dlthomas comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Yes, that was a part of the point of the article - people try to fully specify what they want, it gets this complex, and it's still missing things; meanwhile, people understand what someone means when they say "I wish I was immortal."
Well, they understand it about as well as the speaker does. It's not clear to me that the speaker always knows what they mean.
Right - there's no misunderstanding, because the complexity is hidden by expectations and all sorts of shared stuff that isn't likely to be there when talking to a genie of the "sufficiently sophisticated AI" variety, unless you are very careful about making sure that it is. Hence, the wish has hidden complexity - the point (and title) of the article.