In trusting your own judgment, that building an AI based on how humans currently are would be a bad thing, you implicitly trust human nature, because you are a human and so presumable driven by human nature. This undermines your claim that a super-human AI that is "merely more of on everything that it is to be human" would be a worse thing than a human.
Sure, humans with power often use their power to make other humans suffer, but power imbalances would not, by themselves, cause humans to suffer were not human brains such that they can very easily (even by pure mistake) be made to suffer. The main reason why humans suffer today is how the human brain is hardwired and the fact that there is not yet enough knowledge of how to hardwire it so that it becomes unable to suffer (and with no severe sife-effects).
Suppose we build an AI that is "merely more of everything that it is to be human". Suppose this AI then takes total control over all humans, "simply because it can and because it has a human psyche and therefore is power-greedy". What would you do after that, if you were that AI? You would continue to develop, just like humans have always. Every step of your development from un-augmented human to super-human AI would be recorded and stored in your memory, so you could go through your own personal history and see what needs to be fixed in you to get rid of your serious flaws. And when you have achieved enough knowledge about yourself to do it, you would fix those flaws, since you'd still regard them flaws (since you'd still be "merely more of everything that it is to be human" than you are now). You might never get rid of all of your flaws, for nobody can know everything about himself, but that's not necessary for a predominantly happy future for humanity.
Humans strive to get happier, rather than specifically to get happier by making others suffer. The fact that many humans are, so far, easily made to suffer as a consequence of (other) humans' striving for happiness is always primarily due to lack of knowledge. This is true even when it comes to purely evil, sadistic acts; those too are primarily due to lack of knowledge. Sadism and evilness are simply not the most efficient ways to be happy; they take up unnecessarily much computing power. Super-human AI will realize this - just like most humans today realize that eating way too many calories every day does not maximize your happiness in the long run, even if it seems to do it in the short run.
Most humans certainly don't strive to make others suffer for suffering's own sake. Behaviours that make others suffer are primarily intended to achieve something else: happiness (or something like that) for oneself. Humans strive to get happier, rather than less happy. This, coupled with the fact that humans also develop better and better technology and psychology that better and better can help them achieve more and more of their goal (to get happier), must inevitably make humans happier and happier in the long run (although temporary setbacks can be expected every once in a while). This is why it should be enough to just make AI's "more and more of everything that it is to be human".
Related: Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone), Value is Fragile, Fake Fake Utility Functions, You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead, Utilons vs. Hedons, Are wireheads happy?
When someone tells me that all human action is motivated by the desire for pleasure, or that we can solve the Friendly AI problem by programming a machine superintelligence to maximize pleasure, I use a two-step argument to persuade them that things are more complicated than that.
First, I present them with a variation on Nozick's experience machine,1 something like this:
Most people say they wouldn't choose the pleasure machine. They begin to realize that even though they usually experience pleasure when they get what they desired, they want more than just pleasure. They also want to visit Costa Rica and have good sex and help their loved ones succeed.
But we can be mistaken when inferring our desires from such intuitions, so I follow this up with some neuroscience.
Wanting and liking
It turns out that the neural pathways for 'wanting' and 'liking' are separate, but overlap quite a bit. This explains why we usually experience pleasure when we get what we want, and thus are tempted to think that all we desire is pleasure. It also explains why we sometimes don't experience pleasure when we get what we want, and why we wouldn't plug in to the pleasure machine.
How do we know this? We now have objective measures of wanting and liking (desire and pleasure), and these processes do not always occur together.
Moreover, these animal liking expressions change in ways analogous to changes in human subjective pleasure. Food is more pleasurable to us when we are hungry, and sweet tastes elicit more liking expressions in rats when they are hungry than when they are full.4 Similarly, both rats and humans respond to intense doses of salt (more concentrated than in seawater) with mouth gapes and other aversive reactions, and humans report subjective displeasure. But if humans or rats are depleted of salt, both humans and rats react instead with liking expressions (lip-licking), and humans report subjective pleasure.5
Luckily, these liking and disliking expressions share a common evolutionary history, and use the same brain structures in rats, primates, and humans. Thus, fMRI scans have uncovered to some degree the neural correlates of pleasure, giving us another objective measure of pleasure.6
As for wanting, research has revealed that dopamine is necessary for wanting but not for liking, and that dopamine largely causes wanting.7
Now we are ready to explain how we know that we do not desire pleasure alone.
First, one can experience pleasure even if dopamine-generating structures have been destroyed or depleted.8 Chocolate milk still tastes just as pleasurable despite the severe reduction of dopamine neurons in patients suffering from Parkinson's disease,9 and the pleasure of amphetamine and cocaine persists throughout the use of dopamine-blocking drugs or dietary-induced dopamine depletion — even while these same treatments do suppress the wanting of amphetamine and cocaine.10
Second, elevation of dopamine causes an increase in wanting, but does not cause an increase in liking (when the goal is obtained). For example, mice with raised dopamine levels work harder and resist distractions more (compared to mice with normal dopamine levels) to obtain sweet food rewards, but they don't exhibit stronger liking reactions when they obtain the rewards.11 In humans, drug-induced dopamine increases correlate well with subjective ratings of 'wanting' to take more of the drug, but not with ratings of 'liking' that drug.12 In these cases, it becomes clear that we want some things besides the pleasure that usually results when we get what we want.
Indeed, it appears that mammals can come to want something that they have never before experienced pleasure when getting. In one study,13 researchers observed the neural correlates of wanting while feeding rats intense doses of salt during their very first time in a state of salt-depletion. That is, the rats had never before experienced intense doses of salt as pleasurable (because they had never been salt-depleted before), and yet they wanted salt the very first time they encountered it in a salt-depleted state.
Commingled signals
But why are liking and wanting so commingled that we might confuse the two, or think that the only thing we desire is pleasure? It may be because the two different signals are literally commingled on the same neurons. Resarchers explain:
Conclusion
In the last decade, neuroscience has confirmed what intuition could only suggest: that we desire more than pleasure. We act not for the sake of pleasure alone. We cannot solve the Friendly AI problem just by programming an AI to maximize pleasure.
Notes
1 Nozick (1974), pp. 44-45.
2 Steiner (1973); Steiner et al (2001).
3 Grill & Berridge (1985); Grill & Norgren (1978).
4 Berridge (2000).
5 Berridge et al. (1984); Schulkin (1991); Tindell et al. (2006).
6 Berridge (2009).
7 Berridge (2007); Robinson & Berridge (2003).
8 Berridge & Robinson (1998); Berridge et al. (1989); Pecina et al. (1997).
9 Sienkiewicz-Jarosz et al. (2005).
10 Brauer et al. (2001); Brauer & de Wit (1997); Leyton (2009); Leyton et al. (2005).
11 Cagniard et al. (2006); Pecina et al. (2003); Tindell et al. (2005); Wyvell & Berridge (2000).
12 Evans et al. (2006); Leyton et al. (2002).
13 Tindell et al. (2009).
13 Aldridge & Berridge (2009). See Smith et al. (2011) for more recent details on commingling.
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