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XiXiDu comments on AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analysis - Less Wrong
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The reason for why I think that working towards FAI might be a bad idea is that it increases the chance of something going horrible wrong.
If I was to accept the framework of beliefs hold by SI then I would assign a low probability to the possibility that the default scenario in which an AI undergoes recursive self-improvement will include a lot of blackmailing that leads to a lot of suffering. Where the default is that nobody tries to make AI friendly.
I believe that any failed attempt at friendly AI is much more likely to 1) engage in blackmailing 2) keep humans alive 3) fail in horrible ways:
I think that working towards friendly AI will in most cases lead to negative utility scenarios that vastly outweigh the negative utility of an attempt that creating a simple transformer that turns the universe into an inanimate state.
ETA Not sure why the graph looks so messed up. Does anyone know of a better graphing tool?
I think it's too early to decide this. There are many questions whose answers will become clearer before we have to make a choice one way or another. If eventually it becomes clear that building an antinatalist AI is the right thing to do, I think the best way to accomplish it would be through an organization that's like SIAI but isn't too attached to the idea of FAI and just wants to do whatever is best.
Now you can either try to build an organization like that from scratch, or try to push SIAI in that direction (i.e., make it more strategic and less attached to a specific plan). Of course, being lazy, I'm more tempted to do the latter, but your miles may vary. :)
Yes.
I, for one, am ultimately concerned with doing whatever's best. I'm not wedded to doing FAI, and am certainly not wedded to doing 9-researchers-in-a-basement FAI.
Well, that's great. Still, there are quite a few problems.
How do I know
Every time I see a video of one of you people I think, "Wow, those seem like really nice people. I am probably wrong. They are going to do the right thing."
But seriously, is that enough? Can I trust a few people with the power to shape the whole universe? Can I trust them enough to actually give them money? Can I trust them enough with my life until the end of the universe?
You can't even tell me what "best" or "right" or "winning" stands for. How do I know that it can be or will be defined in a way that those labels will apply to me as well?
I have no idea what your plans are for the day when time runs out. I just hope that you are not going to hope for the best and run some not quite friendly AI that does really crappy things. I hope you consider the possibility of rather blowing everything up than risking even worse outcomes.
Hell no.
This is an open problem. See "How can we be sure a Friendly AI development team will be altruistic?" on my list of open problems.
Blowing everying up would be pretty bad. Bad enough to not encourage the possibility.
"Would you murder a child, if it's the right thing to do?"
If FAI is by definition a machine that does whatever is best, this distinction doesn't seem meaningful.
Ok, let me rephrase that to be clearer.
Do you think SingInst is too attached to a specific kind of FAI design? This isn't my impression. (Also, at this point, it might be useful to unpack "SingInst" into particular people constituting it.)
XiXiDu seems to think so. I guess I'm less certain but I didn't want to question that particular premise in my response to him.
It does confuse me that Eliezer set his focus so early on CEV. I think "it's too early to decide this" applies to CEV just as well as XiXiDu's anti-natalist AI. Why not explore and keep all the plausible options open until the many strategically important questions become clearer? Why did it fall to someone outside SIAI (me, in particular) to write about the normative and meta-philosophical approaches to FAI? (Note that the former covers XiXiDu's idea as a special case.) Also concerning is that many criticisms have been directed at CEV but Eliezer seems to ignore most of them.
I'd be surprised if there weren't people within SingInst who disagree with the focus on CEV, but if so, they seem reluctant to disagree in public so it's hard to tell who exactly, or how much say they have in what SingInst actually does.
I guess this could all be due to PR considerations. Maybe Eliezer just wanted to focus public attention on CEV because it's the politically least objectionable FAI approach, and isn't really terribly attached to the idea when it comes to actually building an FAI. But you can see how an outsider might get that impression...
I always thought CEV was half-baked as a technical solution, but as a PR tactic it is...genius.
Yeah, I thought it was explicitly intended more as a political manifesto than a philosophical treatise. I have no idea why so many smart people, like lukeprog, seem to be interpreting it not only as a philosophical basis but as outlining a technical solution.
Why do you think an unknown maximizer would be worse than a not quite friendly AI? Failed Utopia #4-2 sounds much better than a bunch of paperclips. Orgasmium sounds at least as good as paper clips.
Graphs make your case more convincing - even when they are drawn wrong and don't make sense!
...but seriously: where are you getting the figures in the first graph from?
Are you one of these "negative utilittarians" - who thinks that any form of suffering is terrible?
You sound a bit fixated on doom :-(
What do you make of the idea that the world has been consistently getting better for most of the last 3 billion years (give or take the occasional asteroid strike) - and that the progress is likely to continue?