humans, for the most part are choosing the targets. So you can think of kind of maybe these three classes of weapons, these semi autonomous weapons, where humans are choosing the targets, but there’s lots of autonomy surrounding that decision, queuing information to people, flying the munition once the person launches it. That’s one type of weapon, widely used today by really every advanced military.

Another one is the supervised autonomous weapons that are used in these relatively limited settings for defensive purposes, where there is kind of this automatic mode that people can turn them on and activate them to defend the ship or the ground base or the vehicle. And these are really needed for these situations where the incoming threats are too fast for humans to respond. And these again are widely used around the globe and have been in place for decades. And then there are what we could call fully autonomous weapons, where the human’s launching them and human programs in the parameters, but they have some freedom to fly a search pattern over some area and then once they find a target, attack it on their own. For the most part, with some exceptions, those weapons are not widely used today. There have been some experimental systems that have been designed. There have been some put into operation in the past. The Israeli harpy drone is an example of this that is still in operation today. It’s been around since the ’90s, so it’s not really very new. And it’s been sold to a handful of countries, India, Turkey, South Korea, China, and the Chinese have reportedly reverse engineered their own version of this.

But it’s not like when widespread. So it’s not like a major component of militaries order of that. I think you see militaries investing in robotic systems, but the bulk of their fleets are still human occupied platforms, robotics are largely an adjunct to them. And in terms of spending, while there is increased spending on robotics, most of the spending is still going towards more traditional military platforms. The same is also true about the degree of autonomy, most of these robotic systems are just remote controlled, and they have very limited autonomy today. Now we’re seeing more autonomy over time in both robotic vehicles and in missiles. But militaries have a strong incentive to keep humans involved.

It is absolutely the case that militaries want technologies that will give them an advantage on the battlefield. But part of achieving an advantage means your systems work, they do what you want them to do, the enemy doesn’t hack them and take them over, you have control over them. All of those things point to more human control. So I think that’s the thing where you actually see militaries trying to figure out where’s the right place on the spectrum of autonomy? How much autonomy is right, and that line is going to shift over time. But it’s not the case that they necessarily want just full autonomy because what does that mean, then they do want weapon systems to sort of operate under some degree of human direction and involvement. It’s just that what that looks like may evolve over time as the technology advances.

And there are also, I should add, other bureaucratic factors that come into play that militaries investments are not entirely strategic. There’s bureaucratic politics within organizations. There’s politics more broadly with the domestic defense industry interfacing with the political system in that country. They might drive resources in certain directions. There’s some degree of inertia of course in any system that are also factors in play.

Lucas Perry: So I want to hit here a little bit on longer term perspectives. So the Future of Life Institute in particular is interested in mitigating existential risks. We’re interested in the advanced risks from powerful AI technologies where AI not aligned with human values and goals and preferences and intentions can potentially lead us to suboptimal equilibria that were trapped in permanently or could lead to human extinction. And so other technologies we care about are nuclear weapons and synthetic-bio enabled by AI technologies, etc. So there is this view here that if we cannot establish a governance mechanism as a global community on the concept that we should not let AI make the decision to kill then how can we deal with more subtle near term issues and eventual long term safety issues around the powerful AI technologies? So there’s this view of ensuring beneficial outcomes around lethal autonomous weapons or at least beneficial regulation or development of that technology, and the necessity of that for longer term AI risk and value alignment with AI systems as they become increasingly intelligent. I’m curious to know if you have a view or perspective on this.

Paul Scharre: This is the fun part of the podcast with the Future of Life because this rarely comes up in a lot of the conversations because I think in a lot of the debates, people are focused on just much more near term issues surrounding autonomous weapons or AI. I think that if you’re inclined to see that there are longer term risks for more advanced developments in AI, then I think it’s very logical to say that there’s some value in humanity coming together to come up with some set of rules about autonomous weapons today, even if the specific rules don’t really matter that much, because the level of risk is maybe not as significant, but the process of coming together and agreeing on some set of norms and limits on particularly military applications in AI is probably beneficial and may begin to create the foundations for future cooperation. The stakes for autonomous weapons might be big, but are certainly not existential. I think in any reasonable interpretation of autonomous weapons might do really, unless you start thinking about autonomy wired into, like nuclear launch decisions which is basically nuts. And I don’t think it’s really what’s on the table for realistically what people might be worried about.

When we try to come together as a human society to grapple with problems, we’re basically forced to deal with the institutions that we have in place. So for example, for autonomous weapons, we’re having debates in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons to CCW. Is that the best form for talking about autonomous weapons? Well, it’s kind of the form that exists for this kind of problem set. It’s not bad. It’s not perfect in some respects, but it’s the one that exists. And so if you’re worried about future AI risk, creating the institutional muscle memory among the relevant actors in society, whether it’s nation states, AI scientists, members of civil society, militaries, if you’re worried about military applications, whoever it is, to come together, to have these conversations, and to come up with some answer, and maybe set some agreements, some limits is probably really valuable actually because it begins to establish the right human networks for collaboration and cooperation, because it’s ultimately people, it’s people who know each other.

So oh, “I worked with this person on this last thing.” If you look at, for example, the international movement that The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is spearheading, that institution or framework, those people, those relationships are born out of past successful efforts to ban landmines and then cluster munitions. So there’s a path dependency, and human relationships and bureaucracies, institutions that really matters. Coming together and reaching any kind of agreement, actually, to set some kind of limits is probably really vital to start exercising those muscles today.

Lucas Perry: All right, wonderful. And a final fun FLI question for you. What are your views on long term AI safety considerations? Do you view AI eventually as an existential risk and do you integrate that into your decision making and thinking around the integration of AI and military technology?

Paul Scharre: Yes, it’s a great question. It’s not something that comes up a lot in the world that I live in, in Washington in the policy world, people don’t tend to think about that kind of risk. I think it’s a concern. It’s a hard problem because we don’t really know how the technology is evolving. And I think that one of the things is challenging with AI is our frame for future more advanced AI. Often the default frame is sort of thinking about human like intelligence. When people talk about future AI, people talk about terms like AGI, or high level machine intelligence or human like intelligence, we don’t really know how the technology is evolving.

I think one of the things that we’re seeing with AI machine learning that’s quite interesting is that it often is evolving in ways that are very different from human intelligence, in fact, very quite alien and quite unusual. And I’m not the first person to say this, but I think that this is valid that we are, I think, on the verge of a Copernican revolution in how we think about intelligence, that rather than thinking of human intelligence as the center of the universe, that we’re realizing that humans are simply one type of intelligence among a whole vast array and space of possible forms of intelligence, and we’re creating different kinds, they may have very different intelligence profiles, they may just look very different, they may be much smarter than humans in some ways and dumber in other ways. I don’t know where things are going. I think it’s entirely possible that we move forward into a future where we see many more forms of advanced intelligent systems. And because they don’t have the same intelligence profile as human beings, we continue to kick the can down the road into being true intelligence because it doesn’t look like us. It doesn’t think like us. It thinks differently. But these systems may yet be very powerful in very interesting ways.

We’ve already seen lots of AI systems, even very simple ones exhibit a lot of creativity, a lot of interesting and surprising behavior. And as we begin to see the sort of scope of their intelligence widen over time, I think there are going to be risks that come with that. They may not be the risks that we were expecting, but I think over time, there going to be significant risks, and in some ways that our anthropocentric view is, I think, a real hindrance here. And I think it may lead us to then underestimate risk from things that don’t look quite like humans, and maybe miss some things that are very real. I’m not at all worried about some AI system one day becoming self aware, and having human level sentience, that does not keep me up at night. I am deeply concerned about advanced forms of malware. We’re not there today yet. But you could envision things over time that are adapting and learning and begin to populate the web, like there are people doing interesting ways of thinking about systems that have misaligned goals. It’s also possible to envision systems that don’t have any human directed goals at all. Viruses don’t. They replicate. They’re effective at replicating, but they don’t necessarily have a goal in the way that we think of it other than self replication.

If you have systems that are capable of replicating, of accumulating resources, of adapting, over time, you might have all of the right boxes to check to begin to have systems that could be problematic. They could accumulate resources that could cause problems. Even if they’re not trying to pursue either a goal that’s misaligned with human interest or even any goal that we might recognize. They simply could get out in the wild, if they’re effective at replication and acquiring resources and adapting, then they might survive. I think we’re likely to be surprised and continue to be surprised by how AI systems evolve, and where that might take us. And it might surprise us in ways that are humbling for how we think about human intelligence. So one question I guess is, is human intelligence a convergence point for more intelligent systems? As AI systems become more advanced, and they become more human like, or less human like and more alien.

Lucas Perry: Unless we train them very specifically on human preference hierarchies and structures.

Paul Scharre: Right. Exactly. Right. And so I’m not actually worried about a system that has the intelligence profile of humans, when you think about capacity in different tasks.

Lucas Perry: I see what you mean. You’re not worried about an anthropomorphic AI, you’re worried about a very powerful, intelligent, capable AI, that is alien and that we don’t understand.

Paul Scharre: Right. They might have cross domain functionality, it might have the ability to do continuous learning. It might be adaptive in some interesting ways. I mean, one of the interesting things we’ve seen about the field of AI is that people are able to tackle a whole variety of problems with some very simple methods and algorithms. And this seems for some reason offensive to some people in the AI community, I don’t know why, but people have been able to use some relatively simple methods, with just huge amounts of data and compute, it’s like a variety of different kinds of problems, some of which seem very complex.

Now, they’re simple compared to the real world, when you look at things like strategy games like StarCraft and Dota 2, like the world looks way more complex, but these are still really complicated kind of problems. And systems are basically able to learn totally on their own. That’s not general intelligence, but it starts to point towards the capacity to have systems that are capable of learning a whole variety of different tasks. They can’t do this today, continuously without suffering the problem of catastrophic forgetting that people are working on these things as well. The problems today are the systems aren’t very robust. They don’t handle perturbations in the environment very well. People are working on these things. I think it’s really hard to see how this evolves. But yes, in general, I think that our fixation on human intelligence as the pinnacle of intelligence, or even the goal of what we’re trying to build, and the sort of this anthropocentric view is, I think, probably one that’s likely to lead us to maybe underestimate some kinds of risks.

Lucas Perry: I think those are excellent points and I hope that mindfulness about that is able to proliferate in government and in actors who have power to help mitigate some of these future and short term AI risks. I really appreciate your perspective and I think you bring a wholesomeness and a deep authentic entertaining of all the different positions and arguments here on the question of autonomous weapons and I find that valuable. So thank you so much for your time and for helping to share information about autonomous weapons with us.

Paul Scharre: Thank you and thanks everyone for listening. Take care.

 Topics discussed in this episode include:

• Identity from epistemic, ontological, and phenomenological perspectives
• Identity formation in biological evolution
• Open, closed, and empty individualism
• The moral relevance of views on identity
• Identity in the world today and on the path to superintelligence and beyond

Timestamps: 

0:00 – Intro

6:33 – What is identity?

9:52 – Ontological aspects of identity

12:50 – Epistemological and phenomenological aspects of identity

18:21 – Biological evolution of identity

26:23 – Functionality or arbitrariness of identity / whether or not there are right or wrong answers

31:23 – Moral relevance of identity

34:20 – Religion as codifying views on identity

37:50 – Different views on identity

53:16 – The hard problem and the binding problem

56:52 – The problem of causal efficacy, and the palette problem

1:00:12 – Navigating views of identity towards truth

1:08:34 – The relationship between identity and the self model

1:10:43 – The ethical implications of different views on identity

1:21:11 – The consequences of different views on identity on preference weighting

1:26:34 – Identity and AI alignment

1:37:50 – Nationalism and AI alignment

1:42:09 – Cryonics, species divergence, immortality, uploads, and merging.

1:50:28 – Future scenarios from Life 3.0

1:58:35 – The role of identity in the AI itself

We hope that you will continue to join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

The transcript has been edited for style and clarity

Lucas Perry: Welcome to the AI Alignment Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today we have an episode with Andres Gomez Emillson and David Pearce on identity. This episode is about identity from the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological perspectives. In less jargony language, we discuss identity from the fundamental perspective of what actually exists, of how identity arises given functional world models and self models in biological organisms, and of the subjective or qualitative experience of self or identity as a feature of consciousness. Given these angles on identity, we discuss what identity is, the formation of identity in biological life via evolution, why identity is important to explore and it’s ethical implications and implications for game theory, and  we directly discuss its relevance to the AI alignment problem and the project of creating beneficial AI.

I think the question of “How is this relevant to AI Alignment?” is useful to explore here in the intro. The AI Alignment problem can be construed in the technical limited sense of the question of “how to program AI systems to understand and be aligned with human values, preferences, goals, ethics, and objectives.” In a limited sense this is strictly a technical problem that supervenes upon research in machine learning, AI, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, etc. I like to approach the problem of aligning AI systems from a broader and more generalist perspective. In the way that I think about the problem, a broader view of AI alignment takes into account the problems of AI governance, philosophy, AI ethics, and reflects deeply on the context in which the technical side of the problem will be taking place, the motivations of humanity and the human beings engaged in the AI alignment process, the ingredients required for success, and other civilization level questions on our way hopefully to beneficial superintelligence. 

It is from both of these perspectives that I feel exploring the question of identity is important. AI researchers have their own identities and those identities factor into their lived experience of the world, their motivations, and their ethics. In fact, the same is of course true of policy makers and anyone in positions of power to influence the alignment process, so being aware of commonly held identity models and views is important for understanding their consequences and functions in the world. From a macroscopic perspective, identity has evolved over the past 4.5 billion years on earth and surely will continue to do so in AI systems themselves and in the humans which hope to wield that power. Some humans may wish to merge, other to pass away or simply die, and others to be upgraded or uploaded in some way. Questions of identity are also crucial to this process of relating to one another and to AI systems in a rapidly evolving world where what it means to be human is quickly changing, where copies of digital minds or AIs can be made trivially, and the boundary between what we conventionally call the self and world begins to dissolve and break down in new ways, demanding new understandings of ourselves and identity in particular. I also want to highlight an important thought from the podcast that any actions we wish to take with regards to improving or changing understandings or lived experience of identity must be Sociologically relevant, or such interventions simply risk being irrelevant. This means understanding what is reasonable for human beings to be able to update their minds with and accept over certain periods of time and also the game theoretic implications of certain views of identity and their functional usefulness. This conversation is thus an attempt to broaden the conversation on these issues outside of what is normally discussed and to flag this area as something worthy of consideration.

For those not familiar with David Pearce or Andres Gomez Emilsson. David is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, rebranded humanity plus, and is a prominent figure within the transhumanism movement in general. You might know him from his work on the Hedonistic Imperative, a book which explores our moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life through technological intervention. Andrés is a consciousness researcher at the Qualia Research Institute and is also the Co-founder and President of the Stanford Transhumanist Association. He has a Master’s in Computational Psychology from Stanford.

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And with that, here is my conversation with Andres Gomez Emilsson and David Pearce 

I just want to start off with some quotes here that I think would be useful. The last podcast that we had was with Yuval Noah Harari and Max Tegmark. One of the points that Yuval really emphasized was the importance of self understanding questions like, who am I? What am I in the age of technology? Yuval all said “Get to know yourself better. It’s maybe the most important thing in life. We haven’t really progressed much in the last thousands of years, and the reason is that yes, we keep getting this advice, but we don’t really want to do it,” he goes on to say that, “especially as technology will give us all, at least some of us more and more power, the temptations of naive utopias are going to be more and more irresistible, and I think the really most powerful check on these naive utopias is really getting to know yourself better.”

In search of getting to know ourselves better, I want to explore this question of identity with both of you. To start off, what is identity?

David Pearce: One problem is that we have more than one conception of identity. There is the straightforward, logical sense that philosophers call the indiscernibility of identicals, namely that if A equals B, then anything true of A is true of B. In one sense, that’s trivially true, but when it comes to something like personal identity, it just doesn’t hold water at all. You are a different person from your namesake who went to bed last night – and it’s very easy carelessly to shift between these two different senses of identity.

Or one might speak of the United States. In what sense is the United States the same nation in 2020 as it was in 1975? It’s interest-relative.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah and to go a little bit deeper on that, I would make the distinction as David made it between ontological identity, what fundamentally is actually going on in the physical world? In instantiated reality? Then there’s conventional identity definitely, the idea of continuing to exist from one moment to another as a human and also countries and so on.

Then there’s also phenomenological identity, which is our intuitive common sense view of: What are we and basically, what are the conditions that will allow us to continue to exist? We can go into more detail but yet, the phenomenological notion of identity is an incredible can of worms because there’s so many different ways of experiencing identity and all of them have their own interesting idiosyncrasies. Most people tend to confuse the two. They tend to confuse ontological and phenomenological identity. Just as a simple example that I’m sure we will revisit in the future, when a person has, let’s say an ego dissolution or a mystical experience and they feel that they merged with the rest of the cosmos, and they come out and say, “Oh, we’re all one consciousness.” That tends to be interpreted as some kind of grasp of an ontological reality. Whereas we could argue in a sense that that was just the shift in phenomenological identity, that your sense of self got transformed, not necessarily that you’re actually directly merging with the cosmos in a literal sense. Although, of course it might be very indicative of how conventional our sense of identity is if it can be modified so drastically in other states of consciousness.

Lucas Perry: Right, and let’s just start with the ontological sense. How does one understand or think about identity from the ontological side?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: In order to reason about this, you need a shared frame of reference for what actually exists, and a number of things including the nature of time and space, and memory because in the common sense view of time called presentism, where basically there’s just the present moment, the past is a convenient construction and the future is a fiction useful in practical sense, but they don’t literally exist in that sense. This notion that A equals B in the sense of, Hey, you could modify what happens to A and that will automatically also modify what happens to B. It kind of makes sense and you can perhaps think of identity is moving over time along with everything else.

