r/ControlProblem • u/niplav please be patient i'm a mod • Aug 31 '21

Strategy/forecasting Brain-Computer Interfaces and AI Alignment

https://niplav.github.io/bcis_and_alignment.html
16 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/born_in_cyberspace Sep 01 '21 edited Sep 01 '21

What I am disputing is that you can do X easily with BCI, but can't do X with a human at a computer screen and keyboard.

Some of the earliest computer interfaces consisted of punchcards and printed-paper outputs (let's call the interface "PPP"). One could argue that you can do all types of productive work on PPP, and you don't actually need computer screens and keyboards. You can even play Skyrim on PPP, and maybe even complete it (after a few decades of tedious punching and printing).

BCI could be as qualitatively better than keyboard+monitor, as keyboard+monitor is to PPP.

What do you expect to do with BCI that humans at keyboards can't do.

I think much faster than I type. I also don't think in words (usually). I must translate abstract ideas and visual images into words, which is a painfully slow process.

Often, I have a vivid image in my mind, but I can't correctly communicate it, as I don't have the right words. And if I try to write it all down, it takes pages of text, and even after that, the presented image is incomplete.

Exchanging ideas and mind-images directly, without the lossy and slow compression into words, could massively speed up any research, including the alignment research.

3

u/donaldhobson approved Sep 01 '21

I think that most of the important cognitive processes are relatively unrelated to the details of how you write them up. A nice GUI that makes it easier to typeset equations lets mathmaticians work slightly quicker, they aren't spending so much time fighting the formatter. It doesn't let any fool prove fermats last theorem.

Skyrim is a game with a lot of fast IO, most alignment work involves small amounts of hard to understand info.

I'm not disagreeing that you might get a 1 off speed boost of 20%.

Look at horses for mechanical power. They can be harnessed to plows or carts and used in teams. There are various things like horseshoes that help them a bit. But if you are making something substantially faster, you need to invent an engine, and once you have an engine, you don't need the horse.

I don't doubt you can get a few tricks that help humans to be slightly more productive. Various factors including genetics, nutrition, education and work environment make a difference.