What does it matter that the first AGIs will be OAIs, if UFAIs follow immediately after? I mean, once knowledge of how to build OAIs start to spread, how are you going to make sure that nobody fails to properly contain their Oracles, or intentionally modifies them into AGIs that act on their own initiatives? (This recent post of mine might better explain where I'm coming from, if you haven't already read it.)
Wot cousin_it said.
Of course the model "OAIs are extremely dangerous if not properly contained; let's let everyone have one!" isn't going to work. But there are many things we can try with an OAI (building a FAI, for instance), and most importantly, some of these things will be experimental (the FAI approach relies on getting the theory right, with no opportunity to test it). And there is a window that doesn't exist with a genie - a window where people realise superintelligence is possible and where we might be able to get them to take safety ser...
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.