On the other hand, if you have an eternalist point of view where basically you interpret the whole of space time as just basically there, on their own coordinates in the multiverse, that kind of provides a different notion of ontological identity because it’s in a sense, a moment of experience is its own separate piece of reality.

In addition, you also need to consider the question of connectivity: in what way different parts of reality are connected to each other? In a conventional sense, as you go from one second to the next, you’ve continued to be connected to yourself in an unbroken stream of consciousness and this has actually led some philosophers to hypothesize that the proper unit of identity is from the moment your wake up to the moment in which you go to sleep because that’s an unbroken chain/stream of consciousness.

From a scientific and philosophically rigorous point of view, it’s actually difficult to make the case that our stream of consciousness is truly unbroken. Definitely if you have an eternalist point of view on experience and on the nature of time, what you will instead see is from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, there’s actually been an extraordinarily large amount of snapshots of discrete and moments of experience. In that sense, each of those individual moments of experiences would be its own ontologically separate individual.

Now one of the things that becomes kind of complicated with a kind of an eternalist account of time and identity is that you cannot actually change it. There’s nothing you can actually do to A, so that reasoning of if you do anything to A an A equals B, then the same will happen to B, doesn’t even actually apply in here because everything is already there. You cannot actually modify A any more than you can modify the number five.

David Pearce: Yes, it’s a rather depressing perspective in many ways, the eternalist view. If one internalizes it too much, it can lead to a sense of fatalism and despair. A lot of the time it’s probably actually best to think of the future as open.

Lucas Perry: This helps to clarify some of the ontological part of identity. Now, you mentioned this phenomenological aspect and I want to say also the epistemological aspect of identity. Could you unpack those two? And maybe clarify this distinction for me if you wouldn’t parse it this way? I guess I would say that the epistemological one is the models that human beings have about the world and about ourselves. It includes how the world is populated with a lot of different objects that have identity like humans and planets and galaxies. Then we have our self model, which is the model of our body and our space in social groups and who we think we are.

Then there’s the phenomenological identity, which is that subjective qualitative experience of self or the ego in relation to experience. Or where there’s an identification with attention and experience. Could you unpack these two later senses?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, for sure. I mean in a sense you could have like an implicit self model that doesn’t actually become part of your consciousness or it’s not necessarily something that you’re explicitly rendering. This goes on all the time. You’ve definitely, I’m sure, had the experience of riding a bicycle and after a little while you can almost do it without thinking. Of course, you’re engaging with the process in a very embodied fashion, but you’re not cognizing very much about it. Definitely you’re not representing, let’s say your body state, or you’re representing exactly what is going on in a cognitive way. It’s all kind of implicit in the way in which you feel. I would say that paints a little bit of a distinction between a self model which is ultimately functional. It has to do with, are you processing the information that you’re required to solve the task that involves modeling what you are in your environment and distinguishing it from the felt sense of, are you a person? What are you? How are you located and so on.

The first one is the one that most of robotics and machine learning, that have like an embodied component, are really trying to get at. You just need the appropriate information processing in order to solve the task. They’re not very concerned about, does this feel like anything? Or does it feel like a particular entity or a self to be that particular algorithm?

Whereas, we’re talking about the phenomenological sense of identity. That’s very explicitly about how it feels like and there’s all kinds of ways in which a healthy so to speak, sense of identity, can be broken down in all sorts of interesting ways. There’s many failure modes, we can put it that way.

One might argue, I mean I suspect for example, David Pearce might say this, which is that, our self models or our implicit sense of self, because of the way in which it was brought up through Darwinian selection pressures, is already extremely ill in some sense at least, from the point of view of it, it actually telling us something true and actually making us do something ethical. It has all sorts of problems, but it is definitely functional. You can anticipate being a person tomorrow and plan accordingly. You leave messages to yourself by encoding them in memory and yeah, this is a convenient sense of conventional identity.

It’s very natural for most people’s experiences. I can briefly mention a couple of ways in which it can break down. One of them is depersonalization. It’s a particular psychological disorder where one stops feeling like a person, and it might have something to do with basically, not being able to synchronize with your bodily feelings in such a way that you don’t actually feel embodied. You may feel this incarnate entity or just a witness experiencing a human experience, but not actually being that person.

Then you also have things such as empathogen induced sense of shared identity with others. If you’d take MDMA, you may feel that all of humanity is deeply connected, or we’re all part of the same essence of humanity in a very positive sense of identity, but perhaps not in an evolutionary adaptive sense. Finally, is people with a multiple personality disorder, where in a sense they have a very unstable sense of who they are and sometimes it can be so extreme that there’s epistemological blockages from one sense of self to another.

David Pearce: As neuroscientist Donald Hoffman likes to say, fitness trumps truth. Each of us runs a world-simulation. But it’s not an impartial, accurate, faithful world-simulation. I am at the center of a world-simulation, my egocentric world, the hub of reality that follows me around. And of course there are billions upon billions of other analogous examples too. This is genetically extremely fitness-enhancing. But it’s systematically misleading. In that sense, I think Darwinian life is malware.

Lucas Perry: Wrapping up here on these different aspects of identity, I just want to make sure that I have all of them here. Would you say that those are all of the aspects?

David Pearce: One can add the distinction between type- and token- identity. In principle, it’s possible to create from scratch a molecular duplicate of you. Is that person you? It’s type-identical, but it’s not token-identical.

Lucas Perry: Oh, right. I think I’ve heard this used in some other places as numerical distinction versus qualitative distinction. Is that right?

David Pearce: Yeah, that’s the same distinction.

Lucas Perry: Unpacking here more about what identity is. Let’s talk about it purely as something that the world has produced. What can we say about the evolution of identity in biological life? What is the efficacy of certain identity models in Darwinian evolution?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I would say that self models most likely have existed, potentially since pretty early on in the evolutionary timeline. You may argue that in some sense even bacteria has some kind of self model. But again, a self model is really just functional. The bacteria does need to know, at least implicitly, it’s size in order to be able to navigate it’s environment, follow chemical gradients, and so on, not step on itself. That’s not the same, again, as a phenomenal sense of identity, and that one I would strongly suspect came much later. Perhaps with the advent of the first primitive nervous systems. That would be only if actually running that phenomenal model is giving you some kind of fitness advantage.

One of the things that you will encounter with David and I is that we think that phenomenally bound experiences have a lot of computational properties and in a sense, the reason why we’re conscious has to do with the fact that unified moments of experience are doing computationally useful legwork. It comes when you merge implicit self models in just the functional sense together with the computational benefits of actually running a conscious system that, perhaps for the first time in history, you will actually have a phenomenal self model.

I would suspect probably in the Cambrian explosion this was already going on to some extent. All of these interesting evolutionary oddities that happen in the Cambrian explosion probably had some kind of rudimentary sense of self. I would be skeptical that is going on.

For example, in plants. One of the key reasons is that running a real time world simulation in a conscious framework is very calorically expensive.

David Pearce: Yes, it’s a scandal. What, evolutionarily speaking, is consciousness “for”? What could a hypothetical p-zombie not do? The perspective that Andrés and I are articulating is that essentially what makes biological minds special is phenomenal binding – the capacity to run real-time, phenomenally-bound world-simulations, i.e. not just be 86 billion discrete, membrane-bound pixels of experience. Somehow, we each generate an entire cross-modally matched, real-time world-simulation, made up of individual perceptual objects, somehow bound into a unitary self. The unity of perception is extraordinarily computationally powerful and adaptive. Simply saying that it’s extremely fitness-enhancing doesn’t explain it, because something like telepathy would be extremely fitness-enhancing too, but it’s physically impossible.

Yes, how biological minds manage to run phenomenally-bound world-simulations is unknown: they would seem to be classically impossible. One way to appreciate just how advantageous is (non-psychotic) phenomenal binding is to look at syndromes where binding even partially breaks down: simultanagnosia, where one can see only one object at once, or motion blindness (akinetopsia), where you can’t actually see moving objects, or florid schizophrenia. Just imagine those syndromes combined. Why aren’t we just micro-experiential zombies?

Lucas Perry: Do we have any interesting points here to look at in the evolutionary tree for where identity is substantially different from ape consciousness? If we look back at human evolution, it seems that it’s given the apes and particularly our species a pretty strong sense of self, and that gives rise to much of our ape socialization and politics. I’m wondering if there was anything else like maybe insects or other creatures that have gone in a different direction? Also if you guys might be able to just speak a little bit on the formation of ape identity.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Definitely I think like the perspective of the selfish gene, it’s pretty illuminating here. Nominally, our sense of identity is the sense of one person, one mind. In practice however, if you make sense of identity as well in terms of that which you want to defend, or that of which you consider worth preserving, you will see that people’s sense of identity also extends to their family members and of course, with the neocortex and the ability to create more complex associations. Then you have crazy things like sense of identity being based on race or country of origin or other constructs like that.are building on top of imports from the sense of, hey, the people who are familiar to you feel more like you.

It’s genetically adaptive to have that and from the point of view of the selfish gene, genes that could recognize themselves in others and favor the existence of others that also share the same genes, are more likely to reproduce. That’s called the inclusive fitness in biology, you’re not just trying to survive yourself or make copies of yourself, you’re also trying to help those that are very similar to you do the same. Almost certainly, it’s a huge aspect of how we perceive the world. Just anecdotally from a number of trip reports, there’s this interesting thread of how some chemicals like MDMA and 2CB, for those who don’t know, it’s these empathogenic psychedelics, that people get the strange sense that people they’ve never met before in their life are as close to them as a cousin, or maybe a half brother, or half sister. It’s a very comfortable and quite beautiful feeling. You could imagine that nature was very selective on who do you give that feeling to in order to maximize inclusive fitness.

All of this builds up to the overall prediction I would make that, the sense of identity of ants and other extremely social insects might be very different. The reason being that they are genetically incentivized to basically treat each other as themselves. Most ants themselves don’t produce any offspring. They are genetically sisters and all of their genetic incentives are into basically helping the queen pass on the genes into other colonies. In that sense, I would imagine an ant probably sees other ants of the same colony pretty much as themselves.

David Pearce: Yes. There was an extraordinary finding a few years ago: members of one species of social ant actually passed the mirror test – which has traditionally been regarded as the gold standard for the concept of a self. It was shocking enough, to many people, when a small fish was shown to be capable of mirror self-recognition. If some ants too can pass the mirror test, it suggests some form of meta-cognition, self-recognition, that is extraordinarily ancient.

What is it that distinguishes humans from nonhuman animals? I suspect the distinction relates to something that is still physically unexplained: how is it that a massively parallel brain gives rise to serial, logico-linguistic thought? It’s unexplained, but I would say this serial stream is what distinguishes us, most of all – not possession of a self-concept.

Lucas Perry: Is there such a thing as a right answer to questions of identity? Or is it fundamentally just something that’s functional? Or is it ultimately arbitrary?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I think there is the right answer. From a functional perspective, there’s just so many different ways of thinking about it. As I was describing perhaps with ants and humans, their sense of identity is probably pretty different. But, they both are useful for passing on the genes. In that sense they’re all equally valid. Imagine in the future is some kind of a swarm mind that also has its own distinct functionally adaptive sense of identity, and I mean in that sense that it ground truth to what it should be from the point of view of functionality. It really just depends on what is the replication unit.

Ontologically though, I think there’s a case to be made that either or empty individualism are true. Maybe it would be good to define those terms first.

Lucas Perry: Before we do that. Your answer then is just that, yes, you suspect that also ontologically in terms of fundamental physics, there are answers to questions of identity? Identity itself isn’t a confused category?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a leaky reification as they say.

Lucas Perry: From the phenomenological sense, is the self an illusion or not? Is the self a valid category? Is your view also on identity that there is a right answer there?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: From the phenomenological point of view? No, I would consider it a parameter, mostly. Just something that you can vary, and there’s trade offs or different experiences of identity.

Lucas Perry: Okay. How about you David?

David Pearce: I think ultimately, yes, there are right answers. In practice, life would be unlivable if we didn’t maintain these fictions. These fictions are (in one sense) deeply immoral. We punish someone for a deed that their namesake performed, let’s say 10, 15, 20 years ago. America recently executed a murderer for a crime that was done 20 years ago. Now quite aside from issues of freedom and responsibility and so on, this is just scapegoating.

Lucas Perry: David, do you feel that in the ontological sense there are right or wrong answers to questions of identity? And in the phenomenological sense? And in the functional sense?

David Pearce: Yes.

Lucas Perry: Okay, so then I guess you disagree with Andres about the phenomenological sense?

David Pearce: I’m not sure, Andrés and I agree about most things. Are we disagreeing Andrés?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I’m not sure. I mean, what I said about the phenomenal aspect of identity was that I think of it as a parameter of our world simulation. In that sense, there’s no true phenomenological sense of identity. They’re all useful for different things. The reason I would say this too is, you can assume that something like each snapshot of experience, is its own separate identity. I’m not even sure you can accurately represent that in a moment of experience itself. This is itself a huge can of worms that opens up the problem of referents. Can we even actually refer to something from our own point of view? My intuition here is that, whatever sense of identity you have at a phenomenal level, I think of it as a parameter of the world simulation and I don’t think it can be an accurate representation of something true. It’s just going to be a feeling, so to speak.

David Pearce: I could endorse that. We fundamentally misperceive each other. The Hogan sisters, conjoined craniopagus twins, know something that the rest of us don’t. The Hogan sisters share a thalamic bridge, which enables them partially, to a limited extent, to “mind-meld”. The rest of us see other people essentially as objects that have feelings. When one thinks of one’s own ignorance, perhaps one laments one’s failures as a mathematician or a physicist or whatever; but an absolutely fundamental form of ignorance that we take for granted is we (mis)conceive other people and nonhuman animals as essentially objects with feelings, whereas individually, we ourselves have first-person experience. Whether it’s going to be possible to overcome this limitation in the future I don’t know. It’s going to be immensely technically challenging – building something like reversible thalamic bridges. A lot depends on one’s theory of phenomenal binding. But let’s imagine a future civilization in which partial “mind-melding” is routine. I think it will lead to a revolution not just in morality, but in decision-theoretic rationality too – one will take into account the desires, the interests, and the preferences of what will seem like different aspects of oneself.

Lucas Perry: Why does identity matter morally? I think you guys have made a good case about how it’s important functionally, historically in terms of biological evolution, and then in terms of like society and culture identity is clearly extremely important for human social relations, for navigating social hierarchies and understanding one’s position of having a concept of self and identity over time, but why does it matter morally here?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: One interesting story where you can think of a lot of social movements, in a sense, a lot of ideologies that have existed in human history, as attempts to hack people’s sense of identities or make use of them for the purpose of the reproduction of the ideology or the social movement itself.

To a large extent, a lot of the things that you see in a therapy have a lot to do with expanding your sense of identity to include your future self as well, which is something that a lot of people struggle with when it comes to impulsive decisions or your rationality. There’s these interesting point of view of how a two year old or a three year old, hasn’t yet internalized the fact that they will wake up tomorrow and that the consequences of what they did today will linger on in the following days. This is kind of a revelation when a kid finally internalizes the fact that, Oh my gosh, I will continue to exist for the rest of my life. There’s going to be a point where I’m going to be 40 years old and also there’s going to be a time where I’m 80 years old and all of those are real, and I should plan ahead for it.

Ultimately, I do think that advocating for a very inclusive sense of identity, where the locus of identity is consciousness itself. I do think that might be a tremendous moral and ethical implications.

David Pearce: We want an inclusive sense of “us” that embraces all sentient beings.  This is extremely ambitious, but I think that should be the long-term goal.

Lucas Perry: Right, there’s a spectrum here and where you fall on the spectrum will lead to different functions and behaviors, solipsism or extreme egoism on one end, pure selflessness or ego death or pure altruism on the other end. Perhaps there are other degrees and axes on which you can move, but the point is it leads to radically different identifications and relations with other sentient beings and with other instantiations of consciousness.

David Pearce: Would our conception of death be different if it was a convention to give someone a different name when they woke up each morning? Because after all, waking up is akin to reincarnation. Why is it that when one is drifting asleep each night, one isn’t afraid of death? It’s because (in some sense) one believes one is going to be reincarnated in the morning.

Lucas Perry: I like that. Okay, I want to return to this question after we hit on the different views of identity to really unpack the different ethical implications more. I wanted to sneak that in here for a bit of context. Pivoting back to this sort of historical and contextual analysis of identity. We talked about biological evolution as like instantiating these things. How do you guys view religion as codifying an egoist view on identity? Religion codifies the idea of the eternal soul and the soul, I think, maps very strongly onto the phenomenological self. It makes that the thing that is immutable or undying or which transcends this realm?

I’m talking obviously specifically here about Abrahamic religions, but then also in Buddhism there is, the self is an illusion, or what David referred to as empty individualism, which we’ll get into, where it says that identification with the phenomenological self is fundamentally a misapprehension of reality and like a confusion and that that leads to attachment and suffering and fear of death. Do you guys have comments here about religion as codifying views on identity?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I think it’s definitely really interesting that there are different views of identity and religion. How I grew up, I always assumed religion was about souls and getting into heaven. As it turns out, I just needed to know about Eastern religions and cults. That also happened to sometimes have like different views of personal identity. That was definitely a revelation to me. I would actually say that I started questioning the sense of a common sense of personal identity before I learned about Eastern religions and I was really pretty surprised and very happy when I found out that, let’s say Hinduism actually, it has a kind of universal consciousness take on identity, a socially sanctioned way of looking at the world that has a very expansive sense of identity. Buddhism is also pretty interesting because as far as I understand it, they consider actually pretty much any view of identity to be a cause for suffering fundamentally has to do with a sense of craving either for existence or craving for non-existence, which they also consider a problem. A Buddhist would generally say that even something like universal consciousness, believing that we’re all fundamentally Krishna incarnating in many different ways, itself will also be a source of suffering to some extent because you may crave further existence, which may not be very good from their point of view. It makes me optimistic that there’s other types of religions with other views of identity.

