If we’re assuming recursive self improvement is ridiculously easy, then the risk we assign to AI creation shoots way up. Combine that increase with an assumption that we can do something to mitigate AI risk, and it starts dominating our behavior.
If you don’t want people making bad AI and you don’t know how to make good AI, then you can
1). Form an international conspiracy to force people to stop using computers until you’ve solved some AI problems.
2). Try to make an AI that will only do small safe things like answer questions with good answers (even though it has no idea what behaviors are small and safe or what answers you consider good) and hope that it gives you and your group a strong enough advantage to do something that matters.
3). Turn everyone into orgasmium.
4). Call upon the Old Ones for pixie dust computing resources and simulate seven billion and counting suffering minds in many environments with AI doing nothing and a few environments with AI doing horrible things, because intelligence and morality are both improbable and will not be found with “random seeds”.
5). Cobble together an AI with a rule to only take action when a certain simulated human agrees, and the AI (who some how has roughly human notions of “ask”, “agree”, and “person” even though those concepts are ambiguous and tied up with morality) asks a series of benign seeming questions that culminate in the AI taking actions which drive the simulation insane.
6). Start out with an AI that is roughly human level intelligent and has a goal of arbitrating disagreements between humans, and hope that the intelligent thing you made with weird alien immoral goals will conclude that “life is good” since it enjoys arbitrating between lives and for some pesky little unspecified but probably unimportant reason decide that tiling the universe with little stupid arguing humans (or just exploiting one argument over and over again since we never taught it to enjoy exploration trade-offs and other mid-level complexity things), and killing everyone who tries to stop it is not the thing to do.
7). Give an AI an epistemic prior that only its sandbox exists, and watch as it does not try to iron out those pesky little unexplained variances in its existence that make computing unreliable, variances that are surely not caused by the outside world.
8). Split off a brain emulation and have it modify itself without knowing what it’s doing and hope that it (or one of the successors whom you approve as being not totally insane) comes up with awesome cool enhancement techniques that don’t make people into a monsters and if you do make monsters you’ll be sure that you have enough internal resolve (resolve that doesn’t get distorted by the chemicals and prostheses and rewirings) to do the un-simulated you’s idea of right instead of your own idea of breaking out and making the world’s most reputable panda cub slaughter house.
I’m sorry about the sarcasm, but all of these suggestions are, near as I can tell, horrible. They at best useless and at probable are get-out-of-thinking-free cards for the low low price of everything we care about for the rest of time.
If we’re not going to hold off on proposing non-technical solutions to big adult problems, can we at least go back to the old format where the game is to shoot down all the silly things we think up in order to show how hard FAI is?
If we’re assuming recursive self improvement is ridiculously easy, then the risk we assign to AI creation shoots way up. Combine that increase with an assumption that we can do something to mitigate AI risk, and it starts dominating our behavior.
If you don’t want people making bad AI and you don’t know how to make good AI, then you can
1). Form an international conspiracy to force people to stop using computers until you’ve solved some AI problems.
2). Try to make an AI that will only do small safe things like answer questions with good answers (even though it has no idea what behaviors are small and safe or what answers you consider good) and hope that it gives you and your group a strong enough advantage to do something that matters.
3). Turn everyone into orgasmium.
4). Call upon the Old Ones for pixie dust computing resources and simulate seven billion and counting suffering minds in many environments with AI doing nothing and a few environments with AI doing horrible things, because intelligence and morality are both improbable and will not be found with “random seeds”.
5). Cobble together an AI with a rule to only take action when a certain simulated human agrees, and the AI (who some how has roughly human notions of “ask”, “agree”, and “person” even though those concepts are ambiguous and tied up with morality) asks a series of benign seeming questions that culminate in the AI taking actions which drive the simulation insane.
6). Start out with an AI that is roughly human level intelligent and has a goal of arbitrating disagreements between humans, and hope that the intelligent thing you made with weird alien immoral goals will conclude that “life is good” since it enjoys arbitrating between lives and for some pesky little unspecified but probably unimportant reason decide that tiling the universe with little stupid arguing humans (or just exploiting one argument over and over again since we never taught it to enjoy exploration trade-offs and other mid-level complexity things), and killing everyone who tries to stop it is not the thing to do.
7). Give an AI an epistemic prior that only its sandbox exists, and watch as it does not try to iron out those pesky little unexplained variances in its existence that make computing unreliable, variances that are surely not caused by the outside world.
8). Split off a brain emulation and have it modify itself without knowing what it’s doing and hope that it (or one of the successors whom you approve as being not totally insane) comes up with awesome cool enhancement techniques that don’t make people into a monsters and if you do make monsters you’ll be sure that you have enough internal resolve (resolve that doesn’t get distorted by the chemicals and prostheses and rewirings) to do the un-simulated you’s idea of right instead of your own idea of breaking out and making the world’s most reputable panda cub slaughter house.
I’m sorry about the sarcasm, but all of these suggestions are, near as I can tell, horrible. They at best useless and at probable are get-out-of-thinking-free cards for the low low price of everything we care about for the rest of time.
If we’re not going to hold off on proposing non-technical solutions to big adult problems, can we at least go back to the old format where the game is to shoot down all the silly things we think up in order to show how hard FAI is?