Juno_Watt

Karma: 31

Juno_Watt 28 Sep 2013 13:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Epistemic Viciousness

My Favorite Liar. Tell people that you’re going to make X deliberately incorrect statements every training session and they’ve got to catch them.

I can think of only one example of someone who actually did this, and that was someone generally classed a a mystic.

Juno_Watt 13 Sep 2013 8:57 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care

Not so! An AGI need not think like a human, need not know much of anything about humans, and need not, for that matter, be as intelligent as a human.

Is that a fact? No, it’s a matter of definition. It’s scarecely credible you are unaware that a lot of people think the TT is critical to AGI.

The problem I’m pointing to here is that a lot of people treat ‘what I mean’ as a magical category.

I can’t see any evidence of anyone invlolved in these discussions doing that. It looks like a straw man to me.

Ok. NL is hard. Everyone knows that. But its got to be solved anyway.

Nope!

An AI you can’t talk to has pretty limited usefulness, and it has pretty limited safety too, since you don;t even have the option of telling it to stop, or expaling to it why you don;t like what it is doing. Oh, and isn’t EY assumign that an AGi will have NLP? After all, it is supposed to be able to talk its way out of the box.

It’s one the SI can solve for itself.

It can figure out semantics for itslef. Values are a subsert of semantics...

No human being has ever created anything—no system of laws, no government or organization, no human, no artifact—that, if it were more powerful, would qualify as Friendly. I

Wherer do you get this stuff from? Modern societies, with their complex legal and security systems are much less violent than ancient socieites. To take ut one example.

All or nearly all humans, if they were more powerful, would qualify as Unfriendly.

Gee. Then I guess they don’t have an architecutre with a basic drive to be friendly.

‘Smiles’ and ‘statements of approval’ are not adequate roadmarks, because those are stimuli the SI can seize control of in unhumanistic ways to pump its reward buttons.

Why don’t humans do that?

No, it isn’t.

Uh-huh. MIRI has settled that centuries-aold quesiton for once and all has it?

And this is a non sequitur.

It can’t be a non-sequitur, since it is not an arguemnt but a statement of fact.

Nothing else in your post calls orthogonality into question.

So? It wasn’t relevant anywhere else.

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 16:36 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: General purpose intelligence: arguing the Orthogonality thesis
Let G1=”Figure out the right goal to have”

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 16:30 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: General purpose intelligence: arguing the Orthogonality thesis

If an agent has goal G1 and sufficient introspective access to know its own goal, how would avoiding arbirtrariness in its goals help it achieve goal G1 better than keeping goal G1 as its goal?

Avoiding arbitrariness is useful to epistemic rationality and therefore to instrumental rationality. If an AI has rationality as a goal it will avoid arbitrariness, whether or not that assists with G1.

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 16:07 UTC
−10 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care
And you are confusing self-improving AIs with conventional programmes.

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 16:06 UTC
−5 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care

Those are only ‘mistakes’ if you value human intentions. A grammatical error is only an error because we value the specific rules of grammar we do; it’s not the same sort of thing as a false belief (though it may stem from, or result in, false beliefs).

You will see a grammatical error as a mistake if you value grammar in general, or if you value being right in general.

A self-improving AI needs a goal. A goal of self-improvement alone would work. A goal of getting things right in general would work too, and be much safer, as it would include getting our intentions right as a sub-goal.

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 15:17 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: nshepperd’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care

GAI is a program. It always does what it’s programmed to do. That’s the problem—a program that was written incorrectly will generally never do what it was intended to do.

So self-correcting software is impossible. Is self improving software possible?

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 15:13 UTC
−7 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care

You’ve still not given any reason for the future software to care about “what you mean” over all those other calculation either.

Software that cares what you mean will be selected for by market forces.

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 15:11 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: nshepperd’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care
Present day software may not have got far with regard to the evaluative side of doing what you want, but the XiXiDu’s point seems to be that it is getting better at the semantic side. Who was it who said the value problem is part of the semantic problem?

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 14:14 UTC
−4 points
on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care
A. Solve the Problem of Meaning-in-General in advance, and program it to follow our instructions’ real meaning. Then just instruct it ‘Satisfy my preferences’, and wait for it to become smart enough to figure out my preferences.

That problem has got to be solved somehow at some stage, because something that couldn’t pass a Turing Test is no AGI.
But there are a host of problems with treating the mere revelation that A is an option as a solution to the Friendliness problem.
1. You have to actually code the seed AI to understand what we mean. Y
Why is that a problem? Is anyone suggesting AGI can be had for free?
1. The Problem of Meaning-in-General may really be ten thousand heterogeneous problems, especially if ‘semantic value’ isn’t a natural kind. There may not be a single simple algorithm that inputs any old brain-state and outputs what, if anything, it ‘means’; it may instead be that different types of content are encoded very differently.
Ok. NL is hard. Everyone knows that. But its got to be solved anyway.