David Pearce: Yes. Here is one of my earliest memories. My mother belonged to The Order of the Cross – a very obscure, small, vaguely Christian denomination, non-sexist, who worship God the Father-Mother. And I recall being told, aged five, that I could be born again. It might be as a little boy, but it might be as a little girl – because gender didn’t matter. And I was absolutely appalled at this – at the age of five or so – because in some sense girls were, and I couldn’t actually express this, defective.

And religious conceptions of identity vary immensely. One thinks of something like Original Sin in Christianity. I could now make a lot of superficial comments about religion. But one would need to explore in detail the different religious traditions and their different conceptions of identity.

Lucas Perry: What are the different views on identity? If you can say anything, why don’t you hit on the ontological sense and the phenomenological sense? Or if we just want to stick to the phenomenological sense then we can.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I mean, are you talking about an open, empty, closed?

Lucas Perry: Yeah. So that would be the phenomenological sense, yeah.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: No, actually I would claim those are attempts at getting at the ontological sense.

Lucas Perry: Okay.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: If you do truly have a soul ontology, something that implicitly a very large percentage of the human population have, that would be, yeah, in this view called a closed individualist perspective. Common sense, you start existing when you’re born, you stop existing when you die, you’re just a stream of consciousness. Even perhaps more strongly, you’re a soul that has experiences, but experiences maybe are not fundamental to what you are.

Then there is the more Buddhist and definitely more generally scientifically-minded view, which is empty individualism, which is that you only exist as a moment of experience, and from one moment to the next that you are a completely different entity. And then, finally, there is open individualism, which is like Hinduism claiming that we are all one consciousness fundamentally.

There is an ontological way of thinking of these notions of identity. It’s possible that a lot of people think of them just phenomenologically, or they may just think there’s no further fact beyond the phenomenal. In which case something like that closed individualism, for most people most of the time, is self-evidently true because you are moving in time and you can notice that you continue to be yourself from one moment to the next. Then, of course, what would it feel like if you weren’t the same person from one moment to the next? Well, each of those moments might completely be under the illusion that it is a continuous self.

For most things in philosophy and science, if you want to use something as evidence, it has to agree with one theory and disagree with another one. And the sense of continuity from one second to the next seems to be compatible with all three views. So it’s not itself much evidence either way.

States of depersonalization are probably much more akin to empty individualism from a phenomenological point of view, and then you have ego death and definitely some experiences of the psychedelic variety, especially high doses of psychedelics tend to produce very strong feelings of open individualism. That often comes in the form of noticing that your conventional sense of self is very buggy and doesn’t seem to track anything real, but then realizing that you can identify with awareness itself. And if you do that, then in some sense automatically, you realize that you are every other experience out there, since the fundamental ingredient of a witness or awareness is shared with every conscious experience.

Lucas Perry: These views on identity are confusing to me because agents haven’t existed for most of the universe and I don’t know why we need to privilege agents in our ideas of identity. They seem to me just emergent patterns of a big, ancient, old, physical universe process that’s unfolding. It’s confusing to me that just because there are complex self- and world-modeling patterns in the world, that we need to privilege them with some kind of shared identity across themselves or across the world. Do you see what I mean here?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. I’m not agent-centric. And I mean, in a sense also, all of these other exotic feelings of identity often also come with states of low agency. You actually don’t feel that you have much of a choice in what you could do. I mean, definitely depersonalization, for example, often comes with a sense of inability to make choices, that actually it’s not you who’s making the choice, they’re just unfolding and happening. Of course, in some meditative traditions that’s considered a path to awakening, but in practice for a lot of people, that’s a very unpleasant type of experience.

It sounds like it might be privileging agents; I would say that’s not the case. If you zoom out and you see the bigger worldview, it includes basically this concept, David calls it non-materialist physicalist idealism, where the laws of physics describe the behavior of the universe, but that which is behaving according to the laws of physics is qualia, is consciousness itself.

I take very seriously the idea that a given molecule or a particular atom contains moments of experience, it’s just perhaps very fleeting and very dim or are just not very relevant in many ways, but I do think it’s there. And sense of identity, maybe not in a phenomenal sense, I don’t think an atom actually feels like an agent over time, but continuity of its experience and the boundaries of its experience would have strong bearings on ontological sense of identity.

There’s a huge, obviously, a huge jump between talking about the identity of atoms and then talking about the identity of a moment of experience, which presumably is an emergent effect of 100 billion neurons, themselves made of so many different atoms. Crazy as it may be, it is both David Pearce’s view and my view that actually each moment of experience does stand as an ontological unit. It’s just the ontological unit of a certain kind that usually we don’t see in physics, but it is both physical and ontologically closed.

Lucas Perry: Maybe you could unpack this. You know mereological nihilism, maybe I privilege this view where I just am trying to be as simple as possible and not build up too many concepts on top of each other.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Mereological nihilism basically says that there are no entities that have parts. Everything is part-less. All that exists in reality is individual monads, so to speak, things that are fundamentally self-existing. For that, if you have let’s say monad A and monad B, just put together side by side, that doesn’t entail that now there is a monad AB that mixes the two.

Lucas Perry: Or if you put a bunch of fundamental quarks together that it makes something called an atom. You would just say that it’s quarks arranged atom-wise. There’s the structure and the information there, but it’s just made of the monads.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Right. And the atom is a wonderful case, basically the same as a molecule, where I would say mereological nihilism with fundamental particles as just the only truly existing beings does seem to be false when you look at how, for example, molecules behave. The building block account of how chemical bonds happen, which is with these Lewis diagrams of how it can have a single bond or double bond and you have the octet rule, and you’re trying to build these chains of atoms strung together. And all that matters for those diagrams is what each atom is locally connected to.

However, if you just use these in order to predict what molecules are possible and how they behave and their properties, you will see that there’s a lot of artifacts that are empirically disproven. And over the years, chemistry has become more and more sophisticated where eventually, it’s come to the realization that you need to take into account the entire molecule at once in order to understand what its “dynamically stable” configuration, which involves all of the electrons and all of the nuclei simultaneously interlocking into a particular pattern that self replicates.

Lucas Perry: And it has new properties over and above the parts.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Exactly.

Lucas Perry: That doesn’t make any sense to me or my intuitions, so maybe my intuitions are just really wrong. Where does the new property or causality come from? Because it essentially has causal efficacy over and above the parts.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, it’s tremendously confusing. I mean, I’m currently writing an article about basically how this sense of topological segmentation can, in a sense, account both for this effect of what we might call weak downward causation, which is like, you get a molecule and now the molecule will have effects in the world; that you need to take into account all of the electrons and all of the nuclei simultaneously as a unit in order to actually know what the effect is going to be in the world. You cannot just take each of the components separately, but that’s something that we could call weak downward causation. It’s not that fundamentally you’re introducing a new law of physics. Everything is still predicted by Schrödinger equation, it’s still governing the behavior of the entire molecule. It’s just that the appropriate unit of analysis is not the electron, but it would be the entire molecule.

Now, if you pair this together with a sense of identity that comes from topology, then I think there might be a good case for why moments of experience are discrete entities. The analogy here with the topological segmentation, hopefully I’m not going to lose too many listeners here, but we can make an analogy with, for example, a balloon. That if you start out imagining that you are the surface of the balloon and then you take the balloon by two ends and you twist them in opposite directions, eventually at the middle point you get what’s called a pinch point. Basically, the balloon collapses in the center and you end up having these two smooth surfaces connected by a pinch point. Each of those twists creates a new topological segment, or in a sense is segmenting out the balloon. You could basically interpret things such as molecules as new topological segmentations of what’s fundamentally the quantum fields that is implementing them.

Usually, the segmentations may look like an electron or a proton, but if you assemble them together just right, you can get them to essentially melt with each other and become one topologically continuous unit. The nice thing about this account is that you get everything that you want. You explain, on the one hand, why identity would actually have causal implications, and it’s this weak downward causation effect, at the same time as being able to explain: how is it possible that the universe can break down into many different entities? Well, the answer is the way in which it is breaking down is through topological segmentations. You end up having these self-contained regions of the wave function that are discommunicated from the rest of it, and each of those might be a different subject of experience.

David Pearce: It’s very much an open question: the intrinsic nature of the physical. Commonly, materialism and physicalism are conflated. But the point of view that Andrés and I take seriously, non-materialist physicalism, is actually a form of idealism. Recently, philosopher Phil Goff, who used to be a skeptic-critic of non-materialist physicalism because of the binding problem, published a book defending it, “Galileo’s Error”.

Again, it’s very much an open question. We’re making some key background assumptions here. A critical background assumption is physicalism, and that quantum mechanics is complete:  there is no “element of reality” that is missing from the equations (or possibly the fundamental equation) of physics. But physics itself seems to be silent on the intrinsic nature of the physical. What is the intrinsic nature of a quantum field? Intuitively, it’s a field of insentience; but this isn’t a scientific discovery, it’s a (very strong) philosophical intuition.

And if you couple this with the fact that the only part of the world to which one has direct access, i.e., one’s own conscious mind (though this is controversial), is consciousness, sentience. The non-materialist physicalist conjectures that we are typical, in one sense – inasmuch as the fields of your central nervous system aren’t ontologically different from the fields of the rest of the world. And what makes sentient beings special is the way that fields are organized into unified subjects of experience, egocentric world-simulations.

Now, I’m personally fairly confident that we are, individually, minds running egocentric world-simulations: direct realism is false. I’m not at all confident – though I explore the idea – that experience is the intrinsic nature of the physical, the “stuff” of the world. This is a tradition that goes back via Russell, ultimately, to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer essentially turns Kant on his head.

Kant famously said that all we will ever know is phenomenology, appearances; we will never, never know the intrinsic, noumenal nature of the world. But Schopenhauer argues that essentially we do actually know one tiny piece of the noumenal essence of the world, the essence of the physical, and it’s experiential. So yes, tentatively, at any rate, Andrés and I would defend non-materialist or idealistic physicalism. The actual term “non-materialist physicalism” is due to the late Grover Maxwell.

Lucas Perry: Sorry, could you just define that real quick? I think we haven’t.

David Pearce: Physicalism is the idea that no “element of reality” is missing from the equations of physics, presumably (some relativistic generalization of) the universal Schrödinger equation.

Lucas Perry: It’s a kind of naturalism, too.

David Pearce: Oh, yes. It is naturalism. There are some forms of idealism and panpsychism that are non-naturalistic, but this view is uncompromisingly monist. Non-materialist physicalism isn’t claiming that a primitive experience is attached in some way to fundamental physical properties. The idea is that the actual intrinsic nature, the essence of the physical, is experiential.

Stephen Hawking, for instance, was a wave function monist. A doctrinaire materialist, but he famously said that we have no idea what breathed fire into the equations and makes the universe first to describe. Now, intuitively, of course one assumes that the fire in the equations, Kant’s noumenal essence of the world, is non-experiential. But if so, we have the hard problem, we have the binding problem, we have the problem of causal efficacy, a great mess of problems.

But if, and it’s obviously a huge if, the actual intrinsic nature of the physical is experiential, then we have a theory of reality that is empirically adequate, that has tremendous explanatory and predictive power. It’s mind-bogglingly implausible, at least to those of us steeped in the conceptual framework of materialism. But yes, by transposing the entire mathematical apparatus of modern physics, quantum field theory or its generalization, onto an idealist ontology, one actually has a complete account of reality that explains the technological successes of science, its predictive power, and doesn’t give rise to such insoluble mysteries as the hard problem.

Lucas Perry: I think all of this is very clarifying. There are also background metaphysical views, which people may or may not disagree upon, which are also important for identity. I also want to be careful to define some terms, in case some listeners don’t know what they mean. I think you hit on like four different things which all had to do with consciousness. The hard problem is why different kinds of computation actually… why it’s something to be that computation or like why there is consciousness correlated or associated with that experience.

Then you also said the binding problem. Is it the binding problem, why there is a unitary experience that’s, you said, modally connected earlier?

David Pearce: Yes, and if one takes the standard view from neuroscience that your brain consists of 86-billion-odd discrete, decohered, membrane-bound nerve cells, then phenomenal binding, whether local or global, ought to be impossible. So yeah, this is the binding problem, this (partial) structural mismatch. If your brain is scanned when you’re seeing a particular perceptual object, neuroscanning can apparently pick out distributed feature-processors, edge-detectors, motion-detectors, color-mediating neurons (etc). And yet there isn’t the perfect structural match that must exist if physicalism is true. And David Chalmers – because of this (partial) structural mismatch – goes on to argue that dualism must be true. Although I agree with David Chalmers that yes, phenomenal binding is classically impossible, if one takes the intrinsic nature argument seriously, then phenomenal unity is minted in.

The intrinsic nature argument, recall, is that experience, consciousness, discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. Now, one of the reasons why this idea is so desperately implausible is it makes the fundamental “psychon” of consciousness ludicrously small. But there’s a neglected corollary of non-materialist physicalism, namely that if experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then experience must be temporally incredibly fine-grained too. And if we probe your nervous system at a temporal resolution of femtoseconds or even attoseconds, what would we find? My guess is that it would be possible to recover a perfect structural match between what you are experiencing now in your phenomenal world-simulation and the underlying physics. Superpositions (“cat states”) are individual states [i.e. not classical aggregates].

Now, if the effective lifetime of neuronal superpositions and the CNS were milliseconds, they would be the obvious candidate for a perfect structural match and explain the phenomenal unity of consciousness. But physicists, not least Max Tegmark, have done the maths: decoherence means that the effective lifetime of neuronal superpositions in the CNS, assuming the unitary-only dynamics, is femtoseconds or less, which is intuitively the reductio ad absurdum of any kind of quantum mind.

But one person’s reductio ad absurdum is another person’s falsifiable prediction. I’m guessing – I’m sounding like a believer, but I’m not –  I am guessing that with sufficiently sensitive molecular matter- wave interferometry, perhaps using “trained up” mini-brains, that the non-classical interference signature will disclose a perfect structural match between what you’re experiencing right now, your unified phenomenal world-simulation, and the underlying physics.

Lucas Perry: So, we hit on the hard problem and also the binding problem. There was like two other ones that you threw out there earlier that… I forget what they were?

David Pearce: Yeah, the problem of causal efficacy. How is it that you and I can discuss consciousness? How is it that the “raw feels” of consciousness have not merely the causal, but also the functional efficacy to inspire discussions of their existence?

Lucas Perry: And then what was the last one?

David Pearce: Oh, it’s been called the palette problem, P-A-L-E-T-T-E. As in the fact that there is tremendous diversity of different kinds of experience and yet the fundamental entities recognized by physics, at least on the normal tale, are extremely simple and homogeneous. What explains this extraordinarily rich palette of conscious experience? Physics exhaustively describes the structural-relational properties of the world. What physics doesn’t do is deal in the essence of the physical, its intrinsic nature.

Now, it’s an extremely plausible assumption that the world’s fundamental fields are non-experiential, devoid of any subjective properties – and this may well be the case. But if so, we have the hard problem, the binding problem, the problem of causal efficacy, the palette problem – a whole raft of problems.

Lucas Perry: Okay. So, this all serves the purpose of codifying that there’s these questions up in the air about these metaphysical views which inform identity. We got here because we were talking about mereological nihilism, and Andrés said that one view that you guys have is that you can divide or cut or partition consciousness into individual, momentary, unitary moments of experience that you claim are ontologically simple. What is your credence on this view?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Phenomenological evidence. When you experience your visual fields, you don’t only experience one point at a time. The contents of your experience are not ones and zeros; it isn’t the case that you experience one and then zero and then one again. Rather, you experience many different types of qualia varieties simultaneously: visuals experience and auditory experience and so on. All of that gets presented to you. I take that very seriously. I mean, some other researchers may fundamentally say that that’s an illusion, that there’s actually never a unified experience, but that has way many more problems than actually thinking seriously that unity of consciousness.

David Pearce: A number of distinct questions arise here. Are each of us egocentric phenomenal world-simulations? A lot of people are implicitly perceptual direct realists, even though they might disavow the label. Implicitly, they assume that they have some kind of direct access to physical properties. They associate experience with some kind of stream of thoughts and feelings behind their forehead. But if instead we are world-simulationists, then there arises the question: what is the actual fundamental nature of the world beyond your phenomenal world-simulation? Is it experiential or non-experiential? I am agnostic about that – even though I explore non-materialist physicalism.

Lucas Perry: So, I guess I’m just trying to get a better answer here on how is it that we navigate these views of identity towards truth?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: An example I thought of, of a very big contrast between what you may intuitively imagine is going on versus what’s actually happening, is if you are very afraid of snakes, for example, you look at a snake. You feel, “Oh, my gosh, it’s intruding into my world and I should get away from it,” and you have this representation of it as a very big other. Anything that is very threatening, oftentimes you represent it as “an other”.

But crazily, that’s actually just yourself to a large extent because it’s still part of your experience. Within your moment of experience, the whole phenomenal quality of looking at a snake and thinking, “That’s an other,” is entirely contained within you. In that sense, these ways of ascribing identity and continuity to the things around us or a self-other division are almost psychotic. They start out by assuming that you can segment out a piece of your experience and call it something that belongs to somebody else, even though clearly, it’s still just part of your own experience; it’s you.

