a friendly AI that is not quite friendly could create a living hell for the rest of time, increasing negative utility dramatically
"Ladies and gentlemen, I believe this machine could create a living hell for the rest of time..."
(audience yawns, people look at their watches)
"...increasing negative utility dramatically!"
(shocked gasps, audience riots)
Do you actually disagree with anything or are you just trying to ridicule it? Do you think that the possibility that FAI research might increase negative utility is not to be taken seriously? Do you think that world states where faulty FAI designs are implemented have on average higher utility than world states where nobody is alive? If so, what research could I possible do to come to the same conclusion? What arguments do I miss? Do I just have to think about it longer?
Consider the way Eliezer Yudkowsky agrues in favor of FAI research:
...Two hundred millio
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.