I think it strongly unlikely that paperclippers are more advanced than humans, but am not sure if there is a justification for that beyond my preference for humans.
Right. But when you, as a human being with human preferences, decide that you wouldn’t stand in a way of an AGI paperclipper, you’re also using human preferences (the very human meta-preference for one’s preferences to be non-arbitrary), but you’re somehow not fully aware of this.
To put it another way, a truly Paperclipping race wouldn’t feel a similarly reasoned urge to allow a non-Paperclipping AGI to ascend, because “lack of arbitrariness” isn’t a meta-value for them.
So you ought to ask yourself whether it’s your real and final preference that says “human preference is arbitrary, therefore it doesn’t matter what becomes of the universe”, or whether you just believe that you should feel this way when you learn that human preference isn’t written into the cosmos after all. (Because the latter is a mistake, as you realize when you try and unpack that “should” in a non-human-preference-dependent way.)
So you ought to ask yourself whether it’s your real and final preference that says “human preference is arbitrary, therefore it doesn’t matter what becomes of the universe”,
That isn’t what I feel, by the way. It matters to me which way the future turns out; I am just not yet certain on what metric to compare the desirability to me of various volumes of future space. (Indeed, I am pessimistic on being able to come up with anything more than a rough sketch of such a metric.)
I mean, consider two possible futures: in the first, you have a diverse set of less advanced paperclippers (some want paperclips, others want staples, and so on). How do you compare that with a single, more technically advanced paperclipper? Is it unambiguously obvious the unified paperclipper is worse than the diverse group, and that the more advanced is worse than the less advanced?
When you realize that humanity are paperclippers designed by an idiot, it makes the question a lot more difficult to answer.
Right. But when you, as a human being with human preferences, decide that you wouldn’t stand in a way of an AGI paperclipper, you’re also using human preferences (the very human meta-preference for one’s preferences to be non-arbitrary), but you’re somehow not fully aware of this.
To put it another way, a truly Paperclipping race wouldn’t feel a similarly reasoned urge to allow a non-Paperclipping AGI to ascend, because “lack of arbitrariness” isn’t a meta-value for them.
So you ought to ask yourself whether it’s your real and final preference that says “human preference is arbitrary, therefore it doesn’t matter what becomes of the universe”, or whether you just believe that you should feel this way when you learn that human preference isn’t written into the cosmos after all. (Because the latter is a mistake, as you realize when you try and unpack that “should” in a non-human-preference-dependent way.)
That isn’t what I feel, by the way. It matters to me which way the future turns out; I am just not yet certain on what metric to compare the desirability to me of various volumes of future space. (Indeed, I am pessimistic on being able to come up with anything more than a rough sketch of such a metric.)
I mean, consider two possible futures: in the first, you have a diverse set of less advanced paperclippers (some want paperclips, others want staples, and so on). How do you compare that with a single, more technically advanced paperclipper? Is it unambiguously obvious the unified paperclipper is worse than the diverse group, and that the more advanced is worse than the less advanced?
When you realize that humanity are paperclippers designed by an idiot, it makes the question a lot more difficult to answer.