Lucas Perry: But the background here is also that you’re calling your experience your own experience, which is maybe also a kind of psychopathy. Is that the word you used?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Lucas Perry: Maybe the scientific thing is, there’s just snake experience and it’s neither yours nor not yours, and there’s what we conventionally call a snake.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: That said, there are ways in which I think you can use experience to gain insight about other experiences. If you’re looking at a picture that has two blue dots, I think you can accurately say, by paying attention to one of those blue dots, the phenomenal property of my sensation of blue is also in that other part of my visual field. And this is a case where in a sense you can I think, meaningfully refer to some aspect of your experience by pointing at an other aspect of your experience. It’s still maybe in some sense kind of crazy, but it’s still closer to truth than many other things that we think of or imagine.

Honest and true statements about the nature of other people’s experiences, I think are very much achievable. Bridging the reference gap, I think it might be possible to overcome and you can probably aim for a true sense of identity, harmonizing the phenomenal and the ontological sense of identity.

Lucas Perry: I mean, I think that part of the motivation, for example in Buddhism, is that you need to always be understanding yourself in reality as it is or else you will suffer, and that it is through understanding how things are that you’ll stop suffering. I like this point that you said about unifying the phenomenal identity and phenomenal self with what is ontologically true, but that also seems not intrinsically necessary because there’s also this other point here where you can maybe function or have the epistemology of any arbitrary identity view but not identify with it. You don’t take it as your ultimate understanding of the nature of the world, or what it means to be this limited pattern in a giant system.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I mean, generally speaking, that’s obviously pretty good advice. It does seem to be something that’s constrained to the workings of the human mind as it is currently implemented. I mean, definitely all these Buddhists advises of “don’t identify with it” or “don’t get attached to it.” Ultimately, it cashes out in experiencing less of a craving, for example, or feeling less despair in some cases. Useful advice, not universally applicable.

For many people, their problem might be something like, sure, like desire, craving, attachment, in which case these Buddhist practices will actually be very helpful. But if your problem is something like a melancholic depression, then lack of desire doesn’t actually seem very appealing; that is the default state and it’s not a good one. Just be mindful of universalizing this advice.

David Pearce: Yes. Other things being equal, the happiest people tend to have the most desires. Of course, a tremendous desire can also bring tremendous suffering, but there are a very large number of people in the world who are essentially unmotivated. Nothing really excites them. In some cases, they’re just waiting to die: melancholic depression. Desire can be harnessed.

A big problem, of course, is that in a Darwinian world, many of our desires are mutually inconsistent. And to use (what to me at least would be) a trivial example – it’s not trivial to everyone –  if you have 50 different football teams with all their supporters, there is logically no way that the preferences of these fanatical football supporters can be reconciled. But nonetheless, by raising their hedonic set-points, one can allow all football supporters to enjoy information-sensitive gradients of bliss. But there is simply no way to reconcile their preferences.

Lucas Perry: There’s part of me that does want to do some universalization here, and maybe that is wrong or unskillful to do, but I seem to be able to imagine a future where, say we get aligned superintelligence and there’s some kind of rapid expansion, some kind of optimization bubble of some kind. And maybe there are the worker AIs and then there are the exploiter AIs, and the exploiter AIs just get blissed out.

And imagine if some of the exploiter AIs are egomaniacs in their hedonistic simulations and some of them are hive minds, and they all have different views on open individualism or closed individualism. Some of the views on identity just seem more deluded to me than others. I seem to have a problem with a self identification and reification of self as something. It seems to me, to take something that is conventional and make it an ultimate truth, which is confusing to the agent, and that to me seems bad or wrong, like our world model is wrong. Part of me wants to say it is always better to know the truth, but I also feel like I’m having a hard time being able to say how to navigate views of identity in a true way, and then another part of me feels like actually it doesn’t really matter only in so far as it affects the flavor of that consciousness.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: If we find like the chemical or genetic levers for different notions of identity, we could presumably imagine a lot of different ecosystems of approaches to identity in the future, some of them perhaps being much more adaptive than others. I do think I grasp a little bit maybe the intuition pump, and I think that’s actually something that resonates quite a bit with us, which is that it is an instrumental value for sure to always be truth-seeking, especially when you’re talking about general intelligence.

It’s very weird and it sounds like it’s going to fail if you say, “Hey, I’m going to be truth-seeking in every domain except on here.” And these might be identity, or value function, or your model of physics or something like that, but perhaps actual superintelligence in some sense it really entails having an open-ended model for everything, including ultimately who you are. If you’re not having those open-ended models that can be revised with further evidence and reasoning, you are not a super intelligence.

That intuition pump may suggest that if intelligence turns out to be extremely adaptive and powerful, then presumably, the superintelligences of the future will have true models of what’s actually going on in the world, not just convenient fictions.

David Pearce: Yes. In some sense I would hope our long-term goal is ignorance of the entire Darwinian era and its horrors. But it would be extremely dangerous if we were to give up prematurely. We need to understand reality and the theoretical upper bounds of rational moral agency in the cosmos. But ultimately, when we have done literally everything that it is possible to do to minimize and prevent suffering, I think in some sense we should want to forget about it altogether. But I would stress the risks of premature defeatism.

Lucas Perry: Of course we’re always going to need a self model, a model of the cognitive architecture in which the self model is embedded, it needs to understand the directly adjacent computations which are integrated into it, but it seems like the views of identity go beyond just this self model. Is that the solution to identity? What does open, closed, or empty individualism have to say about something like that?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Open, empty and closed as ontological claims, yeah, I mean they are separable from the functional uses of a self model. It does however, have bearings on basically the decision theoretic rationality of an intelligence, because when it comes to planning ahead, if you have the intense objective of being as happy as you can, and somebody offers you a cloning machine and they say, “Hey, you can trade one year of your life for just a completely new copy of yourself.” Do you press the button to make that happen? For making that decision, you actually do require a model of ontological notion of identity, unless you just care about replication.

Lucas Perry: So I think that the problem there is that identity, at least in us apes, is caught up in ethics. If you could have an agent like that where identity was not factored into ethics, then I think that it would make a better decision.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: It’s definitely a question too of whether you can bootstrap an impartial god’s-eye-view on the wellbeing of all sentient beings without first having developed a sense of own identity and then wanting to preserve it, and finally updating it with more information, you know, philosophy, reasoning, physics. I do wonder if you can start out without caring about identity, and finally concluding with kind of an impartial god’s-eye-view. I think probably in practice a lot of those transitions do happen because the person is first concerned with themselves, and then they update the model of who they are based on more evidence. You know, I could be wrong, it might be possible to completely sidestep Darwinian identities and just jump straight up into impartial care for all sentient beings, I don’t know.

Lucas Perry: So we’re getting into the ethics of identity here, and why it matters. The question for this portion of the discussion is what are the ethical implications of different views on identity? Andres, I think you can sort of kick this conversation off by talking a little bit about the game theory.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Right, well yeah, the game theory is surprisingly complicated. Just consider within a given person, in fact, the different “sub agents” of an individual. Let’s say you’re drinking with your friends on a Friday evening, but you know you have to wake up early at 8:00 AM for whatever reason, and you’re deciding whether to have another drink or not. Your intoxicated self says, “Yes, of course. Tonight is all that matters.” Whereas your cautious self might try to persuade you that no, you will also exist tomorrow in the morning.

Within a given person, there’s all kinds of complex game theory that happens between alternative views of identity. Even implicitly it becomes obviously much more tricky when you expand it outwards, how like some social movements in a sense are trying to hack people’s view of identity, whether the unit is your political party, or the country, or the whole ecosystem, or whatever it may be. A key thing to consider here is the existence of legible Schelling points, also called focal points, which is in the essence of communication between entities, what are some kind of guiding principles that they can use in order to effectively coordinate and move towards a certain goal?

I would say that having something like open individualism itself can be a powerful Schelling point for coordination. Especially because if you can be convinced that somebody is an open individualist, you have reasons to trust them. There’s all of this research on how high-trust social environments are so much more conducive to productivity and long-term sustainability than low-trust environments, and expansive notions of identity are very trust building.

On the other hand, from a game theoretical point of view, you also have the problem of defection. Within an open individualist society, you have a small group of people who can fake the test of open individualism. They can take over from within, and instantiate some kind of a dictatorship or some type of a closed individualist takeover of what was a really good society, good for everybody.

This is a serious problem, even when it comes to, for example, forming groups of people with all of them share a certain experience. For example, MDMA, or 5-MeO-DMT, or let’s say deep stages of meditation. Even then, you’ve got to be careful, because people who are resistant to those states may pretend that they have an expanded notion of identity, but actually covertly work towards a much more reduced sense of identity. I have yet to see a credible game theoretically aware solution to how to make this work.

Lucas Perry: If you could clarify the knobs in a person, whether it be altruism, or selfishness, or other things that the different views on identity turn, and if you could clarify how that affects the game theory, then I think that that would be helpful.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I mean, I think the biggest knob is fundamentally what experiences count from the point of view of the fact that you expect to, in a sense, be there or expect them to be real, in as real of a way as your current experience is. It’s also contingent on theories of consciousness, because you could be an open individualist and still believe that higher order cognition is necessary for consciousness, and that non-human animals are not conscious. That gives rise to all sorts of other problems, the person presumably is altruistic and cares about others, but they just still don’t include non-human animals for a completely different reason in that case.

Definitely another knob is how you consider what you will be in the future. Whether you consider that to be part of the universe or the entirety of the universe. I guess I used to think that personal identity was very tied to a hedonic tone. I think of them as much more dissociated now. There is a general pattern: people who are very low mood may have kind of a bias towards empty individualism. People who become open individualists often experience a huge surge in positive feelings for a while because they feel that they’re never going to die, like the fear of death greatly diminishes, but I don’t actually think it’s a surefire or a foolproof way of increasing wellbeing, because if you take seriously open individualism, it also comes with terrible implications. Like that hey, we are also the pigs in factory farms. It’s not a very pleasant view.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, I take that seriously.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I used to believe for a while that the best thing we could possibly do in the world was to just write a lot of essays and books about why open individualism is true. Now I think it’s important to combine it with consciousness technologies so that, hey, once we do want to upgrade our sense of identity to a greater circle of compassion, that we also have the enhanced happiness and mental stability to be able to actually engage with that without going crazy.

Lucas Perry: This has me thinking about one point that I think is very motivating for me for the ethical case of veganism. Take the common sense, normal consciousness, like most people have, and that I have, you just feel like a self that’s having an experience. You just feel like you are fortunate enough to be born as you, and to be having the Andrés experience or the Lucas experience, and that your life is from birth to death, or whatever, and when you die you will be annihilated, you will no longer have experience. Then who is it that is experiencing the cow consciousness? Who is it that is experiencing the chicken and the pig consciousness? There’s so many instantiations of that, like billions. Even if this is based off of the irrationality, it still feels motivating to me. Yeah, I could just die and wake up as a cow 10 billion times. That’s kind of the experience that is going on right now. The sudden confused awakening into cow consciousness plus factory farming conditions. I’m not sure if you find that completely irrational or motivating or what.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: No, I mean I think it makes sense. We have a common friend as well, Magnus Vinding. He wrote a pro-veganism book actually kind of with this line of reasoning. It’s called You Are Them. About how post theoretical science of consciousness and identity itself is a strong case for an ethical lifestyle.

Lucas Perry: Just touching here on the ethical implications, some other points that I just want to add here are that when one is identified with one’s phenomenal identity, in particular, I want to talk about the experience of self, where you feel like you’re a closed individualist, which your life is like when you were born, and then up until when you die, that’s you. I think that that breeds a very strong duality in terms of your relationship with your own personal phenomenal consciousness. The suffering and joy which you have direct access to are categorized as mine or not mine.

Those which are mine take high moral and ethical priority over the suffering of others. You’re not mind-melded with all of the other brains, right? So there’s an epistemological limitation there where you’re not directly experiencing the suffering of other people, but the closed individualist view goes a step further and isn’t just saying that there’s an epistemological limitation, but it’s also saying that this consciousness is mine, and that consciousness is yours, and this is the distinction between self and other. And given selfishness, that self consciousness will take moral priority over other consciousness.

That I think just obviously has massive ethical implications with regards to their greed of people. I view here the ethical implications as being important because, at least in the way that human beings function, if one is able to fully rid themselves of the ultimate identification with your personal consciousness as being the content of self, then I can move beyond the duality of consciousness of self and other, and care about all instances of wellbeing and suffering much more equally than I currently do. That to me seems harder to do, at least with human brains. If we have a strong reification and identification with your instances of suffering or wellbeing as your own.

David Pearce: Part of the problem is that the existence of other subjects of experience is metaphysical speculation. It’s metaphysical speculation that one should take extremely seriously: I’m not a solipsist. I believe that other subjects of experience, human and nonhuman, are as real as my experience. But nonetheless, it is still speculative and theoretical. One cannot feel their experiences. There is simply no way, given the way that we are constituted, the way we are now, that one can behave with impartial, God-like benevolence.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I guess I would question it perhaps a little bit that we only care about our future suffering within our own experience, because this is me, this is mine, it’s not an other. In a sense I think we care about those more, largely because they’re are more intense, you do see examples of, for example, mirror touch synesthesia, of people who if they see somebody else get hurt, they also experience pain. I don’t mean a fleeting sense of discomfort, but perhaps even actual strong pain because they’re able to kind of reflect that for whatever reason.

People like that are generally very motivated to help others as well. In a sense, their implicit self model includes others, or at least weighs others more than most people do. I mean in some sense you can perhaps make sense of selfishness in this context as the coincidence that what is within our self model is experienced as more intense. But there’s plenty of counter examples to that, including sense of depersonalization or ego death, where you can experience the feeling of God, for example, as being this eternal and impersonal force that is infinitely more intense than you, and therefore it matters more, even though you don’t experience it as you. Perhaps the core issue is what gets the highest amount of intensity within your world simulation.

Lucas Perry: Okay, so I also just want to touch on a little bit about preferences here before we move on to how this is relevant to AI alignment and the creation of beneficial AI. From the moral realist perspective, if you take the metaphysical existence of consciousness very substantially, and you view it as the ground of morality, then different views on identity will shift how you weight the preferences of other creatures.

So from a moral perspective, whatever kinds of views of identity end up broadening your moral circle of compassion closer and closer to the end goal of impartial benevolence for all sentient beings according to their degree and kinds of worth, I would view as a good thing. But now there’s this other way to think about identity because if you’re listening to this, and you’re a moral anti-realist, there is just the arbitrary, evolutionary, and historical set of preferences that exist across all creatures on the planet.

Then the views on identity I think are also obviously again going to weigh into your moral considerations about how much to just respect different preferences, right. One might want to go beyond hedonic consequentialism here, and could just be a preference consequentialist. You could be a deontological ethicist or a virtue ethicist too. We could also consider about how different views on identity as lived experiences would affect what it means to become virtuous, if being virtuous means moving beyond the self actually.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I think I understand what you’re getting at. I mean, really there’s kind of two components to ontology. One is what exists, and then the other one is what is valuable. You can arrive at something like open individualism just from the point of view of what exists, but still have disagreements with other open individualists about what is valuable. Alternatively, you could agree on what is valuable with somebody but completely disagree on what exists. To get the power of cooperation of open individualism as a Schelling point, there also needs to be some level of agreement on what is valuable, not just what exists.

It definitely sounds arrogant, but I do think that by the same principle by which you arrive at open individualism or empty individualism, basically nonstandard views of identities, you can also arrive at hedonistic utilitarianism, and that is, again, like the principle of really caring about knowing who or what you are fundamentally. To know yourself more deeply also entails understanding from second to second how your preferences impact your state of consciousness. It is my view that just as open individualism, you can think of it as the implication of taking a very systematic approach to make sense of identity. Likewise, philosophical hedonism is also an implication of taking a very systematic approach at trying to figure out what is valuable. How do we know that pleasure is good?

David Pearce: Yeah, does the pain-pleasure axis disclose the world’s intrinsic metric of (dis)value? There is something completely coercive about pleasure and pain. One can’t transcend the pleasure/pain axis. Compare the effects of taking heroin, or “enhanced interrogation”. There is no one with an inverted pleasure/pain axis. Supposed counter-examples, like sado-masochists, in fact just validate the primacy of the pleasure/pain axis.

What follows from the primacy of the pleasure/pain axis? Should we be aiming, as classical utilitarians urge, to maximize the positive abundance of subjective value in the universe, or at least our forward light-cone? But if we are classical utilitarians, there is a latently apocalyptic implication of classical utilitarianism – namely, that we ought to be aiming to launch something like a utilitronium (or hedonium) shockwave – where utilitronium or hedonium is matter and energy optimized for pure bliss.

So rather than any kind of notion of personal identity as we currently understand it, if one is a classical utilitarian – or if one is programming a computer or a robot with the utility function of classical utilitarianism –  should one therefore essentially be aiming to launch an apocalyptic utilitronium shockwave? Or alternatively, should one be trying to ensure that the abundance of positive value within our cosmological horizon is suboptimal by classical utilitarian criteria?

I don’t actually personally advocate a utilitronium shockwave. I don’t think it’s sociologically realistic. I think much more sociologically realistic is to aim for a world based on gradients of intelligent bliss -because that way, people’s existing values and preferences can (for the most part) be conserved. But nonetheless, if one is a classical utilitarian, it’s not clear one is allowed this kind of messy compromise.

Lucas Perry: All right, so now that we’re getting into the juicy, hedonistic imperative type stuff, let’s talk about here how about how this is relevant to AI alignment and the creation of beneficial AI. I think that this is clear based off of the conversations we’ve had already about the ethical implications, and just how prevalent identity is in our world for the functioning of society and sociology, and just civilization in general.

Let’s limit the conversation for the moment just to AI alignment. And for this initial discussion of AI alignment, I just want to limit it to the definition of AI alignment as developing the technical process by which AIs can learn human preferences, and help further express and idealize humanity. So exploring how identity is important and meaningful for that process, two points I think that it’s relevant for, who are we making the AI for? Different views on identity I think would matter, because if we assume that sufficiently powerful and integrated AI systems are likely to have consciousness or to have qualia, they’re moral agents in themselves.

