Nick wrote: Good point, but when the box says “doesn’t halt”, how do I know it’s correct?
A halting-problem oracle can be used for all kinds of things besides just checking whether an individual Turing machine will halt or not. For example you can use it to answer various mathematical questions and produce proofs of the answers, and then verify the proofs yourself. You should be able to obtain enough proofs to convince yourself that the black box is not just giving random answers or just being slightly smarter than you are.
If P!=NP, you should be able to convince yourself that the black box has at least exponentially more computational power than you do. So if you are an AI with say the computational resources of a solar system, you should be able to verify that the black box either contains exotic physics or has access to more resources than the rest of the universe put together.
Eliezer wrote: So once again I say: it is really hard to improve your math abilities with eyes open in a way that you couldn’t theoretically do with eyes closed.
It seems to me that an AI should/can never completely rule out the possibility that the universe contains physics that is mathematically more powerful than what it has already incorporated into itself, so it should always keep its eyes open. Even if it has absorbed the entire universe into itself, it might still be living inside a simulation, right?
Nick wrote: Good point, but when the box says “doesn’t halt”, how do I know it’s correct?
A halting-problem oracle can be used for all kinds of things besides just checking whether an individual Turing machine will halt or not. For example you can use it to answer various mathematical questions and produce proofs of the answers, and then verify the proofs yourself. You should be able to obtain enough proofs to convince yourself that the black box is not just giving random answers or just being slightly smarter than you are.
If P!=NP, you should be able to convince yourself that the black box has at least exponentially more computational power than you do. So if you are an AI with say the computational resources of a solar system, you should be able to verify that the black box either contains exotic physics or has access to more resources than the rest of the universe put together.
Eliezer wrote: So once again I say: it is really hard to improve your math abilities with eyes open in a way that you couldn’t theoretically do with eyes closed.
It seems to me that an AI should/can never completely rule out the possibility that the universe contains physics that is mathematically more powerful than what it has already incorporated into itself, so it should always keep its eyes open. Even if it has absorbed the entire universe into itself, it might still be living inside a simulation, right?