Import AI 437: Co-improving AI; RL dreams; AI labels might be annoying

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Facebook: Let’s not build self-improving AI, let’s build co-improving AI:
…A sensible goal which may be hard to achieve…
Facebook researchers have said that building self-improving AI which eventually reaches superintelligence is “fraught with danger for humankind - from misuse through to misalignment” and it’d instead be better to co-develop superintelligence. They’ve published their reasoning in a paper which reads both as aspirational and earnest.
Ideally, humans and machines will work together to build a smarter-than-human system, and the researchers think we should develop a research agenda “targeting improving AI systems’ ability to work with human researchers to conduct AI research together, from ideation to experimentation, in order to both accelerate AI research and to generally endow both AIs and humans with safer superintelligence through their symbiosis.” The thesis here is that “co-improvement can provide: (i) faster progress to find important paradigm shifts; (ii) more transparency and steerability than direct self-improvement in making this progress; (iii) more focus on human-centered safe AI.”

What goes into a co-improving AI?

• Collaborative brainstorming, problem, experiment, benchmark, and evaluation identification: Humans and AIs should jointly define goals, research approaches, the tests needed to measure progress against them, experiments to generate data, and methods to evaluate the results.

• Joint development of safety and deployment: Humans and AIs should co-develop the methods to align the technology as well as the methods of deploying and communicating about the technology.

• “Overall collaboration aims to enable increased intelligence in both humans & AI, including all manifested learnings from the research cycle, with the goal of achieving co-superintelligence,” they write.

Why this matters - a Rorschach for the psychology of (some) AI researchers: In seminal American show The Wire there’s a scene where an up and coming criminal kingpin says to a security guard trying to enforce the laws of society: “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way“. This is how reading this paper feels: AI researchers, staring at the likely imminent arrival of automated AI R&D, articulate how things would be better and saner if humans could co-operatively develop future AI and write a position paper about it. But are they just grasping for a world that is unlikely to exist and articulating their ...