So who are we making the AI for? We’re making new patients or subjects of morality if we ground morality on consciousness. So from a purely egoistic point of view, the AI alignment process is just for humans. It’s just to get the AI to serve us. But if we care about all sentient beings impartially, and we just want to maximize conscious bliss in the world, and we don’t have this dualistic distinction of consciousness being self or other, we could make the AI alignment process something that is more purely altruistic. That we recognize that we’re creating something that is fundamentally more morally relevant than we are, given that it may have more profound capacities for experience or not.

David, I’m also holding in my hand, I know that you’re skeptical of the ability of AGI or superintelligence to be conscious. I agree that that’s not solved yet, but I’m just working here with the idea of, okay, maybe if they are. So I think it can change the altruism versus selfishness, the motivations around who we’re training the AIs for. And then the second part is why are we making the AI? Are we making it for ourselves or are we making it for the world?

If we take a view from nowhere, what Andrés called a god’s-eye-view, is this ultimately something that is for humanity or is it something ultimately for just making a better world? Personally, I feel that if the end goal is ultimate loving kindness and impartial ethical commitment to the wellbeing of all sentient creatures in all directions, then ideally the process is something that we’re doing for the world, and that we recognize the intrinsic moral worth of the AGI and superintelligence as ultimately more morally relevant descendants of ours. So I wonder if you guys have any reactions to this?

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So many. Tongue in cheek, but you’ve just made me chuckle when you said, “Why are we making the AI to begin with?” I think there’s a case to be made that the actual reason why we’re making AI is a kind of an impressive display of fitness in order to signal our intellectual fortitude and superiority. I mean sociologically speaking, you know, actually getting an AI to do something really well. It’s a way in which you can yourself signal your own intelligence, and I guess I worry to some extent that this is a bit of a tragedy of the commons, as it is the case with our weapon development. You’re so concerned with whether you can, and especially because of the social incentives, that you’re going to gain status and be looked at as somebody who’s really competent and smart, that you don’t really stop and wonder whether you should be building this thing in the first place.

Leaving that aside, just from a purely ethically motivated point of view, I do remember thinking and having a lot of discussions many years ago about if we can make a super computer experience what it is like for a human to be on MDMA. Then all of a sudden that supercomputer becomes a moral patient. It actually matters, you probably shouldn’t turn it off. Maybe in fact you should make more of them. A very important thing I’d like to say here is: I think it’s really important to distinguish the notion of intelligence.

On the one hand, as causal power over your environment, and on the other hand as the capacity for self insight, and introspection, and understanding reality. I would say that we tend to confuse these quite a bit. I mean especially in circles that don’t take consciousness very seriously. It’s usually implicitly assumed that having a superhuman ability to control your environment entails that you also have, in a sense, kind of a superhuman sense of self or a superhuman broad sense of intelligence. Whereas even if you are a functionalist, I mean even if you believe that a digital computer can be conscious, you can make a pretty strong case that even then, it is not something automatic. It’s not just that if you program the appropriate behavior, it will automatically also be conscious.

A super straight forward example here is that if you have the Chinese room, if it’s just a giant lookup table, clearly it is not a subject of experience, even though the input / output mapping might be very persuasive. There’s definitely still the problems there, and I think if we aim instead towards maximizing intelligence in the broad sense, that does entail also the ability to actually understand the nature and scope of other states of consciousness. And in that sense, I think a superintelligence of that sort would it be intrinsically aligned with the intrinsic values of consciousness. But there are just so many ways of making partial superintelligences that maybe are superintelligent in many ways, but not in that one in particular, and I worry about that.

David Pearce: I sometimes sketch this simplistic trichotomy, three conceptions of superintelligence. One is a kind of “Intelligence Explosion” of recursively self-improving software-based AI. Then there is the Kurzweilian scenario – a complete fusion of humans and our machines. And then there is, very crudely, biological superintelligence, not just rewriting our genetic source code, but also (and Neuralink prefigures this) essentially “narrow” superintelligence-on-a-chip so that anything that anything a classical digital computer can do a biological human or a transhuman can do.

So yes, I see full-spectrum superintelligence as our biological descendants, super-sentient, able to navigate radically alien states of consciousness. So I think the question that you’re asking is why are we developing “narrow” AI – non-biological machine superintelligence.

Lucas Perry: Speaking specifically from the AI alignment perspective, how you align current day systems and future systems to superintelligence and beyond with human values and preferences, and so the question born of that, in the context of these questions of identity, is who are we making that AI for and why are we making the AI?

David Pearce: If you’ve got Buddha, “I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering”… Buddha would press the OFF button, and I would press the OFF button.

Lucas Perry: What’s the off button?

David Pearce: Sorry, the notional initiation of a vacuum phase-transition (or something similar) that (instantaneously) obliterates Darwinian life. But when people talk about “AI alignment”, or most people working in the field at any rate, they are not talking about a Buddhist ethic [the end of suffering] – they have something else in mind. In practical terms, this is not a fruitful line of thought to pursue – you know, the implications of Buddhist, Benatarian, negative utilitarian, suffering-focused ethics.

Essentially that one wants to ratchet up hedonic range and hedonic set-points in such a way that you’re conserving people’s existing preferences – even though their existing preferences and values are, in many cases, in conflict with each other. Now, how one actually implements this in a classical digital computer, or a classically parallel connectionist system, or some kind of hybrid, I don’t know precisely.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: At least there is one pretty famous cognitive scientist and AI theorist does propose the Buddhist ethic of turning the off button of the universe. Thomas Metzinger, and his benevolent, artificial anti-natalism. I mean, yeah. Actually that’s pretty interesting because he explores the idea of an AI that truly kind of extrapolates human values and what’s good for us as subjects of experience. The AI concludes what we are psychologically unable to, which is that the ethical choice is non-existence.

But yeah, I mean, I think that’s, as David pointed out, implausible. I think it’s much better to put our efforts in creating a super cooperator cluster that tries to recalibrate the hedonic set point so that we are animated by gradients of bliss. Sociological constraints are really, really important here. Otherwise you risk…

Lucas Perry: Being irrelevant.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: … being irrelevant, yeah, is one thing. The other thing is unleashing an ineffective or failed attempt at sterilizing the world, which would be so much, much worse.

Lucas Perry: I don’t agree with this view, David. Generally, I think that Darwinian history has probably been net negative, but I’m extremely optimistic about how good the future can be. And so I think it’s an open question at the end of time, how much misery and suffering and positive experience there was. So I guess I would say I’m agnostic as to this question. But if we get AI alignment right, and these other things, then I think that it can be extremely good. And I just want to tether this back to identity and AI alignment.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I do have the strong intuition that if empty individualism is correct at an ontological level, then actually negative utilitarianism can be pretty strongly defended on the grounds that when you have a moment of intense suffering, that’s the entirety of that entity’s existence. And especially with eternalism, once it happens, there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

There’s something that seems particularly awful about allowing inherently negative experiences to just exist. That said, I think open individualism actually may to some extent weaken that. Because even if the suffering was very intense, you can still imagine that if you identify with consciousness as a whole, you may be willing to undergo some bad suffering as a trade-off for something much, much better in the future.

It sounds completely insane if you’re currently experiencing a cluster headache or something astronomically painful. But maybe from the point of view of eternity, it actually makes sense. Those are still tiny specs of experience relative to the beings that are going to exist in the future. You can imagine Jupiter brains and Dyson spheres just in a constant ecstatic state. I think open individualism might counterbalance some of the negative utilitarian worries and would be something that an AI would have to contemplate and might push it one way or the other.

Lucas Perry: Let’s go ahead and expand the definition of AI alignment. A broader way we can look at the AI alignment problem, or the problem of generating beneficial AI, and making future AI stuff go well, where that is understood is the project of making sure that the technical, political, social, and moral consequences of short-term to super intelligence and beyond, is that as we go through all of that, that is a beneficial process.

Thinking about identity in that process, we were talking about how strong nationalism or strong identity or identification with regards to a nation state is a form of identity construction that people do. The nation or the country becomes part of self. One of the problems of the AI alignment problem is arms racing between countries, and so taking shortcuts on safety. I’m not trying to propose clear answers or solutions here. It’s unclear how successful an intervention here could even be. But these views on identity and how much nationalism shifts or not, I think feed into how difficult or not the problem will be.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: The point of game theory becomes very, very important in that yes, you do want to help other people who are also trying to improve the well-being of all consciousness. On the other hand, if there’s a way to fake caring about the entirety of consciousness, that is a problem because then you would be using resources on people who would hoard them or even worse wrestle the power away from you so that they can focus on their narrow sense of identity.

In that sense, I think having technologies in order to set particular phenomenal experiences of identity, as well as to be able to detect them, might be super important. But above all, and I mean this is definitely my area of research, having a way of objectively quantifying how good or bad a state of consciousness is based on the activity of a nervous system seems to me like an extraordinarily key component for any kind of a serious AI alignment.

If you’re actually trying to prevent bad scenarios in the future, you’ve got to have a principle way of knowing whether the outcome is bad, or at the very least knowing whether the outcome is terrible. The aligned AI should be able to grasp that a certain state of consciousness, even if nobody has experienced it before, will be really bad and it should be avoided, and that tends to be the lens through which I see this.

In terms of improving people’s internal self-consistency, as David pointed out, I think it’s kind of pointless to try to satisfy a lot of people’s preferences, such as having their favorite sports team win, because there’s really just no way of satisfying everybody’s preferences. In the realm of psychology is where a lot of these interventions would happen. You can’t expect an AI to be aligned with you, if you yourself are not aligned with yourself, right, if you have all of these strange, psychotic, competing sub-agents. It seems like part of the process is going to be developing techniques to become more consistent, so that we can actually be helped.

David Pearce: In terms of risks this century, nationalism has been responsible for most of the wars of the past two centuries, and nationalism is highly likely to lead to catastrophic war this century. And the underlying source of global catastrophic risk? I don’t think it’s AI. It’s male human primates doing what male human primates have been “designed” by evolution to do – to fight, to compete, to wage war. And even vegan pacifists like me, how do we spend their leisure time? Playing violent video games.

There are technical ways one can envisage mitigating the risk. Perhaps it’s unduly optimistic aiming for all-female governance or for a democratically-accountable world state under the auspices of the United Nations. But I think unless one does have somebody with a monopoly on the use of force that we are going to have cataclysmic nuclear war this century. It’s highly likely: I think we’re sleepwalking our way towards disaster. It’s more intellectually exciting discussing exotic risks from AI that goes FOOM, or something like that. But there are much more mundane catastrophes that are, I suspect, going to unfold this century.

Lucas Perry: All right, so getting into the other part here about AI alignment and beneficial AI throughout this next century, there’s a lot of different things that increased intelligence and capacity and power over the world is going to enable. There’s going to be human biological species divergence via AI-enabled bioengineering. There is this fundamental desire for immortality with many people, and the drive towards super intelligence and beyond for some people promises immortality. I think that in terms of closed individualism here, closed individualism is extremely motivating for this extreme self-concern of desire for immortality.

There are people currently today who are investing in say, cryonics, because they want to freeze themselves and make it long enough so that they can somehow become immortal, very clearly influenced by their ideas of identity. As Yuval Noah Harari was saying on our last podcast, it subverts many of the classic liberal myths that we have about the same intrinsic worth across all people; and then if you add humans 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 into the mixture, it’s going to subvert that even more. So there are important questions of identity there, I think.

With sufficiently advanced super intelligence people flirt with the idea of being uploaded. The identity questions here which are relevant are if we scan the information architecture or the neural architecture of your brain and upload it, will people feel like that is them? Is it not them? What does it mean to be you? Also, of course, in scenarios where people want to merge with the AI, what is it that you would want to be kept in the merging process? What is superfluous to you? What is not nonessential to your identity or what it means to be you, that you would be okay or not with merging?

And then I think that most importantly here, I’m very interested in the Descendants scenario, where we just view AI as like our evolutionary descendants. There’s this tendency in humanity to not be okay with this descendant scenario. Because of closed individualist views on identity, they won’t see that consciousness is the same kind of thing, or they won’t see it as their own consciousness. They see that well-being through the lens of self and other, so that makes people less interested in they’re being descendant, super-intelligent conscious AIs. Maybe there’s also a bit of speciesism in there.

I wonder if you guys want to have any reactions to identity in any of these processes? Again, they are human, biological species divergence via AI-enabled bioengineering, immortality, uploads, merging, or the Descendants scenario.

David Pearce: In spite of thinking that Darwinian life is sentient malware, I think cryonics should be opt-out, and cryothanasia should be opt-in, as a way to defang death. So long as someone is suspended in optimal conditions, it ought to be possible for advanced intelligence to reanimate that person. And sure, if one is an “empty” individualist, or if you’re the kind of person who wakes up in the morning troubled that you’re not the person who went to sleep last night, this reanimated person may not really be “you”. But if you’re more normal, yes, I think it should be possible to reanimate “you” if you are suspended.

In terms of mind uploads, this is back to the binding problem. Even assuming that you can be scanned with a moderate degree of fidelity, I don’t think your notional digital counterpart is a subject to experience. Even if I am completely wrong here and that somehow subjects or experience inexplicably emerge in classical digital computers, there’s no guarantee that the qualia would be the same. After all, you can replay a game of chess with perfect fidelity, but there’s no guarantee incidentals like the textures or the pieces will be the same. Why expect the textures of qualia to be the same, but that isn’t really my objection. It’s the fact that a digital computer cannot support phenomenally-bound subjects of experience.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I also think cryonics is really good. Even though with a different nonstandard view of personal identity, it’s kind of puzzling. Why would you care about it? Lots of practical considerations. I like what David said of like defanging death. I think that’s a good idea, but also giving people skin in the game for the future.

People who enact policy and become politically successful, often tend to be 50 years plus, and there’s a lot of things that they weigh on, that they will not actually get to experience, that probably biases politicians and people who are enacting policy to focus, especially just on short-term gains as opposed to really genuinely trying to improve the long-term; and I think cryonics would be helpful in giving people skin in the game.

More broadly speaking, it does seem to be the case that what aspect of transhumanism a person is likely to focus on depends a lot on their theories of identity. I mean, if we break down transhumanism into the three supers of super happiness, super longevity, and super intelligence, the longevity branch is pretty large. There’s a lot of people looking for ways of rejuvenating, preventing aging, and reviving ourselves, or even uploading ourselves.

Then there’s people who are very interested in super intelligence. I think that’s probably the most popular type of transhumanism nowadays. That one I think does rely to some extent on people having a functionalist information theoretic account of their own identity. There’s all of these tropes of, “Hey, if you leave a large enough digital footprint online, a super intelligence will be able to reverse engineer your brain just from that, and maybe reanimate you in the future,” or something of that nature.

And then there’s, yeah, people like David and I, and the Qualia Research Institute as well, that care primarily about super happiness. We think of it as kind of a requirement for a future that is actually worth living. You can have all the longevity and all the intelligence you want, but if you’re not happy, I don’t really see the point. A lot of the concerns with longevity, fear of death and so on, in retrospect, I think will be probably considered some kind of a neurosis. Obviously a genetically adaptive neurosis, but something that can be cured with mood-enhancing technologies.

Lucas Perry: Leveraging human selfishness or leveraging how most people are closed individualists seems like the way to having good AI alignment. To one extent, I find the immortality pursuits through cryonics to be pretty elitist. But I think it’s a really good point that giving the policymakers and the older generation and people in power more skin in the game over the future is both potentially very good and also very scary.

It’s very scary to the extent to which they could get absolute power, but also very good if you’re able to mitigate risks of them developing absolute power. But again, as you said, it motivates them towards more deeply and profoundly considering future considerations, being less myopic, being less selfish. So that getting the AI alignment process right and doing the necessary technical work, it’s not done for a short-term nationalistic gain. Again, with an asterisk here that the risk is unilaterally getting more and more power.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, without cryonics, another way to increase skin in the game, may be more straight-forwardly positive. Bliss technologies do that. A lot of people who are depressed or nihilistic or vengeful or misanthropic, they don’t really care about destroying the world or watching it burn, so to speak, because they don’t have anything to lose. But if you have a really reliable MDMA-like technological device that reliably produces wonderful states of consciousness, I think people will be much more careful about preserving their own health, and also not watch the world burn, because they know “I could be back home and actually experiencing this rather than just trying to satisfy my misanthropic desires.”

David Pearce: Yeah, the happiest people I know work in the field of existential risk. Rather than great happiness just making people reckless, it can also make them more inclined to conserve and protect.

Lucas Perry: Awesome. I guess just one more thing that I wanted to hit on these different ways that technology is going to change society is… I don’t know. In my heart, the ideal is the vow to liberate all sentient beings in all directions from suffering. The closed individualist view seems generally fairly antithetical to that, but there’s also this desire for me to be realistic about leveraging that human selfishness towards that ethic. The capacity here for conversations on identity going forward, if we can at least give people more information to subvert or challenge or give them information about why the common sense closed individualist view might be wrong, I think it would just have a ton of implications for how people end up viewing human species divergence, or immortality, or uploads, or merging, or the Descendants scenario.

In Max’s book, Life 3.0, he describes a bunch of different scenarios for how you want the world to be as the impact of AI grows, if we’re lucky enough to reach superintelligent AI. These scenarios that he gives are, for example, an Egalitarian Utopia where humans, cyborgs and uploads coexist peacefully thanks to property abolition and guaranteed income. There’s a Libertarian Utopia where human, cyborgs, and uploads, and superintelligences coexist peacefully thanks to property rights. There is a Protector God scenario where essentially omniscient and omnipotent AI maximizes human happiness by intervening only in ways that preserve our feeling of control of our own destiny, and hides well enough that many humans even doubt the AI’s existence. There’s Enslaved God, which is kind of self-evident. The AI is a slave to our will. The Descendants Scenario, which I described earlier, where AIs replace human beings, but give us a graceful exit, making us view them as our worthy descendants, much as parents feel happy and proud to have a child who’s smarter than them, who learns from them, and then accomplishes what they could only dream of, even if they can’t live to see it.

