“Unfortunately, Eric, when you build a powerful enough Outcome Pump, it can wish more powerful Outcome Pumps into existence, which can in turn wish even more powerful Outcome Pumps into existence.”
Yes, technology that develops itself, once a certain point of sophistication is reached.
My only acquaintance with AI up to now has been this website: http://www.20q.net Which contains a neural network that has been learning for two decades or so. It can “read your mind” when you’re thinking of a character from the TV show The Simpsons. Pretty incredible actually!
It seems contradictory to previous experience that humans should develop a technology with “black box” functionality, i.e. whose effects could not be foreseen and accurately controlled by the end-user. Technology has to be designed and it is designed with an effect/result in mind. It is then optimized so that the end user understands how to call forth this effect. So positing an effective equivalent of the mythological figure “Genie” in technological form ignores the optimization-for-use that would take place at each stage of developing an Outcome-Pump. The technology-falling-from-heaven which is the Outcome Pump demands that we reverse engineer the optimization of parameters which would have necessarily taken place if it had in fact developed as human technologies do.
I suppose the human mind has a very complex “ceteris paribus” function which holds all these background parameters at equal to their previous values, while not explicitly stating them, and the ironic-wish-fulfillment-Genie idea relates to the fulfillment of a wish while violating an unspoken ceteris paribus rule. Demolishing the building structure violates ceteris paribus more than the movements of a robot-retriever would in moving aside burning material to save the woman. Material displaced from building should be as nearly equal to the womans body weight as possible, inducing an explosion is a horrible violation of the objective, if the Pump could just be made to sense the proper (implied) parameters.
If the market forces of supply and demand continue to undergird technological progress (i.e. research and development and manufacturing), then the development of a sophisticated technology not-optimized-for-use is problematic: who pays for the second round of research implementation? Surely not the customer, when you give him an Outcome Pump whose every use could result in the death and destruction of his surrounding environs and family members. Granted this is an aside and maybe impertinent in the context of this discussion.