Here I think that if each of the conceptual steps is feasible on a short enough time scale so that humans there’s a reasonable chance of finishing them all before a hypothetical intelligence explosion then researching decision theory is a visible way forward.
But I’m doubtful as to the feasibility of the stages of the proposed research plan beyond the development of decision theory in absence of a detailed taskification of the latter stages.
I could imagine research in decision theory leading to the creation of a Friendly AI, but the same could be true of any area of basic research. For example, the study of solid state physics could lead to useful new technologies which can meet many people’s needs cheaply and correspondingly quell political unrest; leading to stable political conditions which are more conducive to militaries taking safety precautions in developing artificial intelligence technologies; thereby averting unfriendly AI for long enough for people to come up with a more promising approach to the currently intractable aspects of the your proposed research program.
Also; supposing that the research program that you allude to does become taskified to a sufficiently fine degree so that it looks tractable it’s plausible that there will be a surge of interest in the relevant decision theory and that academia will solve the relevant problems on its own accord.
To be clear: I’m not necessarily discouraging you personally from studying decision theory—you’re visibly passionate about it and my observation is that people are much better at doing what they’re passionate about than what they do out of a sense of duty. At the same time; I don’t see why decision theory deserves higher priority than other basic scientific research which could plausibly have favorable technological consequences.
As a disclosure of personal bias I personally don’t find decision theory at all aesthetically attractive (yet?) and it correspondingly seems like something that I would not enjoy or be good at, so I may be motivated to diminish its utilitarian importance or be blind to it. Regardless, I do appreciate that there are people like you, cousin it and Wei Dai who are strongly interested in the subject as I think that it’s good for society to have a diversity of intellectuals researching a variety of subjects.
If you strongly believe that researching decision theory presently deserves high priority for researchers in general at present then I would encourage you to write some articles about why you see it as deserving such high priority with a view toward attracting collaborators and helping SIAI explain its focus on decision theory. Some of your thinking here has come out implicitly in your responses to some of my comments but I would be interested in hearing a more holistic account of your views and their justification.
Here I think that if each of the conceptual steps is feasible on a short enough time scale so that humans there’s a reasonable chance of finishing them all before a hypothetical intelligence explosion then researching decision theory is a visible way forward.
But I’m doubtful as to the feasibility of the stages of the proposed research plan beyond the development of decision theory in absence of a detailed taskification of the latter stages.
I could imagine research in decision theory leading to the creation of a Friendly AI, but the same could be true of any area of basic research. For example, the study of solid state physics could lead to useful new technologies which can meet many people’s needs cheaply and correspondingly quell political unrest; leading to stable political conditions which are more conducive to militaries taking safety precautions in developing artificial intelligence technologies; thereby averting unfriendly AI for long enough for people to come up with a more promising approach to the currently intractable aspects of the your proposed research program.
Also; supposing that the research program that you allude to does become taskified to a sufficiently fine degree so that it looks tractable it’s plausible that there will be a surge of interest in the relevant decision theory and that academia will solve the relevant problems on its own accord.
To be clear: I’m not necessarily discouraging you personally from studying decision theory—you’re visibly passionate about it and my observation is that people are much better at doing what they’re passionate about than what they do out of a sense of duty. At the same time; I don’t see why decision theory deserves higher priority than other basic scientific research which could plausibly have favorable technological consequences.
As a disclosure of personal bias I personally don’t find decision theory at all aesthetically attractive (yet?) and it correspondingly seems like something that I would not enjoy or be good at, so I may be motivated to diminish its utilitarian importance or be blind to it. Regardless, I do appreciate that there are people like you, cousin it and Wei Dai who are strongly interested in the subject as I think that it’s good for society to have a diversity of intellectuals researching a variety of subjects.
If you strongly believe that researching decision theory presently deserves high priority for researchers in general at present then I would encourage you to write some articles about why you see it as deserving such high priority with a view toward attracting collaborators and helping SIAI explain its focus on decision theory. Some of your thinking here has come out implicitly in your responses to some of my comments but I would be interested in hearing a more holistic account of your views and their justification.