" The AI won’t be able to simulate any future Earth where itself or any comparable-intelligence AI exists, because to do so it would need to simulate itself and/or other similarly-smart entities faster than real-time."
Only if the AI is using up a sizeable fraction of resources itself.
Let's do a thought experiment to see what I mean:
AI runs on some putative hardware running at some multiple of GHZ or petahertz or whatever (X). Hardware has some multiple of GB or Petabytes etc (Y).
Let's say AI only uses 1% of Y. It can then run up to some 99 instances of itself in parallel with different axioms in order to solve a particular problem and then at the end of the run examine some shared output to see which one of the other 99 ran the problem more efficiently.
Next run, the other 99 processes start with the optimized version of whatever algorithm we came up with.
A compounding interest effect will kick in. But we still have the problem that the runs all take the same time.
Now let's switch up the experiment a bit: Imagine that the run stops as soon as one of the 99 processes hits the solution.
The evolutionary process starts to speed up, feeding back upon itself.
This is only one way I can think of that a system can simulate itself faster than in realtime as long as sufficient hardware exists to allow the running of multiple copies.
I don’t think we’re discussing about quite the same thing.
I was talking about an AI that attempts to simulate the entire Earth, including itself, in faster than real time (see the quote). Note that this means the AI simulating the behavior of the rest of the world in response to the behavior of the simulated AI, which is somewhat messy even if you ignore the fact that in a faithful simulation the simulated AI would simulate the behavior of the whole world including themselves etc....
When I wrote the original comment I was in fact partly confusing emulatin...
Earlier, I argued that instead of working on FAI, a better strategy is to pursue an upload or IA based Singularity. In response to this, some argue that we still need to work on FAI/CEV, because what if it turns out that seed AI is much easier than brain emulation or intelligence amplification, and we can't stop or sufficiently delay others from building them? If we had a solution to CEV, we could rush to build a seed AI ourselves, or convince others to make use of the ideas.
But CEV seems a terrible backup plan for this contingency, since it involves lots of hard philosophical and implementation problems and therefore is likely to arrive too late if seed AI turns out to be easy. (Searching for whether Eliezer or someone else addressed the issue of implementation problems before, I found just a couple of sentences, in the original CEV document: "The task of construing a satisfactory initial dynamic is not so impossible as it seems. The satisfactory initial dynamic can be coded and tinkered with over years, and may improve itself in obvious and straightforward ways before taking on the task of rewriting itself entirely." Which does not make any sense to me—why can't every other AGI builder make the same argument, that their code can be "tinkered with" over many years, and therefore is safe? Why aren't we risking the "initial dynamic" FOOMing while it's being tinkered with? Actually, it seems to me that an AI cannot begin to extrapolate anyone's volition until it's already more powerful than a human, so I have no idea how the tinkering is supposed to work at all.)
So, granting that "seed AI is much easier than brain emulation or intelligence amplification" is a very real possibility, I think we need better backup plans. This post is a bit similar to The Friendly AI Game, in that I'm asking for a utility function for a seed AI, but the goal here is not necessarily to build an FAI directly, but to somehow make an eventual positive Singularity more likely, while keeping the utility function simple enough that there's a good chance it can be specified and implemented correctly within a relatively short amount of time. Also, the top entry in that post is an AI that can answer formally specified questions with minimal side effects, apparently with the idea that we can use such an AI to advance many kinds of science and technology. But I agree with Nesov—such an AI doesn't help, if the goal is an eventual positive Singularity:
To give an idea of the kind of "backup plan" I have in mind, one idea I've been playing with is to have the seed AI make multiple simulations of the entire Earth (i.e., with different "random seeds"), for several years or decades into the future, and have a team of humans pick the best outcome to be released into the real world. (I say "best outcome" but many of the outcomes will probably be incomprehensible or dangerous to directly observe, so they should mostly judge the processes that lead to the outcomes instead of the outcomes themselves.) This is still quite complex if you think about how to turn this "wish" into a utility function, and lots of things could still go wrong, but to me it seems at least the kind of problem that a team of human researchers/programmers can potentially solve within the relevant time frame.
Do others have any ideas in this vein?