Today's post, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes was originally published on 24 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

 

There are a lot of things that humans care about. Therefore, the wishes that we make (as if to a genie) are enormously more complicated than we would intuitively suspect. In order to safely ask a powerful, intelligent being to do something for you, that being must share your entire decision criterion, or else the outcome will likely be horrible.


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1 comment, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:37 AM

I guess you can always make the first wish be "Share my entire decision criterion for all following wishes I ask".

To translate that to the development of an AI, you could teach the AI psychology before asking anything of it that could be misunderstood if you use nonhuman decision criteria.