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Eugine_Nier comments on Secrets of the eliminati - Less Wrong
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Eliminativism is all well and good if all one wants to do is predict. However, it doesn't help answer questions like "What should I do?", or "What utility function should we give the FAI?"
The same might be said of evolutionary psychology. In which case I would respond that evolutionary psychology helped us stop thinking in a certain stupid way.
Once, we thought that men were attracted to pretty women because there was some inherent property called "beauty", or that people helped their neighbors because there was a universal Moral Law to which all minds would have access. Once it was the height of sophistication to argue whether people were truly good but corrupted by civilization, or truly evil but restrained by civilization.
Evolutionary psychology doesn't answer "What utility function should we give the FAI?", but it gives good reasons to avoid the "solution": 'just tell it to look for the Universal Moral Law accessible to all minds, and then do that.' And I think a lot of philosophy progresses by closing off all possible blind alleys until people grudgingly settle on the truth because they have no other alternative.
I am less confident in my understanding of eliminativism than of evo psych, so I am less willing to speculate on it. But since one common FAI proposal is "find out human preferences, and then do those", if it turns out human preferences don't really exist in a coherent way, that sounds like an important thing to know.
I think many people have alluded to this problem before, and that the people seriously involved in the research don't actually expect it to be that easy, but a clear specification of all the different ways in which it is not quite that easy is still useful. The same is true for "what should I do?"
I would think that knowing evo psych is enough to realize this is a dodgy approach at best.
I don't see the connection, but I do care about the issue. Can you attempt to state an argument for that?
Human preferences are an imperfect abstraction. People talk about them all the time and reason usefully about them, so either an AI could do the same, or you found a counterexample to the Church-Turing thesis. "Human preferences" is a useful concept no matter where those preferences come from, so evo psych doesn't matter.
Similarly, my left hand is an imperfect abstraction. Blood flows in, blood flows out, flakes of skin fall off, it gets randomly contaminated from the environment, and the boundaries aren't exactly defined, but nevertheless it generally does make sense to think in terms of my left hand.
If you're going to argue that FAI defined in terms of inferring human preferences can't work, I hope that isn't also going to be an argument that an AI can't possibly use the concept of my left hand, since the latter conclusion would be absurd.
Sure. I think I should clarify first that I meant evo psych should have been sufficient to realize that human preferences are not rigorously coherent. If I tell a FAI to make me do what I want to do, its response is going to be "which you?", as there is no Platonic me with a quickly identifiable utility function that it can optimize for me. There's just a bunch of modules that won the evolutionary tournament of survival because they're a good way to make grandchildren.
If I am conflicted between the emotional satisfaction of food and the emotional dissatisfaction of exercise combined with the social satisfaction of beauty, will a FAI be able to resolve that for me any more easily than I can resolve it?
If my far mode desires are rooted in my desire to have a good social identity, should the FAI choose those over my near mode desires which are rooted in my desire to survive and enjoy life?
In some sense, the problem of FAI is the problem of rigorously understanding humans, and evo psych suggests that will be a massively difficult problem. That's what I was trying to suggest with my comment.
I think that bar is unreasonably high. If you have conflict between enjoying eating a lot vs being skinny and beautiful, and the FAI helps you do one or the other, then you aren't in a position to complain that it did the wrong thing. It's understanding of you doesn't have to be more rigorous than your understanding of you.
It does if I want it to give me results any better than I can provide for myself. I also provided the trivial example of internal conflicts- external conflicts are much more problematic. Human desire for status is possibly the source of all human striving and accomplishment. How will a FAI deal with the status conflicts that develop?
No. For example, if it develops some diet drug that lets you safely enjoy eating and still stay skinny and beautiful, that might be a better result than you could provide for yourself, and it doesn't need any special understanding of you to make that happen. It just makes the drug, makes sure you know the consequences of taking it, and offers it to you. If you choose take it, that tells the AI more about your preferences, but there's no profound understanding of psychology required.
Putting an inferior argument first is good if you want to try to get the last word, but it's not a useful part of problem solving. You should try to find the clearest problem where solving that problem solves all the other ones.
If it can do a reasonable job of comparing utilities across people, then maximizing average utility seems to do the right thing here. Comparing utilities between arbitrary rational agents doesn't work, but comparing utilities between humans seems to -- there's an approximate universal maximum (getting everything you want) and an approximate universal minimum (you and all your friends and relatives getting tortured to death). Status conflicts are not one of the interesting use cases. Do you have anything better?
It might not need special knowledge of my psychology, but it certainly needs special knowledge of my physiology.
But notice that the original point was about human preferences. Even if it provides new technologies that dissolve internal conflicts, the question of whether or not to use the technology becomes a conflict. Remember, we live in a world where some people have strong ethical objections to vaccines. An old psychological finding is that oftentimes, giving people more options makes them worse off. If the AI notices that one of my modules enjoys sensory pleasure, offers to wirehead me, and I reject it on philosophical grounds, I could easily become consumed by regret or struggles with temptation, and wish that I never had been offered wireheading in the first place.
I put the argument of internal conflicts first because it was the clearest example, and you'll note it obliquely refers to the argument about status. Did you really think that, if a drug were available to make everyone have perfectly sculpted bodies, one would get the same social satisfaction from that variety of beauty?
I doubt it can measure utilities; as I argued two posts ago, and simple average utilitarianism is so wracked with problems I'm not even sure where to begin.
A common tactic in human interaction is to care about everything more than the other person does, and explode (or become depressed) when they don't get their way. How should such real-life utility monsters be dealt with?
Why do you find status uninteresting?
I haven't heard of people having strong ethical objections to vaccines. They have strong practical (if ill-founded) objections-- they believe vaccines have dangers so extreme as to make the benefits not worth it, or they have strong heuristic objections-- I think they believe health is an innate property of an undisturbed body or they believe that anyone who makes money from selling a drug can't be trusted to tell the truth about its risks.
To my mind, an ethical objection would be a belief that people should tolerate the effects of infectious diseases for some reason such as that suffering is good in itself or that it's better for selection to enable people to develop innate immunities.
If everyone's inferred utility goes from 0 to 1, and the real-life utility monster cares more than the other people about one thing, the inferred utility will say he cares less than other people about something else. Let him play that game until the something else happens, then he loses, and that's a fine outcome.
I think it can, in principle, estimate utilities from behavior. See http://www.fungible.com/respect.
The problems I'm aware of have to do with creating new people. If you assume a fixed population and humans who have comparable utilities as described above, are there any problems left? Creating new people is a more interesting use case than status conflicts.
As I said, because maximizing average utility seems to get a reasonable result in that case.
This may be a bit naive, but can a FAI even have a really directive utility function? It would seem to me that by definition (caveats to using that aside) it would not be running with any 'utility' in 'mind'.