What is a terminal value? That which stimulates the planning reward circuit in the human nucleus accumbens?
the value I place on having fun . . .may in turn be thought of as an instrumental value of a yet deeper value: the value I place on being happy moment-to-moment.
From the deeper perspective of computational neuroscience, the intrinsic/instrumental values reduce to cached predictions of your proposed 'terminal value' (being happy moment-to-moment), which reduces to various types of stimulations of the planning reward circuitry.
Labeling the experience of chocolate ice cream as an 'instrumental value' and the resulting moment-to-moment happiness as the real 'terminal value' is a useless distinction - it then collapses your terminal values down to the singular of 'happiness' and relabels everything worthy of discussion as 'instrumental'.
The quality of being happy moment-to-moment is anything but a single value and should not by any means be reduced to a single concept. It is a vast space of possible mental stimuli, each of which creates a unique conscious experience.
The set of mental states encompassed by "being happy moment-to-moment moment-to-moment" is vast: the gustatory pleasure of eating chocolate ice cream, the feeling of smooth silk sheets, the release of orgasm, the satisfaction of winning a game of chess, the accomplishment of completing a project, the visual experience of watching a film, the euphoria of eureka, all of these describe entire complex spaces of possible mental states.
Furthemore, the set of possible mental states is forever dynamic, incomplete, and undefined. The set of possible worlds that could lead to different visual experiences, as just a starter example, is infinite, and each new experience or piece of knowledge itself changes the circuitry underlying the experiences and thus changes our values.
If you were going to implement your own preference function as a Turing machine, trying to keep the code as short as possible, the terminal values would be the things that machine would value.
The simplest complete turing machine implementation of your preference function is an emulation of your mind. It is you, and it has no perfect simpler equivalent (although many imperfect simulations are possible).
However, from a human perspective, that's [computational singularity] still a pretty large potential target range, and a large proportion of it is undesirable
The core of the cosmist idea is that for any possible goal evaluator with an infinite planning horizon, there is a single convergent optimal path towards that goal system. So no, the potential target range in theory is not large at all - it is singularly narrow.
As an example, consider a model universe consisting of a modified game of chess or go. The winner of the game is then free to arrange the pieces on the board in any particular fashion (including the previously dead pieces). The AI's entire goal is to make some particular board arrangement - perhaps a smily face. For any such possible goal system, all AI's play the game exactly the same at the limits of intelligence - they just play optimally. Their behaviour doesn't differ in the slightest until the game is done and they have won.
Whether the sequence of winning moves such a god would make on our board is undesirable or not from our current perspective is a much more important, and complex, question.
David Chalmers is a leading philosopher of mind, and the first to publish a major philosophy journal article on the singularity:
Chalmers, D. (2010). "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis." Journal of Consciousness Studies 17:7-65.
Chalmers' article is a "survey" article in that it doesn't cover any arguments in depth, but quickly surveys a large number of positions and arguments in order to give the reader a "lay of the land." (Compare to Philosophy Compass, an entire journal of philosophy survey articles.) Because of this, Chalmers' paper is a remarkably broad and clear introduction to the singularity.
Singularitarian authors will also be pleased that they can now cite a peer-reviewed article by a leading philosopher of mind who takes the singularity seriously.
Below is a CliffsNotes of the paper for those who don't have time to read all 58 pages of it.
The Singularity: Is It Likely?
Chalmers focuses on the "intelligence explosion" kind of singularity, and his first project is to formalize and defend I.J. Good's 1965 argument. Defining AI as being "of human level intelligence," AI+ as AI "of greater than human level" and AI++ as "AI of far greater than human level" (superintelligence), Chalmers updates Good's argument to the following:
By "defeaters," Chalmers means global catastrophes like nuclear war or a major asteroid impact. One way to satisfy premise (1) is to achieve AI through brain emulation (Sandberg & Bostrom, 2008). Against this suggestion, Lucas (1961), Dreyfus (1972), and Penrose (1994) argue that human cognition is not the sort of thing that could be emulated. Chalmers (1995; 1996, chapter 9) has responded to these criticisms at length. Briefly, Chalmers notes that even if the brain is not a rule-following algorithmic symbol system, we can still emulate it if it is mechanical. (Some say the brain is not mechanical, but Chalmers dismisses this as being discordant with the evidence.)