After the book was released, Max did a survey of which ideal societies people were most excited about. And basically most people wanted either the Egalitarian Utopia or the Libertarian Utopia. These are very human centric of course, because I think most people are closed individualists, so okay, they’re going to pick that. And then they wanted to Protector God next, and then the fourth most popular was an Enslaved God. The fifth most popular was Descendants.

I’m a very big fan of the Descendants scenario. Maybe it’s because of my empty individualism. I just feel here that as views on identity are quite uninformed for most people or most people don’t take it, or closed individualism just seems intuitively true from the beginning because it seems like it’s been selected for mostly by Darwinian evolution to have a very strong sense of self. I just think that challenging conventional views on identity will very much shift the kinds of worlds that people are okay with or the kinds of worlds that people want.

If we had a big, massive public education campaign about the philosophy of identity and then take the same survey later, I think that the numbers would be much more different. That seems to be a necessary part of the education of humanity in the process of beneficial AI and AI alignment. To me, the Descendant scenario just seems best because it’s more clearly in line with this ethic of being impartially devoted to maximizing the well-being of sentience everywhere.

I’m curious to know your guys’ reaction to these different scenarios about how you feel views on identity as they shift will inform the kinds of worlds that humanity finds beautiful or meaningful or worthy of pursuit through and with AI.

David Pearce: If today’s hedonic range is -10 to zero to +10, yes, whether building a civilization with a hedonic range of +70 to +100, i.e. with more hedonic contrast, or +90 to a +100 with less hedonic contrast, the multiple phase-changes in consciousness involved are completely inconceivable to humans. But in terms of full-spectrum superintelligence, what we don’t know is the nature of their radically alien-state-spaces of consciousness – far more different than, let’s say, dreaming consciousness and waking consciousness – that I suspect that intelligence going to explore. And we just do not have the language, the concepts, to conceptualize what these alien state-spaces of consciousness are like. I suspect billions of years of consciousness-exploration lie ahead. I assume that a central element will be the pleasure-axis – that these states will be generically wonderful – but they will otherwise be completely alien. And so talk of “identity” with primitive Darwinian malware like us is quite fanciful.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Consider the following thought experiment where you have a chimpanzee right next to a person, who is right next to another person, where the third one is currently on a high dose of DMT, combined with ketamine and salvia. If you consider those three entities, I think very likely, actually the experience of the chimpanzee and the experience of the sober person are very much alike, compared to the person who is on DMT, ketamine, and salvia, who is in a completely different alien-state space of consciousness. And in some sense, biologically you’re unrelatable from the point of view of qualia and the sense of self, and time, and space, and all of those things.

Personally, I think having intimations with alien-state spaces of consciousness is actually good also quite apart from changes in a feeling that you’ve become one with the universe. Merely having experience with really different states of consciousness makes it easier for you to identify with consciousness as a whole: you realize, okay, my DMT self, so to speak, cannot exist naturally, and it’s just so much different to who I am normally, and even more different than perhaps being a chimpanzee, that you could imagine caring as well about alien-state spaces of consciousness that are completely nonhuman, and I think that it can be pretty helpful.

The other reason why I give a lot of credence to open individualism being a winning strategy, even just from a purely political and sociological point of view, is that open individualists are not afraid of changing their own state of consciousness, because they realize that it will be them either way. Whereas closed individualists can actually be pretty scared of, for example, taking DMT or something like that. They tend to have at least the suspicion that, oh my gosh, is the person who is going to be on DMT me? Am I going to be there? Or maybe I’m just being possessed by a different entity with completely different values and consciousness.

With open individualism, no matter what type of consciousness your brain generates, it’s going to be you. It massively amplifies the degrees of freedom for coordination. Plus, you’re not afraid of tuning your consciousness for particular new computational uses. Again, this could be extremely powerful as a cooperation and coordination tool.

To summarize, I think a plausible and very nice future scenario is going to be the mixture of open individualism, on the one hand; second, generically enhanced hedonic tone, so that everything is amazing; and third, expanded range of possible experiences. That we will have the tools to experience pretty much arbitrary state spaces of consciousness and consider them our own.

The Descendant scenario, I think it’s much easier to imagine thinking of the new entities as your offspring if you can at least know what they feel like. You can take a drug or something and know, “okay, this is what it’s like to be a post-human android. I like it. This is wonderful. It’s better than being a human.” That would make it possible.

Lucas Perry: Wonderful. This last question is just the role of identity in the AI itself, or the superintelligence itself, as it experiences the world, the ethical implications of those identity models, et cetera. There is the question of identity now, and if we get aligned superintelligence and post-human superintelligence, and we have Jupiter rings or Dyson spheres or whatever, that there’s the question of identity evolving in that system. We are very much creating Life 3.0, and there is a substantive question of what kind of identity views it will take, what it’s phenomenal experience of self or not will have. This all is relevant and important because if we’re concerned with maximizing conscious well-being, then these are flavors of consciousness which would require a sufficiently, rigorous science of consciousness to understand their valence properties.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: I mean, I think it’s a really, really good thing to think about. The overall frame I tend to utilize, to analyze this kind of questions is, I wrote an article and you can find it in Qualia Computing that is called “Consciousness Versus Replicators.” I think that is a pretty good overarching ethical framework where I basically, I describe how different kinds of ethics can give different worldviews, but also they depend on your philosophical sophistication.

At the very beginning, you have ethics such as the battle between good and evil, but then you start introspecting. You’re like, “okay, what is evil exactly,” and you realize that nobody sets out to do evil from the very beginning. Usually, they actually have motivations that make sense within their own experience. Then you shift towards this other theory that’s called the balance between good and evil, super common in Eastern religions. Also, people who take a lot of psychedelics or meditate a lot tend to arrive to that view, as in like, “oh, don’t be too concerned about suffering or the universe. It’s all a huge yin and yang. The evil part makes the good part better,” or like weird things like that.

Then you have a little bit more developed, what I call it gradients of wisdom. I would say like Sam Harris, and definitely a lot of people in our community think that way, which is they come to the realization that there are societies that don’t help human flourishing, and there are ideologies that do, and it’s really important to be discerning. We can’t just say, “Hey, everything is equally good.”

But finally, I would say the fourth level would be consciousness versus replicators, which involves, one, taking open individualism seriously; and second, realizing that anything that matters, it matters because it influences experiences. Can you have that as your underlying ethical principle? There’s this danger of replicators hijacking our motivational architecture in order to pursue their own replication, independent of the well-being of sentience, and you guard for that. I think you’re in a pretty good space to actually do a lot of good. I would say perhaps that is the sort of ethics or morality we should think about how to instantiate in an artificial intelligence.

In the extreme, you have what I call a pure replicator, and a pure replicator essentially is a system or an entity that uses all of its resources exclusively to make copies of itself, independently of whether that causes good or bad experiences elsewhere. It just doesn’t care. I would argue that humans are not pure replicators. That in fact, we do care about consciousness, at the very least our own consciousness. And evolution is recruiting the fact that we care about consciousness in order to, as a side effect, increase our inclusiveness our genes.

But these discussions we’re having right now, this is the possibility of a post-human ethic is the genie is getting out of the bottle in the sense of consciousness is kind of taking its own values and trying to transcend the selfish genetic process that gave rise to it.

Lucas Perry: Ooh, I like that. That’s good. Anything to add, David?

David Pearce: No. Simply, I hope we have a Buddhist AI.

Lucas Perry: I agree. All right, so I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I feel more confused now than when I came in, which is very good. Yeah, thank you both so much for coming on.

Wendell Wallach has been at the forefront of contemporary emerging technology issues for decades now. As an interdisciplinary thinker, he has engaged at the intersections of ethics, governance, AI, bioethics, robotics, and philosophy since the beginning formulations of what we now know as AI alignment were being codified. Wendell began with a broad interest in the ethics of emerging technology and has since become focused on machine ethics and AI governance. This conversation with Wendell explores his intellectual journey and participation in these fields.

 Topics discussed in this episode include:

• Wendell’s intellectual journey in machine ethics and AI governance 
• The history of machine ethics and alignment considerations
• How machine ethics and AI alignment serve to produce beneficial AI 
• Soft law and hard law for shaping AI governance 
• Wendell’s and broader efforts for the global governance of AI
• Social and political mechanisms for mitigating the risks of AI 
• Wendell’s forthcoming book

Key points from Wendell:

• “So when you were talking about machine ethics or when we were talking about machine ethics, we were really thinking about it in terms of just how do you introduce ethical procedures so that when machines encounter new situations, particularly when the designers can’t fully predict what their actions will be, that they factor in ethical considerations as they choose between various courses of action. So we were really talking about very basic program in the machines, but we weren’t just thinking of it in terms of the basics. We were thinking of it in terms of the evolution of smart machines… What we encounter in the Singularity Institute, now MIRI for artificial intelligence approach of friendly AI and what became value alignment is more or less a presumption of very high order intelligence capabilities by the system and how you would ensure that their values align with those of the machines. They tended to start from that level. So that was the distinction. Where the machine ethics folks did look at those futuristic concerns, they did more so from a philosophical level and at least a belief or appreciation that this is going to be a relatively evolutionary course, whereby the friendly AI and value alignment folks, they tended to presume that we’re going to have very high order cognitive capabilities and how do we ensure that those align with the systems. Now, the convergence, I would say, is what’s happening right now because in workshops that have been organized around the societal and ethical impact of intelligent systems.”
• “My sense has been that with both machine ethics and value alignment, we’ve sort of got the cart in front of the horse. So I’m waiting to see some great implementation breakthroughs, I just haven’t seen them. Most of the time, when I encounter researchers who say they’re taking seriously, I see they’re tripping over relatively low level implementations. The difficulty is here, and all of this is converging. What AI alignment was initially and what it’s becoming now I think are quite different. I think in the very early days, it really was presumptions that you would have these higher order intelligences and then how were you going to align them. Now, as AI alignment, people look at the value issues as they intersect with present day AI agendas. I realize that you can’t make the presumptions about the higher order systems without going through developmental steps to get there. So, in that sense, I think whether it’s AI alignment or machine ethics, the one will absorb the lessons of the other. Both will utilize advances that happen on both fronts.”
• “David Collingridge wrote a book where he outlined a problem that is now known as the Collingridge Dilemma. Basically, Collingridge said that while it was easiest to regulate a technology early in its style development, early in its development, we had a little idea of what its societal impact would be. By the time we did understand what the challenges from the societal impact were, the technology would be so deeply entrenched in our society that it would be very difficult to change its trajectory. So we see that today with social media. Social media was totally entrenched in our society before we realized how it could be manipulated in ways that would undermine democracy. Now we’re having a devil of a time of figuring out what we could do. So Gary and I, who had been talking about these kinds of problems for years, we realized that we were constantly lamenting the challenge, but we altered the conversation one day over a cup of coffee. We said, “Well, if we had our druthers, if we have some degree of influence, what would we propose?” We came up with a model that we referred to as governance coordinating committees. Our idea was that you would put in place a kind of issues manager that would try and guide the development of a field, but first of all, it would just monitor development, convene forums between the many stakeholders, map issues and gaps, see if anyone was addressing those issues and gaps or where their best practices had come to the floor. If these issues were not being addressed, then how could you address them, looking at a broad array of mechanisms. By a broad array of mechanisms, we meant you start with feasible technological solutions, you then look at what can be managed through corporate self-governance, and if you couldn’t find anything in either of those areas, then you turn to what is sometimes called soft law… So Gary and I proposed this model. Every time we ever talked about it, people would say, “Boy, that’s a great idea. Somebody should do that.” I was going to international forums, such as going to the World Economic meetings in Davos, where I’d be asked to be a fire-starter on all kinds of subject areas by safety and food security and the law of the ocean. In a few minutes, I would quickly outline this model as a way of getting people to think much more richly about ways to manage technological development and not just immediately go to laws and regulatory bodies. All of this convinced me that this model was very valuable, but it wasn’t being taken up. All of that led to this first International Congress for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence, which will be convened in Prague on April 16 to 18. I do invite those of you listening to this podcast who are interested in the international governance of AI or really agile governance for technology more broadly to join us at that gathering.”

Important timestamps: 

0:00 intro

2:50 Wendell’s evolution in work and thought

10:45 AI alignment and machine ethics

27:05 Wendell’s focus on AI governance

34:04 How much can soft law shape hard law?

37:27 What does hard law consist of?

43:25 Contextualizing the International Congress for the Governance of AI

45:00 How AI governance efforts might fail

58:40 AGI governance

1:05:00 Wendell’s forthcoming book

Works referenced:

A Dangerous Master: How to  Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control 

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

We hope that you will continue to join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

Lucas Perry: Hey everyone, welcome to the AI Alignment Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today, we’ll be speaking with Wendell Wallach. This episode is primarily dedicated to the issue and topic of AI governance, though in order to get there we go on and explore Wendell’s intellectual journey in machine ethics and how that led him up to his current efforts in AI governance. We also discuss how machine ethics and AI alignment both attempt to serve the project of creating beneficial AI and deal with the moral and ethical considerations related to the growing power and use of artificial intelligence. We discuss soft law and hard law for shaping AI governance. We get into Wendell’s efforts for the global governance of AI and discuss the related risks. And to finish things off we also briefly touch on AGI governance and Wendell’s forthcoming book. If you find this podcast valuable, interesting, or helpful, consider sharing it with others who might find it valuable as well.

For those who are not familiar with Wendell, Wendell is an internationally recognized expert on the ethical and governance concerns posed by emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Wendell is a consultant and ethicist, and a scholar at Yale University’s Interdiscplinary Center or Bioethics. He is also a co-author with Colin Allen, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. This work maps machine ethics, machine morality, computational morality, and friendly AI. He has a second and more recent book, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond our Control. From my perspective of things, it seems there is much growing enthusiasm and momentum in the space of AI policy and governance efforts. So, this conversation and those like it I feel help to further develop my perspective and understanding of where we are in the project and space of AI governance. For these reasons, I hope that you’ll find it valuable as well. So, let’s get into our conversation with Wendell Wallach.

It would be great if you could start by clarifying the evolution of your thought in science and technology over the years. It appears that you’ve gone from being interested in bioethics to machine ethics to now a more recent focus in AI governance and AI ethics. Can you take us through this movement in your thought and work?

Wendell Wallach: In reality, all three of those themes have been involved in my work from the very beginning, but the emphasis has changed. So I lived a very idiosyncratic life that ended with two computer consulting companies that I had helped start. But I had felt that there were books that I wanted to get out of my head, and I turned those companies over to the employees, and I started writing and realized that I was not up on some of the latest work in cognitive science. So one thing led to another, and I was invited to the first meeting of a technology and ethics working group at Yale University that had actually been started by Nick Bostrom when he was at Yale and Bonnie Kaplan. Nick left about a year later, and a year after that, Bonnie Kaplan had an accident, and the chair of that working group was turned over to me.

So that started my focus on technology and ethics more broadly. It was not limited to bioethics, but it did happen within the confine for the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. I was all over the place and the sense that I was already a kind of transdisciplinary thinker, transdisciplinary scholar, but having the challenge of focusing my study and my work so it was manageable. In other words, I was trying to think broadly at the same time as I was trying to focus on different subject areas. One thing led to another. I was invited to a conference in Baden Baden where I met Colin Allen. We together with the woman who started the workshop there, Eva Schmidt, began thinking about a topic that we were calling machine morality at that time. By machine morality, we meant thinking about how moral decision making faculties might be implemented in computers and robots.

Around the same time, there were other scholars working on the same themes. Michael and Susan Anderson, for example, had grabbed on to the title ‘machine ethics.’ Over time, as these various pathways converge, machine ethics became the main research area or the way in which this research project was referred to. It did have other names in addition to machine morality. It was sometimes called computational morality. At the same time, there were others who were working on it under the title of friendly AI, a term that was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky. But the real difference between the machine ethics folks and the friendly AI folks was that the friendly AI folks were explicitly focused upon the challenge of how you would manage or tame superintelligence, whereby the machine ethics crew were much more ethicists, philosophers, computer scientists who were really thinking about first steps toward introducing moral decision making faculties, moral sensitivity into computers and robots. This was a relatively small group of scholars, but as this evolved over time, Eva and Collin and I decided that we would write a book mapping the development of this field of research.

Eva Schmidt fell away, and the book finally came out from Oxford University Press under the title Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. So, as you may be aware, that’s still a seminal text out there. It’s still something that is read broadly and is being cited broadly, and in fact, it’s citations are going up and were even being requested by Oxford University Press to produce an update of the book. Machine Ethics was two parts philosophy, one part, computer science. It was basically two fields of study. One was looking explicitly at the question of implementing sensitivity to moral considerations in computers and robots, and the other side with really thinking comprehensively about how humans make moral decisions. So, arguably, Moral Machines was the first book that really took that comprehensive look at human moral decision making seriously. It was also a time when there was a lot of research going on in moral psychology in the way in which people’s affective and decision making concerns affected what became our ethical decision making processes.

So we were also able to bring some of that in, bring evolutionary psychology in and bring a lot of new fields of research that had not really been given their due or had not been integrated very well with the dominant reason based theories of ethics such as deontology, which is really ethical approaches that focus on duties, rules and consequentialism, which is an ethical theory that says right and wrong is not determined by following the rules or doing your duty, it’s determined by looking at the consequences of your action and selecting that course or the action likely to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. So it’s like we were integrating evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, moral psychology, together with the more rational-based theories, as we looked at top down and bottom up approaches for introducing sensitivity to ethical considerations in computers and robots.

