Tetronian comments on Ethical Treatment of AI - Less Wrong

-6 Post author: stanislavzza 15 November 2010 02:30AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 15 November 2010 03:22:47AM 0 points [-]

I agree with you, but I think your argument is moot because I don't see evolution as a practical way to develop AIs, and especially not Friendly ones. Indeed, if Eliezer and SIAI are correct about the possibility of FOOM, then using evolution to create AIs would be extremely dangerous.

Comment author: stanislavzza comment score below threshold [+] (4 children)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 November 2010 08:20:42PM 4 points [-]

How is Rice's theorem at all relevant here?

Note: Just because there is no general algorithm to tell whether an arbitrary AI is friendly, doesn't mean it's impossible to construct a friendly AI.

Comment author: stanislavzza 16 November 2010 10:43:29AM -1 points [-]

Imagine that you want to construct an AI that will never self-halt (easier to define than friendliness, but the same idea applies). You could build the machine so that it doesn't have an off switch, and therefore can't halt simply out of inability. However, if the machine can self-modify, it could subsequently grant itself the ability to halt. So in your design, you'd have to figure out a way to prevent self-halting under all possible input conditions, under all possible self-modifications of the machine. This latter task cannot be solved in the general case because of Rice's Theorem, and engineering a solution leads to an infinite regress:

Machine can't halt directly
Machine can't self-modify to change #1 above
Machine can't self-modify to change #2 above and so on.

So in practice, how can one create a relatively non-suicidal AI? An evolutionary/ecological approach is proven to work: witness biological life. (however, humans, who have the most general computational power, suicide at a more or less constant rate).

In short: genetic programming, or some other such search, can possibly find quasi-solutions (meaning they work under conditions that have been tested) if they exist, but designing in all the required characteristics up front would require tremendous ability to prove outcomes for each specific case. In practice, this debate is probably moot because it'll be a combination of both.

Comment author: red75 16 November 2010 11:48:56AM * 1 point [-]

So in your design, you'd have to figure out a way to prevent self-halting under all possible input conditions, under all possible self-modifications of the machine.

Self-modifications are being performed by the machine itself. Thus we (and/or machine) don't need to prove that all modifications aren't "suicidal". Machine can be programmed to perform only provably (in reasonable time) non-suicidal self-modifications. Rice's theorem doesn't apply in this case.

Edit: However this leaves meta-level unpatched. Machine can self-modify into non-suicidal machine that doesn't care about preserving non-suicidability over modifications. This can be patched by constraining allowed self-modifications to a class of modifications that leads to machines with provably equivalent behavior (with a possible side effect of inability to self-repair).

Comment author: stanislavzza 16 November 2010 01:43:28PM 0 points [-]

The kind of constraint you propose would be very useful. We would have to first prove that there is a kind of topology in under general computation (because the machine can change its own language, so the solution can't be language specific) that only allows non-suicidal trajectories under all possible inputs and self-modifications. (or perhaps at least with low probability, but this is not likely to be computable). I have looked, but not found such a thing in existing theory. There is work on topology of computation, but it's something different from this. I may just be unaware of it, however.

Note that in the real-world scenario, we also have to worry about entropy battering around the design, so we need a margin of error for that too.

Finally, the finite-time solution is practical, but ultimately not satisfying. The short term solution to being in a building on fire may be to stay put. The long term solution may be to risk short-term harm for long-term survival. And so with only short-term solutions, one may end up in a dead end down the road. A practical limit on short-term advance simulation is that one still has to act in real time while the simulation runs. And if you want the simulation to take into account that simulations are occurring, we're back to infinite regress...

Tetronian comments on Ethical Treatment of AI - Less Wrong

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