Do you think that it is possible to build an AI that does the moral thing even without being directly contingent on human preferences? Conditional on its possibility, do you think we should attempt to create such an AI?
I share your trepidation about humans and their values, but I see that as implying that we have to be meta enough such that even if humans are wrong, our AI will still do what is right. It seems to me that this is still a real possibility. For an example of an FAI architecture that is more in this direction, check out CFAI.
Do you think that it is possible to build an AI that does the moral thing even without being directly contingent on human preferences?
No. I believe that it is practically impossible to systematically and consistently assign utility to world states. I believe that utility can not even be grounded and therefore defined. I don't think that there exists anything like "human preferences" and therefore human utility functions, apart from purely theoretical highly complex and therefore computationally intractable approximations. I don't think that t...
Suppose you buy the argument that humanity faces both the risk of AI-caused extinction and the opportunity to shape an AI-built utopia. What should we do about that? As Wei Dai asks, "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive intelligence explosion?"
This post serves as a table of contents and an introduction for an ongoing strategic analysis of AI risk and opportunity.
Contents:
Why discuss AI safety strategy?
The main reason to discuss AI safety strategy is, of course, to draw on a wide spectrum of human expertise and processing power to clarify our understanding of the factors at play and the expected value of particular interventions we could invest in: raising awareness of safety concerns, forming a Friendly AI team, differential technological development, investigating AGI confinement methods, and others.
Discussing AI safety strategy is also a challenging exercise in applied rationality. The relevant issues are complex and uncertain, but we need to take advantage of the fact that rationality is faster than science: we can't "try" a bunch of intelligence explosions and see which one works best. We'll have to predict in advance how the future will develop and what we can do about it.
Core readings
Before engaging with this series, I recommend you read at least the following articles:
Example questions
Which strategic questions would we like to answer? Muehlhauser (2011) elaborates on the following questions:
Salamon & Muehlhauser (2013) list several other questions gathered from the participants of a workshop following Singularity Summit 2011, including:
These are the kinds of questions we will be tackling in this series of posts for Less Wrong Discussion, in order to improve our predictions about which direction we can nudge the future to maximize the chances of a positive intelligence explosion.