Philosophers have speculated that an AI tasked with a task such as creating paperclips might cause an apocalypse by learning to divert ever-increasing resources to the task, and then learning how to resist our attempts to turn it off. But this column argues that, to do this, the paperclip-making AI would need to create another AI that could acquire power both over humans and over itself, and so it would self-regulate to prevent this outcome. Humans who create AIs with the goal of acquiring power may be a greater existential threat.
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The insight from economics is that while it may be hard, or even impossible, for a human to control a super-intelligent AI, it is equally hard for a super-intelligent AI to control another AI. Our modest super-intelligent paperclip maximiser, by switching on an AI devoted to obtaining power, unleashes a beast that will have power over it. Our control problem is the AI’s control problem too. If the AI is seeking power to protect itself from humans, doing this by creating a super-intelligent AI with more power than its parent would surely seem too risky.
Here we examine the paperclip apocalypse concern for artificial general intelligence (or AGI) whereby a superintelligent AI with a simple goal (ie., producing paperclips) accumulates power so that all resources are devoted towards that simple goal and are unavailable for any other use. We provide conditions under which a paper apocalypse can arise but also show that, under certain architectures for recursive self-improvement of AIs, that a paperclip AI may refrain from allowing power capabilities to be developed. The reason is that such developments pose the same control problem for the AI as they do for humans (over AIs) and hence, threaten to deprive it of resources for its primary goal.
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Website: https://www.joshuagans.com
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Gans
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Link to actual paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04309
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