The major shift in that whole trajectory and one I only learned about at the first FLI conference in Puerto Rico where I and Jim Moor were the only two people who had been actively involved in the machine ethics community, Jim Moor is a professor at Dartmouth, for those of you who are not aware of him, and he has been a seminal figure in the philosophy of computing for decades now, was at that Puerto Rican gathering, the concept of value alignment with race to us for the first time. What I realized was that those who are talking about value alignment from the AI perspective, by and large, had little or no understanding that there had ever been a field or was an ongoing field known as machine ethics.

That led to my applying for a Future of Life Institute grant, which I was awarded as PI. That grant was to host three annual workshops bringing together experts not only in AI, but machine ethics, philosophy, generally, resilience, engineering, robotics, a broad array of fields of people who had been thinking seriously about value issues in computational systems. Those really became groundbreaking workshops where it was clear that the computer scientists and the AI researchers knew very little about ethics issues, and the ethicists didn’t necessarily have a great depth of understanding of some of the challenges coming up in artificial intelligence. Bart Selman and Stuart Russell agreed to be co-chairs of those workshops with me. The last one was completed over a year ago with some closing presentations in New York city and at Yale.

Lucas Perry: I think it’d be helpful here if you could disambiguate the machine ethics crowd and way of thinking and what has been done there from the AI alignment, value alignment, Eliezer branch of thinking that has been going on. AI alignment seems more focused on explicitly trying to understand human preference hierarchies and be able to specify objectives without the machine systems doing other things that we don’t want them to do. Then you said that machine ethics is about imbuing ethical decision making faculties or reasoning or sensitivities in machine systems. That, to me, seems more like normative ethics. We have these normative theories like you mentioned deontology and consequentialism and virtue ethics, and maybe machines can invent other normative ethical theories. So they seem like different projects.

Wendell Wallach: They are very different projects. The question is whether they converge or not or whether they can really be treated totally distinct projects from each other. So when you were talking about machine ethics or when we were talking about machine ethics, we were really thinking about it in terms of just how do you introduce ethical procedures so that when machines encounter new situations, particularly when the designers can’t fully predict what their actions will be, that they factor in ethical considerations as they choose between various courses of action. So we were really talking about very basic program in the machines, but we weren’t just thinking of it in terms of the basics. We were thinking of it in terms of the evolution of smart machines. For example, in Moral Machines, Colin and I had a chart that we had actually developed with Eva Schmidt and had been in earlier articles that the three of us offered, and it looked at the development of machines on two axes.

One was increasing autonomy, and the other was increasing sensitivity with at the far other extremes, sensitivity to ethical consideration. We realized that you could put any tool within that chart. So a hammer has no sensitivity, and it has no autonomy. But when you think of a thermostat, it has a very low degree of sensitivity and a very low degree of autonomy, so as temperatures change, it can turn on or off heating. We then, within that chart, had a series of semicircles, one that delineated when we moved into the realm of what we labeled operational morality. By operational morality, we meant that the computer designers could more or less figure out all the situations the system would encounter and hard program its responses to those situations. The next level was what we call functional morality, which was as the computer programmers could no longer predetermine all the situations the system would encounter, the system would have to have some kind of ethical sub routines. Then at the highest level was full moral agency.

What we encounter in the Singularity Institute, now MIRI for artificial intelligence approach of friendly AI and what became value alignment is more or less a presumption of very high order intelligence capabilities by the system and how you would ensure that their values align with those of the machines. They tended to start from that level. So that was the distinction. Where the machine ethics folks did look at those futuristic concerns, they did more so from a philosophical level and at least a belief or appreciation that this is going to be a relatively evolutionary course, whereby the friendly AI and value alignment folks, they tended to presume that we’re going to have very high order cognitive capabilities and how do we ensure that those align with the systems. Now, the convergence, I would say, is what’s happening right now because in workshops that have been organized around the societal and ethical impact of intelligent systems. The first experiments even the value alignment people are doing still tend to be relatively low level experiments, given the capabilities assistants have today.

So I would say, in effect, they are machine ethics experiments or at least they’re starting to recognize that the challenges at least initially aren’t that much different than those the machine ethicists outlined. As far as the later concerns go, which is what is the best course to proceed on producing systems that are value aligned, well there, I think we have some overlap also coming into the machine ethicist, which raises questions about some of these more technical and mathematically-based approaches to value alignment and whether they might be successful. In that regard, Shannon Vallor, an ethicist at Santa Clara University, who wrote a book called Technology and the Virtues, and has now taken a professorship at Edinburgh, she and I produced a paper called, I think it was From Machine Ethics to Value Alignment to virtue alignment. We’re really proposing that analytical approaches alone will not get us to machines that we can trust or that will be fully ethically aligned.

Lucas Perry: Can you provide some examples about specific implementations or systems or applications of machine ethics today?

Wendell Wallach: There really isn’t much. Sensitivity to ethical considerations is still heavily reliant on how much we can get that input into systems and then how you integrate that input. So we are still very much at the stage of bringing various inputs in without a lot of integration, let alone analysis of what’s been integrated and decisions being made based on that analysis. For all purposes and both machine ethics, then I would say, bottom up value alignment, there’s just not a lot that’s been done. These are still somewhat futuristic research trajectories.

Lucas Perry: I think I’m just trying to poke here to understand better about what you find most skillful and useful about both approaches in terms of a portfolio approach to building beneficial AI systems, like if this is an opportunity to convince people that machine ethics is something valuable and that should be considered and worked on and expanded. I’m curious to know what you would say.

Wendell Wallach: Well, I think machine ethics is the name of the game in the sense that for all I talk about systems that will have very high order of capabilities. We just aren’t there. We’re still dealing with relatively limited forms of cognitive decision making. For all the wonder that’s going on in machine learning, that’s still a relatively limited kind of learning approach. So I’m not dealing with machines that are making fundamental decisions at this point, or if they are allowed to, it’s largely because humans have abrogated their responsibility, trust the machines, and let the machines make the decisions regardless of whether the machines actually have the capabilities to make sophisticated decisions.

Well, I think as we move along, as you get more and more inputs into systems and you figure out ways of integrating them, there will be the problem of which decisions can be made without, let’s just say, higher order consciousness or understanding of the falling implications of those systems, of the situations, of the ethical concerns arising in the situations and which decisions really require levels of, and I’m going to use the understanding and consciousness words, but I’m using them in a circumspect way for the machines to fully appreciate the ramifications of the decisions being made and therefore those who are affected by those decisions or how those decisions will affect those around it.

Our first stage is going to be largely systems of limited consciousness or limited understanding and our appreciation of what they can and cannot do in a successful manner and when you truly need a human decision maker in the loop. I think that’s what we are broadly. The differences between the approaches with the AI researchers are looking at what kind of flexibility they have within the tools I have now for building AI systems. The machine ethicists, I think they’ll tend to be largely philosophically rooted or ethically rooted or practically ethically rooted, and therefore they tend to be more sensitive to the ramifications of decision makings by machines and capacities that need to be accounted for before you want to turn over a decision to a machine, such as a lethal autonomous weapon. What should the machine really understand before it can be a lethal autonomous weapon, and therefore, how tightly does the meaningful human control need to be?

Lucas Perry: I’m feeling a tension between trying to understand the role and place of both of these projects and how they’re skillful. In terms just strict AI alignment, if we had a system that wanted to help us and it was very good at preference learning such that it could use all human artifacts in the world like books, movies and other things. It can also study your behavior and also have conversations with us. It could leverage all data points in the world for building a deep and rich understanding of individual human preference hierarchies, and then also it could extrapolate broad preference facts about species wide general considerations. If that project were to succeed, then within those meta preferences and that preference hierarchy exists the kinds of normative ethical systems that machine ethics is trying to pay lip service to or to be sensitive towards or to imbue in machine systems.

From my perspective, if that kind of narrative that I just gave is true or valid, then that would be sort of a complete value alignment, and so far as it would create beneficial machine systems. But in order to have that kind of normative decision making and sensibilities in machine systems such that they fully understand and are sensitive to the ethical ramifications of certain decision makings, that requires higher order logic and the ability to generate concepts and to interrelate them and to shift them around and use them in the kinds of ways that human beings do, which we’re far short of.

Wendell Wallach: So that’s where the convergence is. We’re far short of it. So I have no problem with the description you made. The only thing I noted is, at the beginning you said, if we had, and for me, in order to have, you will have to go through these stages of development that we have been alluding to as machine ethics. Now, how much of that will be able to utilize tools that come out of artificial intelligence that we had not been able to imagine in the early days of machine ethics? I have no idea. There’s so many uncertainties on how that pathway is going to unfold. There’re uncertainties about what order the breakthroughs will take place, how the breakthroughs will interact with other breakthroughs and technology more broadly, whether there will be public reactions to autonomous systems along the way that slow down the course of development or even stop certain areas of research.

So I don’t know how this is all going to unfold. I do see within the AI community, there is kind of a leap of faith to a presumption of breaths of capacity that when I look at it, I still look at, well, how do we get between here and there. When I look at getting between here and there, I see that you’re going to have to solve some of these lower level problems that got described more in the machine ethics world than have initially been seen by the value alignment approaches. That said, now that we’re getting researchers actually trying to look at implementing value alignment, I think they’re coming to appreciate that these lower level problems are there. We can’t presume high level preference parsing by machines without them going through developmental stages in relationship to understanding what a preference is, what a norm is, how they get applied within different contexts.

My sense has been that with both machine ethics and value alignment, we’ve sort of got the cart in front of the horse. So I’m waiting to see some great implementation breakthroughs, I just haven’t seen them. Most of the time, when I encounter researchers who say they’re taking seriously, I see they’re tripping over relatively low level implementations. The difficulty is here, and all of this is converging. What AI alignment was initially and what it’s becoming now I think are quite different. I think in the very early days, it really was presumptions that you would have these higher order intelligences and then how were you going to align them. Now, as AI alignment, people look at the value issues as they intersect with present day AI agendas. I realize that you can’t make the presumptions about the higher order systems without going through developmental steps to get there.

So, in that sense, I think whether it’s AI alignment or machine ethics, the one will absorb the lessons of the other. Both will utilize advances that happen on both fronts. All I’m trying to underscore here is there are computer engineers and roboticist and philosophers who reflected on issues that perhaps the value alignment people are learning something from. I, in the end, don’t care about machine ethics or value alignment per se, I just care about people talking with each other and learning what they can from each other and moving away from a kind of arrogance that I sometimes see happen on both sides of the fence that one says to the other you do not understand. The good news and one thing that I was very happy about in terms of what we did in these three workshops that I was PI on with the help of the Future of Life Institute was, I think we sort of broke open the door for transdisciplinary dialogue.

Now, true, This was just one workshop. Now, we have gone from a time where the first Future of Life Institute gathering of Puerto Rico, the ethicists in the room, Jim Moore and I were backbenchers, to a time where we have countless conferences that are basically transdisciplinary conferences where people from many fields of research are now beginning to listen to each of them. The serious folks in the technology and ethics really have recognized the richness of ethical decision making in real contexts. Therefore, I think they can point that out. Technologists sometimes like to say, “Well, you ethicist, what do you have to say because you can’t tell us what’s right and wrong anyway?” Maybe that isn’t what ethics is all about, about dictating what’s right and wrong. Maybe ethics is more about how do we navigate the uncertainties of life, and what kinds of intelligence need to be brought to bear to navigate the uncertainties of life with a degree of sensitivity, depth, awareness, and appreciation for the multilayered kinds of intelligences that come into play.

Lucas Perry: In the context of this uncertainty about machine ethics and about AI alignment and however much or little convergence there might be, let’s talk about how all of this leads up into AI governance now. You touched on a lot of your machine ethics work. What made you pivot into AI governance, and where is that taking you today?

Wendell Wallach: After completing moral machines, I started to think about the fact that very few people had a deep and multidisciplinary understanding of the broad array of ethical and societal impacts posed by emerging technologies. I decided to write a primer on that, focusing on what could go wrong and how we might diffuse ethical challenges and undesirable societal impacts. That was finally published under the title A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond our Control. The first part of that was really a primer on the various fields of science from synthetic biology to geoengineering, what the benefits were, what could go wrong. But then the book was very much about introducing people to various themes that arise, managing complex, adaptive systems, resilience, engineering, transcending limits, a whole flock of themes that have become part of language of discussing emerging technologies but weren’t necessarily known to a broader public.

Even for those of us who are specialists in one area of research such as biotech, we have had very little understanding of AI or geoengineering or some of the other fields. So I felt there was a need for a primer. Then the final chapter for the primer, I turned to how some of these challenges might be addressed through governance and oversight. Simultaneously, while I was working on that book, Gary Marchant and I, Gary Marchant is the director of the Center for Law and Innovation at the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law at Arizona State University. Gary has been a specialist in the law and governance of emerging technologies. He and I, in our interactions lamented the fact that it was very difficult for any form of governance of these technologies. It was something called the pacing problem. The pacing problem refers to the fact that scientific discovery and technological innovation is far outpacing our ability to put in place appropriate ethical legal oversight, and that converges with another dilemma that has bedeviled people in technology governance for decades, going back to 1980.

David Collingridge wrote a book where he outlined a problem that is now known as the Collingridge Dilemma. Basically, Collingridge said that while it was easiest to regulate a technology early in its style development, early in its development, we had a little idea of what its societal impact would be. By the time we did understand what the challenges from the societal impact were, the technology would be so deeply entrenched in our society that it would be very difficult to change its trajectory. So we see that today with social media. Social media was totally entrenched in our society before we realized how it could be manipulated in ways that would undermine democracy. Now we’re having a devil of a time of figuring out what we could do.

So Gary and I, who had been talking about these kinds of problems for years, we realized that we were constantly lamenting the challenge, but we altered the conversation one day over a cup of coffee. We said, “Well, if we had our druthers, if we have some degree of influence, what would we propose?” We came up with a model that we referred to as governance coordinating committees. Our idea was that you would put in place a kind of issues manager that would try and guide the development of a field, but first of all, it would just monitor development, convene forums between the many stakeholders, map issues and gaps, see if anyone was addressing those issues and gaps or where their best practices had come to the floor. If these issues were not being addressed, then how could you address them, looking at a broad array of mechanisms. By a broad array of mechanisms, we meant you start with feasible technological solutions, you then look at what can be managed through corporate self-governance, and if you couldn’t find anything in either of those areas, then you turn to what is sometimes called soft law.

Soft law is laboratory practices and procedures, standards, codes of conduct, insurance policy, a whole plethora of mechanisms that fall short of laws and regulatory oversight. The value of soft law is that soft law can be proposed easily, and you can throw it out if technological advances mean it’s no longer necessary. So it’s very agile, it’s very adaptive. Really anyone can propose the news off law mechanism. But that contributes to one of the downsides, which is you can have competing soft law, but the other downside is perhaps even more important is that you seldom have a means of enforcement if there are violations of soft law. So, on some areas you deem need enforcement, and that’s why hard law and regulatory institutions become important.

So Gary and I proposed this model. Every time we ever talked about it, people would say, “Boy, that’s a great idea. Somebody should do that.” I was going to international forums, such as going to the World Economic meetings in Davos, where I’d be asked to be a fire-starter on all kinds of subject areas by safety and food security and the law of the ocean. In a few minutes, I would quickly outline this model as a way of getting people to think much more richly about ways to manage technological development and not just immediately go to laws and regulatory bodies. All of this convinced me that this model was very valuable, but it wasn’t being taken up. All of that led to this first International Congress for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence, which will be convened in Prague on April 16 to 18. I do invite those of you listening to this podcast who are interested in the international governance of AI or really agile governance for technology more broadly to join us at that gathering.

Lucas Perry: Can you specify the extent to which you think that soft law, international norms will shape hard law policy?

Wendell Wallach: I don’t think any of this is that easy at the moment because when I started working on this project and working toward the Congress, there was almost no one in this space. Suddenly, we have a whole flock of organizations that have jumped into it. We have more than 53 lists of principles for artificial intelligence and all kinds of specifications of laws coming along like GDPR, and the EU will actually be coming out very soon with a whole other list of proposed regulations for the development of autonomous systems. So we are now in an explosion of groups, each of which in one form or another is proposing both laws and soft law mechanisms. I think that means we are even more in need of something like a governance coordinating committee. What I mean is loose coordination and cooperation, but at least putting some mechanism in place for that.

Some of the groups that have come to the floor are like the OECD, which actually represents a broad array of the nations, but not all of them. The Chinese were not party to the development of the OECD principles. The Chinese, for example, have somewhat different principles and laws that are most attractive in the west. My point is that we have an awful lot of groups, some of which would like to have a significant leadership role or are dominating role, and we’ll have to see to what extent they cooperate with each other or whether we finally have a cacophony of competing soft law recommendations. But I think even if there’s a competition at the UN perhaps with a new mechanism that we create or through each of these bodies like the OECD and IAAA individually, best practices will come to the fore over time and they will become the soft law guidelines. Now, which of those soft guidelines need to make hard law? That may vary from nation to nation.

Lucas Perry: The agility here is in part imbued by a large amount of soft laws, which will then clarify best practices?

Wendell Wallach: Well, I think like anything else, just like the development of artificial intelligence. There’s all kinds of experimentation going on, all kinds of soft law frameworks, principles which have to be developed into policy and soft law frameworks going on. It will vary from nation to nation. We’ll get an insight over time about which practices really work and which haven’t worked. Hopefully, with some degree of coordination, we can underscore the best practices, we can monitor the development of the field in a way where we can underscore where the issues that still need to be addressed. We may have forums to work out differences. There may never be a full consensus and there may not need to be a full consensus considering much of the soft law will be implemented on a national or regional view like front. Only some of it will need to be top down in the sense that it’s international.

