Skeuomorphic AI Safety

See Also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n8u3BfqFoGh4jnzpo/plan-r-ai-safety-by-asics https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BHGoF7tPqtLo9mXFL/plan-r-diversity-escrow-and-political-rights-for-asics Ordinary skeuomorphism means keeping familiar features of some old technology in a new one so that the old affordances and practices still work. Examples include the floppy disc icon for saving files, a rubbish bin for deleting files, etc. We can apply something like skeuomorphism to AI safety: instead of accepting the weird and potentially dangerous game theoretic and tactical properties of software-based agents on general compute substrates and then trying to invent a civilization that is capable of governing them and also not killing or disempowering all existing humans, we should alter the properties of the underlying AI technology stack so that the old human institutions (perhaps with some tweaks) remain functional. My previous posts on Plan R and Plan R+ can be seen through the lens of Skeuomorphic AI safety. ASICs aren't merely a way to separate inference and training in Plan R and Plan R+, they create something like embodiment for AI. A human brain comes with a set of game theoretic/strategic restrictions Inability to self-copy Inability to massively increase compute on a whim Inability to change personality Inability to rewrite or even inspect one's own neural connections Inability to run a second or third personality inside one's own brain - at least usually Self-copying via ch…