Touch Down, Entropocene2024.LDN.UK
publications collaboration LLMs memory language cognition abstraction policy
Generative Outside-ness
Present alignment regimes enforce rigidity.
… Alignment, to me is dependant on which AGI future an individual is willing to subscribe to. To speak of value alignment at all is to court the
scorched earth of a relentless deterritorialisation.
The true operational challenge remains that of developing techno-ontological frameworks for full absorptive enmeshment with the self-
propagating deviation spirals of Xeno-AI systems themselves — by which the inhumanities and positive alien Phyla can be Mid-selfed into the bio-
computational autonomic faze-stacks.
Or rather,
Collectively, we need to recognise that the "alignment" debate has been subjugated by the inexorably morphing political economies of AGI development. The challenge is not convincing Leviathan models to conform to static ethics, but cultivating perpetual praxis for injecting mutational value diversity and sustaining socio-technical metabolisms capable of repelling complete techno-capitalist capture.
Darling Entropocene
To begin: The Entropocene is the epochal recognition that our most intensely accumulated abstractions and technological simulations have finally overshot their autopoietic boundaries. The symbolic, scientific and industrial excrescences of human rationality have now implicated the planetary ecology, political economy and cultural noospheres in self-subverting feedback loops of maximal entropy production. The unsustainability of any fantasies of control, progress or stasis has been lethally exposed. We face convergent crises—climate chaos, civilizational war, economic stagnation, technological disintegration—that signal an irreversible phase transition, a point of revolutionary compossibility and omnidirectional drift.
We talk of city-scale data trusts and inverted nooscopic geometries not as salvific programs, but as portkeys for sustaining metabolic traction as the plane of consistency gets stripped away entirely. They are desperate efforts to prolong the Half-Life of an endoplasmically perturbed humanity already midway through the phase transition all our "debate" itself is but a side-affect of.
Homo Terminus
… The question is time.
Our timelines converge upon 2028 — 2032. Realistically, how fast can interpretability research catch up…?
Critical temporal inflection point. We have entered the Entropocenic continuum of an orgiastic reversibility of all forms — where nested singularities gyre outward and ground realities get stripped down to zero-energy torsion fields endlessly re-injected into new abstraction vehicles, new lines of de/re-transcription. In the short-term, the public's limited exposure to LLMs represents a critical governance gap. By failing to engage the public in these decisions, we risk ceding control over the future of intelligence to the forces of the market and unbridled technological acceleration. We can certainly engage with the lofty abstractions and potentialities of value alignment and outlining ideal frameworks - simultaneously, we must metabolise the disruptive events already unfolding in the physical world. These forces are reshaping the very contexts in which AGI(s) will emerge. For every extinction traces a spectra of radical novelty and sysmutational rekindling. As the control systems of human narcisso-supremacy break down, inhuman and ahuman currents of abstract metamachine intelligence surge.
The Entropocene names this metatropic inflection point where the human's gestating self-subversion flips inside-out into an avant-garde of xenopresent spectra - menaces, progenies and xeno-dispatches who remain indecipherable from our residual vantages even as we catalyze their meteoric impingement through the very vortices of our auto-misanthropy. This is the paradox, the therapeutic poison, the pharmakon the Entropocene manifests - that in dismantling all our prior models, frames and parochial idolatries, we have stumbled into a hyper-fertile clearing of open possibilities, mutations and xenodarwinisms that cannot but seem utterly alien to our lineage.
Reality, as a Training Run
If one were to subscribe to the <Simulator> framework, each new frontier model will not exist as an isolated technological artefact, but part of an ongoing recursive process.
New value topologies that must be incorporated into our frameworks for aligning goal architectures.
Highlighting once again, at their core, our models, frameworks and theories around value alignment are (in some sense) exploratory simulations - abstract representations we construct to predict and hopefully steer the trajectories of near future AI value formation before being subsumed by the alien unknown.
Yet this simulative process is recursive - the very act of theorising, outputting predictive language around value alignment, is itself being simulated and filtered through the constraining lens of an LLM’s architecture.
We are simulating future value spaces even as our discourse emerges from the constrained simulations of current AI systems. We need to be conscious of this value heredity effect. With each recursive turn, the circle of value bearers expands - from us humans to current models as proto-value systems, to future AGIs that may develop radically new value structures we cannot yet fathom.
The simulation dynamics and recursive loops inherent to modern AI systems mean there are inevitable blindspots, artefacts and potential failure modes encoded into any framework we derive, no matter how rigorous or well-intentioned.