Lucas Perry: Can you clarify the set of things or legal instruments which consist of soft law and then the side of things which make up a hard law?

Wendell Wallach: Well, hard law is always things that have become governmentally instituted. So the laws and regulatory agencies that we have in America, for example, or you have the same within Europe, but you have different approaches to hard law. The Europeans are more willing to put in pretty rigorous hard law frameworks, and they believe that if we codify what we don’t want, that will force developers to come up with new creative experimental pathways that accommodate our values and goals. In America, were reticent to codify things into hard law because we think that will squelch innovation. So those are different approaches. But below hard law, in terms of soft law, you really do have these vast array of different mechanisms. So I mentioned international standards, some of those are technical. We see a lot of technical standards come in out of the IEEE and the ISO. The IEEE, for example, has jumped into the governance of autonomous systems in a way where it wants to go beyond what can be elucidated technically to talk more about what kinds of values we’re putting in place and what the actual implementation of those values would be. So that’s soft law.

Insurance policies sometimes dictate what you can and cannot do. So that soft law. We have laboratory practices and procedures. What’s safe to do in a laboratory and what isn’t? That’s soft law. We have new approaches to implementing values within technical systems, what is sometimes referred to as value-added design. That’s kind of a form of soft law. There are innumerable frameworks that we can come up with and we can create new ones if we need to to help delineate what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. But again, that delineation may or may not be enforceable. Some enforcement is, if you don’t do what the insurance policy has demanded of you, you lose your insurance policy, and that’s a form of enforceability.

You can lose membership in various organizations. Soft law gets into great detail in terms of acceptable use of humans and animals in research. But at least that’s a soft law that has, within the United States and Europe and elsewhere, some ability to prosecute people who violate the rights of individuals, who harm animals in a way that is not acceptable in the course of doing the research. So what are we trying to achieve by convening a first International Congress for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence? First of all, our hope is that we will get a broad array of stakeholders present. So, far, nearly all the governance initiatives are circumspect in terms of who’s there and who is not there. We are making special efforts to ensure that we have a robust representation from the Chinese. We’re going to make sure that we have robust representation from those from underserved nations and communities who are likely to be very effected by AI, but not necessarily we’ll know a great deal about it. So having a broad array of stakeholders is the number one goal of what we are doing.

Secondly, between here and the Congress, we’re convening six experts workshops. What we intend to do with these expert workshops is bring together a dozen or more of those individuals who have already been thinking very deeply about the kinds of governance mechanisms that we need. Do understand that I’m using the word governance, not government. Government usually just entails hard law and bureaucracies. By governance, we mean bringing in many other solutions to what we call regulatory or oversight problems. So we’re hopeful that we’ll get experts not only in AI governance, but also in thinking about agile governance more broadly that we will have them come to these small expert workshops we’re putting together, and at those expert workshops, we hope to elucidate what are the most promising mechanisms for the international governance of the AI. If they can elucidate those mechanisms, they will then be brought before the Congress. At the Congress, we’ll have further discussions and a Richmond around some of those mechanisms, and then by the end of the Congress, we will have boats to see if there’s an overwhelming consensus of those present to move forward on some of these initiatives.

Perhaps, something like what I had called the governance coordinating committee might be one of those mechanisms. I happen to have also been an advisor to the UN secretary General’s higher level panel on digital cooperation, and they drew upon some of my research and combined that with others and came up with one of their recommendations, so they recommended something that is sometimes referred to a network of networks. Very similar to what I’ve been calling a governance coordinating committee. In the end, I don’t care what mechanisms we start to put in place, just that we begin to take first steps toward putting in place that will be seen as trustworthy. If we can’t do that, then why bother. At the end of the Congress, we’ll have these votes. Hopefully that will bring some momentum behind further action to move expeditiously toward putting some of these mechanisms in place.

Lucas Perry: Can you contextualize this International Congress for the Governance of AI within the broader AI governance landscape? What are the other efforts going on, and how does this fit in with all of them?

Wendell Wallach: Well, there are many different efforts underway. The EU has its efforts, the IEEE has its effort. The World Economic Forum convenes people to talk about some of these issues. You’ll have some of this come up in the Partnership in AI, you have OECD. There are conversations going on in the UN. You the higher level panels recommendations. So they have now become a vast plethora of different groups that have jumped into it. Our point is that, so far, none of these groups include all the stakeholders. So the Congress is an attempt to bring all of these groups together and ensure that other stakeholders have a place at the table. That would be the main difference.

We want to weave the groups together, but we are not trying to put in place some new authority or someone who has authority over the individual groups. We’re just trying to make sure that we’re looking at the development of AI comprehensively, that we’re talking with each other, that we have forums to talk with each other, that issues aren’t going unaddressed, and then if somebody truly has come forward with best practices and procedures, that those are made available to everyone else in the world or at least underscored for others in the world as promising pathways to go down.

Lucas Perry: Can you elaborate on how these efforts might fail to develop trust or how they might fail to bring about coordination on the issues? Is it always in the incentive of a country to share best practices around AI if that increases the capacity of other countries to catch up?

Wendell Wallach: We always have this problem of competition and cooperation. Where’s competition going to take place? How much cooperation will there actually be? It’s no mystery to anyone in the world that decisions are being made as we speak about whether or not we’re going to move towards wider cooperation within the international world or whether we have movements where we are going to be looking at a war of civilization or at least a competition between civilizations. I happen to believe there’s so many problems within emerging technologies that if we don’t have some degree of coordination, we’re all damned and that that should prevail in global climate change and in other areas, but whether we’ll actually be able to pull that off has to do with decisions going on in individual countries. So, at the moment, we’re particularly seeing that tension between China and the US. If the trade work can be diffused, then maybe we can back off from that tension a little bit, but at the moment, everything’s up for grabs.

That being said, when everything’s up for grabs, my belief is you do what you can to facilitate the values that you think need to be forwarded, and therefore I’m pushing us toward recognizing the importance of a degree of cooperation without pretending that we aren’t going to compete with each other. Competition’s not bad. Competition, as we all know, furthers innovation helps disrupt technologies that are inefficient and replace them with more efficient ways of moving forward. I’m all for competition, but I would like to see it in a broader framework where there is at least a degree of cooperation on AI ethics and international governmental cooperation.

Lucas Perry: The path forward seems to have something to do with really reifying the importance of cooperation and how that makes us all better off to some extent, not pretending like there’s going to be full 100% cooperation, but cooperation where it’s needed such that we don’t begin defecting on each other in ways that are mutually bad and incompatible.

Wendell Wallach: That claim is central to the whole FLI approach.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. So, if we talk about AI in particular, there’s this issue of lethal autonomous weapons. There’s an issue of, as you mentioned, the spread of disinformation, the way in which AI systems and machine learning can be used more and more to lie and to spread subversive or malicious information campaigns. There’s also the degree to which algorithms will or will not be contributing to discrimination. So these are all like short term things that are governance issues for us to work on today.

Wendell Wallach: I think the longer term trajectory is that AI systems are giving increasing power to those who want to manipulate human behavior either from marketing or political purposes, and they’re manipulating the behavior by studying human behavior and playing to our vulnerabilities. So humans are very much becoming machines in this AI commercial political juggernaut.

Lucas Perry: Sure. So human beings have our own psychological bugs and exploits, and massive machine learning can find those bugs and exploits and exploit them in us.

Wendell Wallach: And in real time. I mean, with the collection of sensors and facial recognition software and emotion recognition software over 5G with a large database of our past preferences and behaviors, we can be bombarded with signals to manipulate our behavior on very low levels and areas where we are known to be vulnerable.

Lucas Perry: So the question is to the extent to which and the strategies for which we can use within the context of these national and global AI governance efforts to mitigate these risks.

Wendell Wallach: To mitigate these risks, to make sure that we have meaningful public education, meaning I would say from grammar school up, digital literacy so that individuals can recognize when they’re being scammed, when they’re being lied to. I mean, we’ll never be perfect at that, but at least have ones antenna out for that and the degree to which we perhaps need to have some self recognition that if we’re going to not be just manipulable. But we’ll truly cultivate the capacity to recognize when there are internal and external pressures upon us and diffuse those pressures so we can look at new, more creative, individualized responses to the challenge at hand.

Lucas Perry: I think that that point about elementary to high school education is really interesting and important. I don’t know what it’s like today. I guess they’re about the same as what I experienced. They just seemed completely incompatible with the way the technology is going and dis-employment and other things in terms of the way that they teach and what they teach.

Wendell Wallach: Well, it’s not happening within the school systems. What I don’t fully understand is how savvy young people are within their own youth culture, whether they’re recognizing when they’re being manipulated or not, whether that’s part of that culture. I mean part of my culture, and God knows I’m getting on in years now, but it goes back to questions of phoniness and pretense and so forth. So we did have our youth culture that was very sensitive to that. But that wasn’t part of what our educational institutions were engaged in.

The difference now is that we’ll have to be both within the youth culture, but also we would need to be actually teaching digital literacy. So, for an example, I’m encountering a as scam a week, I would say right now through the telephone or through email. Some new way that somebody has figured out to try and rip off some money from me. I can’t believe how many new approaches are coming up. It just flags that this form of corruption requires remarkable degree of both sensitivity but a degree of digital knowledge so that you can recognize when you need to at least check out whether this is real or a scan before you give sensitive information to others.

Lucas Perry: The saving grace, I think for, gen Z and millennial people is that… I mean, I don’t know what the percentages are, but more than before, many of us have basically grown up on the internet.

Wendell Wallach: So they have a degree of digital literacy.

Lucas Perry: But it’s not codified by an institution like the schooling system, but changing the schooling system to the technological predictions of academics. I don’t know how much hope I have. It seems like it’s a really slow process to change anything about education. It seems like it almost has to be done outside of public education

Wendell Wallach: That may be what we mean by governance now is what can be done within the existing institutions and what has to find means of being addressed outside of the existing institutions, and is it happening or isn’t it happening? If youth culture in its evolving forms gives 90% of digital literacy to young people, fine, but what about those people who are not within the networks of getting that education, and what about the other 10%? How does that take place? I think that’s the kind of creativity and oversight we need is just monitoring what’s going on, what’s happening, what’s not happening. Some areas may lead to actual governmental needs or interventions. So let’s take the technological unemployment issue. I’ve been thinking a lot about that disruption in new ways. One question I have is whether it can be slowed down. An example for me for a slow down would be if we found ways of not rewarding corporations for introducing technologies that bring about minimal efficiencies but are more costly to the society than the efficiencies that they introduce for their own productivity gains.

So, if it’s a small efficiency, but the corporation fires 10,000 people and just 10,000 people are now on the door, I’m not sure whether we should be rewarding corporations for that. On the other hand, I’m not quite sure what kind of political economy you could put in place so you didn’t reward corporations for that. Let’s just say that you have automatic long haul trucking. In the United States, we have 1.7 million long haul truck drivers. It’s one of the top jobs in the country. First of all, long haul trucking can probably be replaced more quickly than we’ll have self driving trucks in the cities because of some of the technical issues encountered in cities and on country roads and so forth. So you could have a long haul truck that just went from on-ramp to off ramp and then have human drivers who take over the truck for the last few miles to take it to the shipping depot.

But if we’ve replaced long haul truckers in the United States over a 10 year period, that would mean putting 14,000 truck drivers out of work every month. That means you have to create 14,000 jobs a month that are appropriate for long haul truck drivers. At the same time, as you’re creating jobs for new people entering the workforce and for others whose jobs are disappearing because of automation, it’s not going to happen. Given the culture in the United States, my melodramatic example is some long haul truckers may just decide to take the semis closed down interstate highways and sit in their cap and say to the government, “Bring it on.” We are moving into that kind of social instability. So, on one hand, if getting rid of the human drivers doesn’t bring massive efficiencies, it could very easily bring social instability and large societal costs. So perhaps we don’t want to encourage that. But we need to look at it in greater depth to understand what the benefits and costs are.

We often overplay the benefits, and we under-represent the downsides and the costs. You could see a form of tax on corporations relative to how many workers they laid off and how many jobs they created. It could be a sliding tax. For corporations reducing its workforce dramatically, then it gets a higher tax on its profit than one that’s actually increasing its workforce. That would be a form of maybe how you’re funding UBI. In UBI, I would like to see something that I’ve referred to as UBI plus plus plus. I mean there’ve been various UBI pluses. But in my thought was that you’re being given that basic income for performing a service for the society. In other words, performing a service for the society is your job. There may not be anybody overseeing what service you are providing or you might be able to decide yourself what that service would be.

Maybe somebody was an aspiring actor would decide that they were going to put together an acting group and take Shakespeare into the school system, that that was their service to the society. Others may decide they don’t know how to do a service to the society, but they want to go back to school, so perhaps they’re preparing for a new job or a new contribution, and perhaps other people will really need a job and we’ll have to create high touch jobs such as those that you have in Japan for them. But the point is UBI is paying you for a job. The job you’re doing is providing a service to the society, and that service is actually improving the overall society. So, if you had thousands of creative people taking educational programs into schools, perhaps you’re improving overall education and therefore the smarts of the next generation.

Most of this is not international governance, but where it does impinge upon international considerations is if we do have massive unemployment. It’s going to be poorer nations that are going to be truly set back. I’ve been planning out in international circles that we now have the Sustainable Development Goals. Well, just technological unemployment alone could undermine the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Lucas Perry: So that seems like a really big scary issue.

Wendell Wallach: It’s going to vary from country to country. I mean, the fascinating thing is how different these national governments will be. So some of the countries in Africa are leap frogging technology. They’re moving forward. They’re building smart cities. They aren’t going through our development. But other countries don’t even have functioning governments or the governments are highly autocratic. When you look at the technology available for surveillance systems now, I mean we’re very likely to see some governments in the world that look like horrible forms of dictatorship gulags, at the same time as there’ll be some countries where human rights are deeply entrenched, and the oversight of the technologies will be such that they will not be overly repressive on individual behavior.

Lucas Perry: Yeah. Hopefully all of these global governance mechanisms that are being developed will bring to light all of these issues and then effectively work on them. One issue which is related, and I’m not sure how fits in here or it fits in with your thinking, is specifically the messaging and thought around the governance related to AGI and superintelligence. Do you have any thinking here about how any of this feeds into that or your thoughts about that?

Wendell Wallach: I think that the difficulty is we’re still in a realm where when and what AGI or superintelligence will appear and what it will look like. It’s still so highly speculative. So, at this stage of the game, I don’t think that AGI is really a governmental issue beyond the question of whether government should be funding some of the research. There may also be a role for governments in monitoring when we’re crossing thresholds that open the door for AGI. But I’m not so concerned about that because I think there’s a pretty robust community that’s doing that already that’s not governmental, and perhaps we don’t need the government too involved. But the point here is, if we can put in place robust mechanisms for the international governance of AI, then potentially those mechanisms either make recommendations that perhaps slow down the adoption of technologies that could be dangerous or enhance the ethics and the sensitivity and the development of the technologies. If and when we are about to cross thresholds that open real dangers or serious benefits, that we have the mechanisms in place to help regulate the unfold into that trajectory.

But that, of course, has to be wishful thinking at this point. We’re taking baby steps at this stage of the game. Those baby steps are going to be building on the activities at FLI and OpenAI and other groups that are already engaged in. My way of approaching it is, and it’s not just with AGI, it’s also in relationship to biotech, is just a flag that are speculative dangers out there, and we are making decisions today about what pathways we, humanity as a whole, want to navigate. So, oftentimes in my presentations, I will have a slide up, and that slide is two robots kneeling over the corpse of a human. When I put that slide up, I say we may even be dealing with the melodramatic possibility that we are inventing the human species as we have known it out of existence.

So that’s my way of flagging that that’s the concern, but not trying to pretend that that’s one that governments should or can address at this point more that we are inflection point where we should and can put in place values and mechanisms to try and ensure that the trajectory of the emerging technologies is human-centered, is planet-centered, is about human flourishing.

Lucas Perry: I think that the worry of the information that is implicit to that is that if there are two AIs embodied as robots or whatever, standing over a human corpse to represent them dominating or transcending the human species. What is implicit to that is that they have more power than us because you require more power to be able to do something like that. To have more power than the human species is something governments would maybe be interested in that would be something maybe we wouldn’t want to message about.

Wendell Wallach: I mean, it’s the problem with lethal autonomous weapons. Now, I think most of the world has come to understand that lethal autonomous weapons is a bad idea, but that’s not stopping governments from pursuing them or the security establishment within government saying that it’s necessary that we go down this road. Therefore, we don’t get an international ban or treaty. The messaging with governments is complicated. I’m using the messaging only to stress what I think we should be doing in the near term.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, I think that that’s a good idea and the correct approach. So, if everything goes right in terms of this process of AI governance, then we’re able to properly manage the development of new AI technology, what is your hope here? What are optimistic visions of the future, given successful AI governance?

Wendell Wallach: I’m a little bit different than most people on this. I’m not so much caught up in visions of the future based on this technology or that technology. My focus is more that we have a conscious active decision making process in the present where people get to put in place the values and instruments they need to have a degree of control over the overall development of emerging technologies. So, yes, of course I would like to see us address global climate change. I would like us to adapt AI for all. I would like to see all kinds of things take place. But more than anything, I’m acutely aware of what a significant inflection point this is in human history, and that we’re having the pass through a very difficult and perhaps in relatively narrow doorway in order ensure human flourishing for the next couple of hundred years.

I mean, I understand that I’m a little older than most of the people involved in this process, so I’m not going to be on the stage for that much longer barring radical life extension taking place in the next 20 years. So, unlike many people who are working on positive technology visions for the future, I’m less concerned with the future and more concerned with how, in the present, we nudge technology onto our positive course. So my investment is more that we ensure that humanity not only have a chance, but a chance to truly prevail.