One thing I can end up worrying about is that useful tricks get ignored due to a dynamic of:
A person tries to overextend the useful trick beyond its range of applicability such that it turns into a godzilla strategy
Everyone starts associates the trick with the godzilla strategy
People don’t consider using the trick within the range where it is actually applicable
For instance, consider debate. Debate is not magic and there’s lots of things it can’t do. But (constructively understood) logical operators such as “for all” and “exists” can be given meaning using a technique called “game semantics”, and “debate” seems like a potential way to implement this in AI.
Can this do even a fraction of the things that people want debate to do? No. Can I think of anything that needs these game semantics? Not right now, no. But is it a tool that seems potentially powerful for the future? Yeah, I’d say so; it expands the range of things we can express, should we ever find a case where we want to express it, and so it is a good idea to be ready to deploy it.
There’s an easy solution to this: just say that some class of tricks seems potentially useful, and explore what it can be used for, without proposing solutions. There’s no need to immediately jump to proposing solutions all the time.
One thing I can end up worrying about is that useful tricks get ignored due to a dynamic of:
A person tries to overextend the useful trick beyond its range of applicability such that it turns into a godzilla strategy
Everyone starts associates the trick with the godzilla strategy
People don’t consider using the trick within the range where it is actually applicable
For instance, consider debate. Debate is not magic and there’s lots of things it can’t do. But (constructively understood) logical operators such as “for all” and “exists” can be given meaning using a technique called “game semantics”, and “debate” seems like a potential way to implement this in AI.
Can this do even a fraction of the things that people want debate to do? No. Can I think of anything that needs these game semantics? Not right now, no. But is it a tool that seems potentially powerful for the future? Yeah, I’d say so; it expands the range of things we can express, should we ever find a case where we want to express it, and so it is a good idea to be ready to deploy it.
There’s an easy solution to this: just say that some class of tricks seems potentially useful, and explore what it can be used for, without proposing solutions. There’s no need to immediately jump to proposing solutions all the time.