The primary task that EY and SIAI have in mind for Friendly AI is "take over the world". (By the way, I think this is utterly foolish, exactly the sort of appealing paradox (like "warring for peace") that can nerd-snipe the best of us.)
Could you explain this in more detail?
As I understand it, EY worked through a chain of reasoning about a decade ago, in his book "Creating Friendly AI". The chain of reasoning is long and I won't attempt to recap it here, but there are two relevant conclusions.
First, that self-improving artificial intelligences are dangerous, and that projects to build self-improving artificial intelligence, or general intelligence that might in principle become self-modifying (such as Goertzel's), are increasing existential risk. Second, that the primary defense against self-improving artificial in...
According to Eliezer, making AI safe requires solving two problems:
1) Formalize a utility function whose fulfillment would constitute "good" to us. CEV is intended as a step toward that.
2) Invent a way to code an AI so that it's mathematically guaranteed not to change its goals after many cycles of self-improvement, negotiations etc. TDT is intended as a step toward that.
It is obvious to me that (2) must be solved, but I'm not sure about (1). The problem in (1) is that we're asked to formalize a whole lot of things that don't look like they should be necessary. If the AI is tasked with building a faster and more efficient airplane, does it really need to understand that humans don't like to be bored?
To put the question sharply, which of the following looks easier to formalize:
a) Please output a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, and please don't get out of your box along the way.
b) Please do whatever the CEV of humanity wants.
Note that I'm not asking if (a) is easy in absolute terms, only if it's easier than (b). If you disagree that (a) looks easier than (b), why?