3… On the face of it, programming an AI to fully understand ‘Be Friendly!’ seems at least as difficult as just programming Friendliness into it, but with an added layer of indirection.

Yeah, but it’s got to be done anyway.

[more of the same snipped]

It’s clear that building stable preferences out of B or C would create a Friendly AI.

Yeah. But it wouldn’t be an AGI or an SI if it couldn’t pass a TT.

The genie — if it bothers to even consider the question — should be able to understand what you mean by ‘I wish for my values to be fulfilled.’ Indeed, it should understand your meaning better than you do. But superintelligence only implies that the genie’s map can compass your true values. Superintelligence doesn’t imply that the genie’s utility function has terminal values pinned to your True Values, or to the True Meaning of your commands.

The issue of whether the SI’s UF contains a set of human values is irrelevant. In a Loosemore architecture, an AI needs to understand and follow the directive “be friendly to humans”, and those are all the goals it needs—to understand, and to follow;

When you write the seed’s utility function, you, the programmer, don’t understand everything about the nature of human value or meaning. That imperfect understanding remains the causal basis of the fully-grown superintelligence’s actions, long after it’s become smart enough to fully understand our values.

The UF only needs to contain “understand English, and obey this directive”. You don’t have to code semantics into the UF. You do of course, have to code it in somewhere,

Instead, we have to give it criteria we think are good indicators of Friendliness, so it’ll know what to self-modify toward

A problem which has been solved over and over by humans. Humans don’t need to be loaded apriori with what makes other humans happy, they only need to know general indicators, like smiles and statements of approval.

Yes, the UFAI will be able to solve Friendliness Theory. But if we haven’t already solved it on our own power, we can’t pinpoint Friendliness in advance, out of the space of utility functions. And if we can’t pinpoint it with enough detail to draw a road map to it and it alone, we can’t program the AI to care about conforming itself with that particular idiosyncratic algorithm.

Why would that be necessary? In the Loosemore architecture, the AGI has the goals of understanding English and obeying the Be Friendly directive. It eventually gets a detailed, extensional, understanding of Friendliness from pursuing those goals, Why would it need to be preloaded with a detailed, extensional unpacking of friendliness? It could fail in understanding English, of course. But there is no reason to think it is unlikely to fail at understanding “friendliness” specifically, and its competence can be tested as you go along.

And if we can’t pinpoint it with enough detail to draw a road map to it and it alone, we can’t program the AI to care about conforming itself with that particular idiosyncratic algorithm.

I don’t see the problem. In the Loosemore architecture, the AGI will care about obeying “be friendly”, and it will arrive at the detailed expansion, the idiosyncracies, of “friendly” as part of its other goal to understand English. It cares about being friendly, and it knows the detailed expansion of friendliness, so where’s the problem?

Yes, the UFAI will be able to self-modify to become Friendly, if it so wishes. But if there is no seed of Friendliness already at the heart of the AI’s decision criteria, no argument or discovery will spontaneously change its heart.

Says who? It has the high level directive, and another directive to understand the directive. It’s been Friendly in principle all along, it just needs to fill in the details.

Unless we ourselves figure out how to program the AI to terminally value its programmers’ True Intentions,

Then we do need to figure out how to program the AI to terminally value its programmers’ True Intentions. That is hardly a fatal objection. Did you think the Loosemore architecture was one that bootstraps itself without any basic goals?

And if we do discover the specific lines of code that will get an AI to perfectly care about its programmer’s True Intentions, such that it reliably self-modifies to better fit them — well, then that will just mean that we’ve solved Friendliness Theory.

No. The goal to understand English is not the same as a goal to be friendly in every way, it is more constrained.

Solving Friendliness, in the MIRI sense, means preloading a detailed expansion of “friendly”. That is not what is happening in the Loosemore architecture. So it is not equivalent to solving the same problem.

The clever hack that makes further Friendliness research unnecessary is Friendliness.

Nope.

Intelligence on its own does not imply Friendliness.

That is an open question.

It’s true that a sufficiently advanced superintelligence should be able to acquire both abilities. But we don’t have them both, and a pre-FOOM self-improving AGI (‘seed’) need not have both. Being able to program good programmers is all that’s required for an intelligence explosion; but being a good programmer doesn’t imply that one is a superlative moral psychologist or moral philosopher.

