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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Recommended Reading for Friendly AI Research - Less Wrong
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Unfortunately, if you think about it, "predicting how a person feels" isn't really helpful to anything, and doesn't contribute to the project of FAI at all (see Are wireheads happy? and The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, for example).
The same happens with other obvious ideas that you think up in the first 5 minutes of considering the problem, and which appear to argue that "research into nuts and bolts of AGI" is relevant for FAI. But on further reflection, it always turns out that these arguments don't hold any water.
The problem comes down the the question of understanding of what it is exactly you want FAI to do, not of how you'd manage to write an actual program that does that with reasonable efficiency. The horrible truth is that we don't have the slightest technical understanding of what it is we want.
Here is a more complex variant that I can't see how to dismiss easily.
If you can build a "predict how humans feel in situation x" function, you can do some interesting things. Lets call this function feel(x). Now as well as first order happiness, you can also predict how they will feel when told about situation X, so feel("told about X").
You might be able to recover something like preference if you can calculate feel("the situation where X is suggested and, told about feel(X) and told about all other possible situations") , for all possible situations, as long as you can rank the output of feel(X) in some way.
Well as long as the human simulator predictor can cope with holding in all possible situations, and not return "worn out" for all situations.
Anyway it is an interesting riff off the idea. Anyone see any holes that I am missing?
Try to figure out what maximizes this estimate method. It won't be anything you'd want implemented, it will be a wireheading stimulus. Plus, FAI needs to valuate (and work to implement) whole possible worlds, not verbal descriptions. And questions about possible worlds involve quantifies of data that a mere human can't handle.
I'm not sure that there is a verbal description of a possible world that is also a wirehead stimulus for me. There might be, which might be enough to discount this method.
True.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction between an answer that we would want and a wireheading solution. Are not all solutions wireheading with an elaborate process to satisfy our status concerns. I.e. is there a real difference between a world that satisfies what we want and directly altering what we want? If the wire in question happens to be an elaborate social order rather than a direct connection why is that different? What possible goal could we want pursued other than the one which we want?
From an evolutionary point of view those things that manage to procreate will out compete those things that change themselves to not care about that and just wirehead.
So in non-singleton situations, alien encounters and any form of resource competition it matters whether you wirehead or not. Pleasure, in an evolved creature, can be seen as the giving (very poor) information on the map to the territory of future influence for the patterns that make up you.
So, assuming survival is important, a solution that maximises survival plus wireheading would seem to solve that problem. Of course it may well just delay the inevitable heat death ending but if we choose to make that important, then sure, we can optimise for survival as well. I'm not sure that gets around the issue that any solution we produce (with or without optimisation for survival) is merely an elaborate way of satisfying our desires (in this case including the desire to continue to exist) and thus all FAI solutions are a form of wireheading.