I don't know if this is a little too afar field for even a Discussion post, but people seemed to enjoy my previous articles (Girl Scouts financial filings, video game console insurance, philosophy of identity/abortion, & prediction market fees), so...
I recently wrote up an idea that has been bouncing around my head ever since I watched Death Note years ago - can we quantify Light Yagami's mistakes? Which mistake was the greatest? How could one do better? We can shed some light on the matter by examining DN with... basic information theory.
Presented for LessWrong's consideration: Death Note & Anonymity.
Sorry, I don't believe you. I've been paying attention to FAI people for some time and never heard "self-modification" used to include situations where the machine performing the "self-modification" does not modify itself. If someone actually took the initiative to define "self-modification" the way you say, I'd perceive them as being deliberately deceptive.
You're being overly literal.
I have seen SIAI affiliated people on Less Wrong arguing that self modification is impossible to prevent by pointing out that even if you include an injunction against rewriting its own source-code would not prevent it from building something else.
Self modification as you describe it is a useless mathematical concept for Friendliness, as is engineering. Worse, it is not even well-defined, if an AI copies itself onto another computer, and alters the copy, is that self-modification? If it modifies itself, but keeps a copy of its o... (read more)