Then hurrah for the Loosemore architecture, which doesn’t require humans to”solve” friendliness in the MIRI sense.

Juno_Watt 12 Sep 2013 6:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: The genie knows, but doesn’t care
Some folks on this site have accidentally bought unintentional snake oil in The Big Hoo Hah That Shall not Be Mentioned. Only an intelligent person could have bought that particular puppy,

Juno_Watt 8 Sep 2013 10:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?
1) What seems (un)likely to an individual depends on their assumptions. If you regard consc. as a form of information processing, thern there is very little inferrential gap to a conclusion of functionalism or computationalism. But there is a Hard Problem of consc, precisely because some aspects—subjective experince, qualia—don’t have any theoretical or practical basis in functionalism of computer technology: we can build memory chips and write storage routines, but we can’t even get a start on building emotion chips or writing seeRed().

2) It’s not practical at the monent, and wouldn’t answer the theoretical questions.

Juno_Watt 31 Aug 2013 8:45 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: Reality is weirdly normal

my intuition that [Mary] would not understand qualia disappears.

For any value of abnormal? SHe is only quantitatively superior: she does not have brain-rewiring abilities.

Juno_Watt 31 Aug 2013 8:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MichaelGR’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2011
Isn’t that disproved by paid-for networks, like HBO? And what about non-US broadcasters like the BBC?

Juno_Watt 28 Aug 2013 1:06 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: Reality is weirdly normal

I think this problem goes both ways. So even if we could get some kind of AI to translate the knowledge into verbal statements for us, it would be impossible, or very difficult, for anything resembling a normal human to gain “experiential knowledge” just by reading the verbal statements.

Mary isn’t a normal human. The point of the story is to explore the limites of explanation. That being the case, Mary is granted unlimited intelligence, so that whatever limits he encountes are limits of explanation, and not her own limits.

I think the most likely reason that qualia seem irreducible is because of some kind of software problem in the brain that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to translate the sort of “experiential knowledge” found in the unconscious “black box” parts of the brain into the sort of verbal, propositional knowledge that we can communicate to other people by language. The high complexity of our minds probably compounds the difficulty even further.

Whatever is stopping Mary from understanding qualia, if you grant that she does not, is not their difficulty in relation to her abilities, as explained above. We might not be able to understand oiur qualia because we are too stupid, but Mary does notnhave that problem.

Juno_Watt 28 Aug 2013 0:51 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: Reality is weirdly normal
Why is she generating a memory? How is she generatign a memory?

Juno_Watt 28 Aug 2013 0:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: Reality is weirdly normal

So she’s bound and gagged, with no ability to use her knowledge?

If by “using her knowledge” you mean performing neurosurgery in herself, I have to repeat that that is a cheat.Otherwise, I ha e to point put that knowledge of, eg. phontosynthesis, doesn’t cause photosynthesis.

Juno_Watt 27 Aug 2013 8:59 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: Reality is weirdly normal

She could then generate such memories in her own brain,

Mary is a super-sceintist in tersm of intelligence and memory, but doesn’t have special abilities to rewire her own cortex. Internally gerneating Red is a cheat, like pricking her thumb to observe the blood.

Juno_Watt 27 Aug 2013 8:38 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: FeepingCreature’s comment on: How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?

If you built a kidney-dialysis machine by a 1:1 mapping and forgot some cell type that is causally active in kidneys, the machine would not actually work.#

I arguing about cases ofWEB and neurla replacement, which are stiuplated as not being 1:1 atom-for-atom replacements.

Changing the physical substrate could remove the qualia, but to claim it could remove the qualia while keeping talk of qualia alive, by sheer coincidence

Not coincidence: a further stipulation that funcitonal equivalene is preserved in WBE;s.

Are you proposing that it’s impossible to build a straight neuron substitute that talks of qualia, without engineering purposeful qualia-talk-emulation machinery?

I am noting thar equivlant talk must be included in functional equivalence.

Why not just build a regular qualia engine, by copying the meat-brain processes 1:1?

You mean atom-by-atom? But is has been put to me that you only need synapse-by-synapse copies. That is what I am responding to.

Juno_Watt 27 Aug 2013 1:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Ghatanathoah’s comment on: Reality is weirdly normal

Feelings are made out of firing neurons, which are in turn made out of atoms.”

A claim that some X is made of some Y is not showing how X’s are made of Y’s. Can you explain why red is produced and not soemthing other.

I don’t get the appeal of dualism.

I wasn’t selling dualism, was noting that ESR’s account is not particualrly phsycialist as well as being not particularly explanatory,

P-zombies and inverted spectrums deserve similar ridicule.

I find the Mary argument more convincing.