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.
I hope you consider the possibility of rather blowing everything up than risking even worse outcomes.
Blowing everying up would be pretty bad. Bad enough to not encourage the possibility.
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.