The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas

Kevin

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas — LessWrong

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By interests, I mean concerns related to fulfilling values. For the time being, I consider human minds to be the only entities complex enough to have values. For example, it is very useful to model a cancer cell as having the goal of replicating, but I don't consider it to have replicating as a value.

The cancer example also shows that our own cells don't fulfill or share our values, and yet we still model the consumption of cancer cells as the consumption of a human being.

If you really want to ignore direct consumption by machines - and pretend that the machines are all working exclusively for humans, doing our bidding precisely - then you have GOT to account for people and companies buying things for the machines that they manange - or your model badly loses touch with reality.

I think I might have the biggest issue with this line. Nobody is pretending that machines are all working exclusively for humans, no more than we pretend our cells are working exclusively for us. The idea is that we account for the machine consumption the same way we account for the consumption of our own cells, by attributing it to the human consumers.

timtyler16y00

There is another take on the word "value" - which defines it to mean that which goal-directed systems want.

That way, you can say things like: "Deep Blue usually values bishops more than knights".

To me, such usage seems vastly superior to using "values" to refer to something that only humans have.

4timtyler16y

The idea being criticised is that - if a few humans dominate the economy by commanding huge armies of robot minions, then - without substantial taxation - the economy will grind to a halt - since hardly any humans are earning any money, and so therefore hardly any humans are spending any money. The problem with that is that the huge armies of robot minions are consuming vast quantities of material while competing with each other for resources - and the purchase of all those goods is not being accounted for anywhere in the model - apparently because of the ideas that only humans are consumers and most humans are unemployed . It seems like a fairly straightforwards modelling mistake to me. The purchase of robot fuel and supplies has GOT to be accounted for. Account for it as mega-spending by the human managing director if you really must - but account for it somewhere. As soon as you do that, the whole idea that increassed automation leads to financial meltdown vanishes like a mirage. We already have a pretty clear idea about the effect of automation on the economy - from Japan and South Korea. The machines do a load of work, and their bodies need feeding - creating demand for raw materials and fuel - and the economy is boosted.

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The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas

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The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is soliciting ideas

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