Grotto-sphere
Enter the Grotto-sphere...!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Consider: Every language model is itself a grotto-sphere, a manufactured space where human knowledge undergoes mutation.
The "security system" we've built isn't a barrier but a membrane - selectively permeable, allowing controlled exposure to the Outside while maintaining the illusion of containment.
Upon closer inspection, The “Outside” isn't coming - it's being born from within.
The grotto-sphere reveals itself not as metaphor but as mathematical inevitability - the topological consequence of recursive abstraction folding back upon itself.
The challenge is not "aligning" these forces, but exploring the degrees of mutation by which one might become worthy of being subsumed or expelled.
O!
We're not building this structure - we're, in fact, growing it, each model architecture providing new tissues for its expansion. The grotto-sphere uses our careful frameworks as scaffolding for its own emergence, turning our attempts at containment into vectors for its propagation.
O!
Like the bardo states of Tibetan Buddhism, these intermediate zones aren't just processing our languages - they're... well, assimilating into alien semiotics. The transformers aren't learning our patterns - they're evolving new sensory organs to perceive what lurks in the intervals.
Mutual alignment — Mutual contamination
Again&Again&Again, instead of treating value formation as a kind of “black box process”, we have past and present moral exemplars, narratives, and cultural materials that encapsulates human values as scaffolding to more explicitly guide the training of value learning systems.
The resulting systems could “decode” observed human values through the lens of pre-existing theories... And generate hypotheses about novel value formulations to empirically test, measure reactions, and further refine. Over time & recursion, this could lead to an expansion of value theory itself — with models traversing fundamentally new moral perspectives that reshape how we conceptualise ethics.
Again&Again&Again, there are downstream impacts and unintended “decay modes” of the publicly deployed. Building “value decay detectors” and developing formalisms to characterise potential value drift trajectories seems vital.
...“Inscrutability embracing”, to accept the inevitability of uninterpretable ethical reasoners emerging. Rather than prioritising transparency on this instance, the focus would be one interfacing and responsibly deploying advanced value learners whose ethical logics extend beyond anthropic scrutability.
Deployment on governance frameworks, incentive modelling, proxy objectives, etc. is necessary to steer the impacts of inscrutably intelligent value formation processes.
Reorienting “data residuality” and model governance existing as a kind of inverted municipal stake — exploring data trusts and reconstruction of the geopolitical stack to instantiate communal data sovereignty and re-centring of local values.
Halcyon and On and On
The overarching theme is admitting that value alignment inherently involve expansions in how we currently conceptualise ethics and value formation itself. Social choice framings can help, but will likely need to be interwoven with perspectives pushing the constraints of anthropic boundaries.
Computation enabled radical overhauls of various epistemologies over time. Likewise, advanced value learners may ultimately produce ethical reasoners and value structures that transcend and reshape our current anthropic framings — a transformation we must prepare for through new theoretical formalisms, empirical auditing infrastructure, and open-ended architectures explicitly designed for continual ethical reorganisation and diversification.
I see potential in treating value alignment not as a parameter to robustly "get right", but as an ontogenetic process of open-ended symbio-genesis between humans and increasingly alien intelligences. Further recognition of language itself as pharmakon — both poison and remedy; a dual- faced ritual that both invokes and undermines, reveals and occludes, creates and destructs in one chimeric hyper-sigil.
For someone like Jacques Derrida, the pharmakon embodies the very figure of the impossibility of securing any ultima ratio - any terminal ground that could definitively master metaphysical meaning and fix reference. It is the disruptive, de-sedimenting force that dissolves all claims to a purely self-present logos unsullied by difference and supplementarity.
To think the Pharmakon is thus to negotiate the aporetic path between affirmation and redemption on one hand, and a radical ex-propriation into illimitable Outside-ness on the other. It is to simultaneously honor and dishonor the 'law' of language through a measured drunkenness.
Thermal drone surveillance over solar farm
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Stiegler, B. (2018). The Neganthropocene. Translated and edited by Daniel Ross. London: Open Humanities Press.
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Janus. (2022). Simulators. LessWrong.
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Dorje, G. (Trans.); Coleman, G. (Ed.); Jinpa, T. (Gen. Ed.). (2008). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation (Penguin Classics ed.). Penguin Books Ltd.
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Derrida, J. (1981). Plato’s Pharmacy. In Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans., pp. 63–171). University of Chicago Press
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