No, I'm pointing out that a purely negative definition isn't actually a useful definition that describes the thing the label is supposed to be pointing at. How does one work toward a negative? We can say a few things it isn't - what is it?
Yudkowsky says:
The term "Friendly AI" refers to the production of human-benefiting, non-human-harming actions in Artificial Intelligence systems that have advanced to the point of making real-world plans in pursuit of goals.
That isn't a "purely negative" definition in the first place.
Even if it was - would you object to the definition of "hole" on similar grounds?
What exactly is wrong with defining some things in terms of what they are not?
It I say a "safe car" is one that doesn't kill or hurt people, that seems just fine to me.
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.