Searle (1980) and Block (1981) argue instead that even if we can emulate the human brain, it doesn't follow that the emulation is intelligent or has a mind. Chalmers says we can set these concerns aside by stipulating that when discussing the singularity, AI need only be measured in terms of behavior. The conclusion that there will be AI++ at least in this sense would still be massively important.
Another consideration in favor of premise (1) is that evolution produced human-level intelligence, so we should be able to build it, too. Perhaps we will even achieve human-level AI by evolving a population of dumber AIs through variation and selection in virtual worlds. We might also achieve human-level AI by direct programming or, more likely, systems of machine learning.
Premise (2) is plausible because AI will probably be produced by an extendible method, and so extending that method will yield AI+. Brain emulation might turn out not to be extendible, but the other methods are. Even if human-level AI is first created by a non-extendible method, this method itself would soon lead to an extendible method, and in turn enable AI+. AI+ could also be achieved by direct brain enhancement.
Premise (3) is the amplification argument from Good: an AI+ would be better than we are at designing intelligent machines, and could thus improve its own intelligence. Having done that, it would be even better at improving its intelligence. And so on, in a rapid explosion of intelligence.
In section 3 of his paper, Chalmers argues that there could be an intelligence explosion without there being such a thing as "general intelligence" that could be measured, but I won't cover that here.
In section 4, Chalmers lists several possible obstacles to the singularity.
Constraining AI
Next, Chalmers considers how we might design an AI+ that helps to create a desirable future and not a horrifying one. If we achieve AI+ by extending the method of human brain emulation, the AI+ will at least begin with something like our values. Directly programming friendly values into an AI+ (Yudkowsky, 2004) might also be feasible, though an AI+ arrived at by evolutionary algorithms is worrying.
Most of this assumes that values are independent of intelligence, as Hume argued. But if Hume was wrong and Kant was right, then we will be less able to constrain the values of a superintelligent machine, but the more rational the machine is, the better values it will have.
Another way to constrain an AI is not internal but external. For example, we could lock it in a virtual world from which it could not escape, and in this way create a leakproof singularity. But there is a problem. For the AI to be of use to us, some information must leak out of the virtual world for us to observe it. But then, the singularity is not leakproof. And if the AI can communicate us, it could reverse-engineer human psychology from within its virtual world and persuade us to let it out of its box - into the internet, for example.
Our Place in a Post-Singularity World
Chalmers says there are four options for us in a post-singularity world: extinction, isolation, inferiority, and integration.
The first option is undesirable. The second option would keep us isolated from the AI, a kind of technological isolationism in which one world is blind to progress in the other. The third option may be infeasible because an AI++ would operate so much faster than us that inferiority is only a blink of time on the way to extinction.
For the fourth option to work, we would need to become superintelligent machines ourselves. One path to this mind be mind uploading, which comes in several varieties and has implications for our notions of consciousness and personal identity that Chalmers discusses but I will not. (Short story: Chalmers prefers gradual uploading, and considers it a form of survival.)
Conclusion
Chalmers concludes:
References
Block (1981). "Psychologism and behaviorism." Philosophical Review 90:5-43.
Chalmers (1995). "Minds, machines, and mathematics." Psyche 2:11-20.
Chalmers (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press.
Dreyfus (1972). What Computers Can't Do. Harper & Row.
Lucas (1961). "Minds, machines, and Godel." Philosophy 36:112-27.
Penrose (1994). Shadows of the Mind. Oxford University Press.
Sandberg & Bostrom (2008). "Whole brain emulation: A roadmap." Technical report 2008-3, Future for Humanity Institute, Oxford University.
Searle (1980). "Minds, brains, and programs." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3:417-57.
Yudkowsky (2004). "Coherent Extrapolated Volition."