I don't know what you mean by "easy", or why it matters. The Foom argument is that, if you develop a sufficiently powerful AGI, it will foom, unless for some reason it doesn't want to.
What I meant is that you point out that a AGI will foom. Here your premises are that artificial general intelligence is feasible and that fooming is likely. Both premises are reasonable in my opinion. Yet you go one step further and use those arguments as a stepping stone for a further proposition. You claim that it is likely that the AGI (premise) will foom (premise) and that it will then run amog (conclusion). I do not accept the conclusion as given. I believe that it is already really hard to build AGI, or the seed for an AGI that is then able to rapidly self-improve itself. I believe that the level of insight and knowledge required will also allow one to constrain the AGI's sphere of action, its incentive not to fill the universe with as many paperclips as possible but merely a factory building.
But you don't get to simply say "I don't think that's likely", and call that evidence.
No you don't. But this argument runs in both directions. Note that I'm aware of the many stairways to hell by AGI here, the disjunctive arguments. I'm not saying they are not compelling enough to seriously consider them. I'm just trying to take a critical look here. There might be many pathways to safe AGI too, e.g. that it is really hard to build an AGI that cares at all. Hard enough to not get it to do much without first coming up with a rigorous mathematical definition of volition.
Without specific discussions of what "dangerous" and "impede AGI" mean in context, it's hard to separate that argument from an evidence-free heuristic.
Anything that might slow down the invention of true AGI even slightly. There are many risks ahead and without some superhuman mind we might not master them. So by anything you do that might slow down the development of AGI you have to take into account the possible increased danger from challenges an AGI could help to solve.
I don't understand why you think an AI couldn't use fuzziness or use brute force searches to accomplish the same things.
I believe it can, but also that this would mean that any AGI wouldn't be significantly faster than a human mind and really hard to self-improve. It is simply not known how effective the human brain is compared to the best possible general intelligence. Sheer bruteforce wouldn't make a difference then either, as humans could come up with such tools as quickly as the AGI.
This is what LW reasoning refers to as "using arguments as soldiers": that is, treating the arguments themselves as the unit of merit, rather than the probability space covered by those arguments.
If you do not compare probabilities then counter-arguments like the ones above will just outweigh your arguments. You've to show that some arguments are stronger than others.
You would think so, but people apparently still fall for 419 scams. Human-level intelligence is more than sufficient to accomplish social engineering.
Yes, but nobody is going to pull a chip-manufacture-factory out of thin air and hand it to the AGI. Without advanced nanotechnology the AGI will need the whole of humanity to help it develop new computational substrates.
You claim that it is likely that the AGI (premise) will foom (premise) and that it will then run amog (conclusion).
What I am actually claiming is that if such an AGI is developed by someone who does not sufficiently understand what the hell they are doing, then it's going to end up doing Bad Things.
Trivial example: the "neural net" that was supposedly taught to identify camouflaged tanks, and actually learned to recognize what time of day the pictures were taken.
This sort of mistake is the normal case for human programmers to make. The norma...
Major update here.
Related to: Should I believe what the SIAI claims?
Reply to: Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It)
What I ask for:
I want the SIAI or someone who is convinced of the Scary Idea1 to state concisely and mathematically (and with possible extensive references if necessary) the decision procedure that led they to make the development of friendly artificial intelligence their top priority. I want them to state the numbers of their subjective probability distributions2 and exemplify their chain of reasoning, how they came up with those numbers and not others by way of sober calculations.
The paper should also account for the following uncertainties:
Further I would like the paper to include and lay out a formal and systematic summary of what the SIAI expects researchers who work on artificial general intelligence to do and why they should do so. I would like to see a clear logical argument for why people working on artificial general intelligence should listen to what the SIAI has to say.
Examples:
Here are are two examples of what I'm looking for:
The first example is Robin Hanson demonstrating his estimation of the simulation argument. The second example is Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok presenting the reasons for their evaluation of the importance of asteroid deflection.
Reasons:
I'm wary of using inferences derived from reasonable but unproven hypothesis as foundations for further speculative thinking and calls for action. Although the SIAI does a good job on stating reasons to justify its existence and monetary support, it does neither substantiate its initial premises to an extent that an outsider could draw the conclusions about the probability of associated risks nor does it clarify its position regarding contemporary research in a concise and systematic way. Nevertheless such estimations are given, such as that there is a high likelihood of humanity's demise given that we develop superhuman artificial general intelligence without first defining mathematically how to prove the benevolence of the former. But those estimations are not outlined, no decision procedure is provided on how to arrive at the given numbers. One cannot reassess the estimations without the necessary variables and formulas. This I believe is unsatisfactory, it lacks transparency and a foundational and reproducible corroboration of one's first principles. This is not to say that it is wrong to state probability estimations and update them given new evidence, but that although those ideas can very well serve as an urge to caution they are not compelling without further substantiation.
1. If anyone is actively trying to build advanced AGI succeeds, we’re highly likely to cause an involuntary end to the human race.
2. Stop taking the numbers so damn seriously, and think in terms of subjective probability distributions [...], Michael Anissimov (existential.ieet.org mailing list, 2010-07-11)
3. Could being overcautious be itself an existential risk that might significantly outweigh the risk(s) posed by the subject of caution? Suppose that most civilizations err on the side of caution. This might cause them to either evolve much slower so that the chance of a fatal natural disaster to occur before sufficient technology is developed to survive it, rises to 100%, or stops them from evolving at all for being unable to prove something being 100% safe before trying it and thus never taking the necessary steps to become less vulnerable to naturally existing existential risks. Further reading: Why safety is not safe
4. If one pulled a random mind from the space of all possible minds, the odds of it being friendly to humans (as opposed to, e.g., utterly ignoring us, and being willing to repurpose our molecules for its own ends) are very low.
5. Loss or impairment of the ability to make decisions or act independently.
6. The Fermi paradox does allow for and provide the only conclusions and data we can analyze that amount to empirical criticism of concepts like that of a Paperclip maximizer and general risks from superhuman AI's with non-human values without working directly on AGI to test those hypothesis ourselves. If you accept the premise that life is not unique and special then one other technological civilisation in the observable universe should be sufficient to leave potentially observable traces of technological tinkering. Due to the absence of any signs of intelligence out there, especially paper-clippers burning the cosmic commons, we might conclude that unfriendly AI could not be the most dangerous existential risk that we should worry about.