paulfchristiano comments on What can you do with an Unfriendly AI? - Less Wrong

16 Post author: paulfchristiano 20 December 2010 08:28PM

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Comment author: paulfchristiano 20 December 2010 09:37:22PM 1 point [-]

Indeed, by saving themselves I was appealing to my analogy. This relies on the construction of a utility function such that human generosity now is more valuable than world domination later. I can write down many such utility functions easily, as contrasted with the difficulty of describing friendliness, so I can at least hope to design an AI which has one of them.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 December 2010 12:21:42AM 2 points [-]

I can write down many such utility functions easily, as contrasted with the difficulty of describing friendliness, so I can at least hope to design an AI which has one of them.

What you can do when you can write down stable utility functions - after you have solved the self-modification stability problem - but you can't yet write down CEV - is a whole different topic from this sort of AI-boxing!

Comment author: paulfchristiano 21 December 2010 01:31:05AM 5 points [-]

I don't think I understand this post.

My claim is that it is easier to write down some stable utility functions than others. This is intimately related to the OP, because I am claiming as a virtue of my approach to boxing that it leaves us with the problem of getting an AI to follow essentially any utility function consistently. I am not purporting to solve that problem here, just making the claim that it is obviously no harder and almost obviously strictly easier than friendliness.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 20 December 2010 09:39:42PM *  1 point [-]

Then you don't need the obscurity part.

Comment author: paulfchristiano 20 December 2010 09:41:37PM 2 points [-]

I don't understand. How do you propose to incentivize the genie appropriately? I haven't done anything for the purpose of obscurity, just for the purpose of creating an appropriate incentive structure. I see no way to get the answer out in one question in general; that would certainly be better if you could do it safely.