“I’m curious to know how you know that in advance? Isn’t it like a kid making a binding decision on its future self? As Aubrey says, (I’m paraphrasing): “If I’m healthy today and enjoying my life, I’ll want to wake up tomorrow. And so on.” You live a very long time one day at a time.”
Good point. I usually trust myself to make predictions of this sort. For example, I predict that I would not want to eat pizza every day in a row for a year, even though I currently like pizza, and this sort of prediction has worked in the past. But I should probably think harder before I become certain that I can make this prediction with something more complicated like my life. I know that many of the very elderly people I know claim they’re tired of life and just want to die already, and I predict that I have no special immunity to this phenomenon that will let me hold out forever. But I don’t know how much of that is caused by literally being bored with what life has to offer already, and how much of it is caused by decrepitude and inability to do interesting things.
“Evil is far harder than good or mu, you have to get the future almost right for it to care about people at all, but somehow introduce a sustainable evil twist to it.”
In all of human society-space, not just the ones that have existed but every possible combination of social structures that could exist, I interpret only a vanishingly small number (the ones that contain large amounts of freedom, for example) as non-evil. Looking over all of human history, the number of societies I would have enjoyed living in are pretty minimal. I’m not just talking about Dante’s Hell here. Even modern day Burma/Saudi Arabia, or Orwell’s Oceania would be awful enough to make me regret not dying when I had the chance.
I don’t think it’s so hard to get a Singularity that leaves people alive but is still awful. If the problem is a programmer who tried to give it a sense of morality but ended up using a fake utility function or just plain screwing up, he might well end with a With Folded Hands scenario or Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox (I remember Eliezer saying once—imagine if we get an AI that understands everything perfectly except freedom) . And that’s just the complicated failure—the simple one is that the government of Communist China develops the Singularity AI and programs it to do whatever they say.
“Also, steven points out for the benefit of altruists that if it’s not you who’s tortured in the future dystopia, the same resources will probably be used to create and torture someone else.”
I think that’s false. In most cases I imagine, torturing people is not the terminal value of the dystopia, just something they do to people who happen to be around. In a pre-singularity dystopia, it will be a means of control and they won’t have the resources to ‘create’ people anyway, (except the old-fashioned way). In a post-singularity dystopia, resources won’t much matter and the AI’s more likely to be stuck under injunctions to protect existing people than trying to create new ones (unless the problem is the Mere Addition Paradox). Though I admit it would be a very specific subset of rogue AIs that view frozen heads as “existing people”.
“Though I hesitate to point this out, the same logic against cryonic suspension also implies that egoists, but not altruists, should immediately commit suicide in case someone is finishing their AI project in a basement, right now. A good number of arguments against cryonics also imply suicide in the present.”
I’m glad you hesitated to point it out. Luckily, I’m not as rationalist as I like to pretend :) More seriously, I currently have a lot of things preventing me from suicide. I have a family, a debt to society to pay off, and the ability to funnel enough money to various good causes to shape the future myself instead of passively experience it. And less rationally but still powerfully, I have the self-preservation urge pretty strongly that would probably kick in if I tried anything. Someday when the Singularity seems very near, I really am going to have to think about this more closely. If I think a dictator’s about to succeed on an AI project, or if I’ve heard about the specifics of the a project’s code and the moral system seems likely to collapse, I do think I’d be sitting there with a gun to my head and my finger on the trigger.
“I’m curious to know how you know that in advance? Isn’t it like a kid making a binding decision on its future self? As Aubrey says, (I’m paraphrasing): “If I’m healthy today and enjoying my life, I’ll want to wake up tomorrow. And so on.” You live a very long time one day at a time.”
Good point. I usually trust myself to make predictions of this sort. For example, I predict that I would not want to eat pizza every day in a row for a year, even though I currently like pizza, and this sort of prediction has worked in the past. But I should probably think harder before I become certain that I can make this prediction with something more complicated like my life. I know that many of the very elderly people I know claim they’re tired of life and just want to die already, and I predict that I have no special immunity to this phenomenon that will let me hold out forever. But I don’t know how much of that is caused by literally being bored with what life has to offer already, and how much of it is caused by decrepitude and inability to do interesting things.
“Evil is far harder than good or mu, you have to get the future almost right for it to care about people at all, but somehow introduce a sustainable evil twist to it.”
In all of human society-space, not just the ones that have existed but every possible combination of social structures that could exist, I interpret only a vanishingly small number (the ones that contain large amounts of freedom, for example) as non-evil. Looking over all of human history, the number of societies I would have enjoyed living in are pretty minimal. I’m not just talking about Dante’s Hell here. Even modern day Burma/Saudi Arabia, or Orwell’s Oceania would be awful enough to make me regret not dying when I had the chance.
I don’t think it’s so hard to get a Singularity that leaves people alive but is still awful. If the problem is a programmer who tried to give it a sense of morality but ended up using a fake utility function or just plain screwing up, he might well end with a With Folded Hands scenario or Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox (I remember Eliezer saying once—imagine if we get an AI that understands everything perfectly except freedom) . And that’s just the complicated failure—the simple one is that the government of Communist China develops the Singularity AI and programs it to do whatever they say.
“Also, steven points out for the benefit of altruists that if it’s not you who’s tortured in the future dystopia, the same resources will probably be used to create and torture someone else.”
I think that’s false. In most cases I imagine, torturing people is not the terminal value of the dystopia, just something they do to people who happen to be around. In a pre-singularity dystopia, it will be a means of control and they won’t have the resources to ‘create’ people anyway, (except the old-fashioned way). In a post-singularity dystopia, resources won’t much matter and the AI’s more likely to be stuck under injunctions to protect existing people than trying to create new ones (unless the problem is the Mere Addition Paradox). Though I admit it would be a very specific subset of rogue AIs that view frozen heads as “existing people”.
“Though I hesitate to point this out, the same logic against cryonic suspension also implies that egoists, but not altruists, should immediately commit suicide in case someone is finishing their AI project in a basement, right now. A good number of arguments against cryonics also imply suicide in the present.”
I’m glad you hesitated to point it out. Luckily, I’m not as rationalist as I like to pretend :) More seriously, I currently have a lot of things preventing me from suicide. I have a family, a debt to society to pay off, and the ability to funnel enough money to various good causes to shape the future myself instead of passively experience it. And less rationally but still powerfully, I have the self-preservation urge pretty strongly that would probably kick in if I tried anything. Someday when the Singularity seems very near, I really am going to have to think about this more closely. If I think a dictator’s about to succeed on an AI project, or if I’ve heard about the specifics of the a project’s code and the moral system seems likely to collapse, I do think I’d be sitting there with a gun to my head and my finger on the trigger.