[…] The notion of an argument that convinces any mind seems to involve a little blue woman who was never built into the system, who climbs out of literally nowhere, and strangles the little grey man, because that transistor has just got to output +3 volts: It’s such a compelling argument, you see.
But compulsion is not a property of arguments, it is a property of minds that process arguments.
[…]
And that is why (I went on to say) the result of trying to remove all assumptions from a mind, and unwind to the perfect absence of any prior, is not an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, but a rock. What is left of a mind after you remove the source code? Not the ghost who looks over the source code, but simply… no ghost.
So—and I shall take up this theme again later—wherever you are to locate your notions of validity or worth or rationality or justification or even objectivity, it cannot rely on an argument that is universally compelling to all physically possible minds.
Nor can you ground validity in a sequence of justifications that, beginning from nothing, persuades a perfect emptiness.
[…]
The first great failure of those who try to consider Friendly AI, is the One Great Moral Principle That Is All We Need To Program—aka the fake utility function—and of this I have already spoken.
But the even worse failure is the One Great Moral Principle We Don’t Even Need To Program Because Any AI Must Inevitably Conclude It. This notion exerts a terrifying unhealthy fascination on those who spontaneously reinvent it; they dream of commands that no sufficiently advanced mind can disobey. The gods themselves will proclaim the rightness of their philosophy! (E.g. John C. Wright, Marc Geddes.)
You have to realize that we don’t need full consensus to make great strides in alignment. Your comments are a bit abstract and obtuse. Perhaps you could more clearly and directly address whatever problems you see in creating a narrow AI with expertise in understanding morality.
--No Universally Compelling Arguments
You have to realize that we don’t need full consensus to make great strides in alignment. Your comments are a bit abstract and obtuse. Perhaps you could more clearly and directly address whatever problems you see in creating a narrow AI with expertise in understanding morality.