One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.
A possible intuition may come from computer games. In principle, a game world can be arbitrarily complex, and the goals ("winning conditions") are specified by the programmers, so they can be anything at all. For example, the world may be Medieval Fantasy setting, while the goal may be to invent, craft, take from NPCs by force, and otherwise collect as many paperclips as possible. If an external incentive is provided for people to play the game (e.g., they get real-world money for each paperclip), the players will essentially become paperclip maximizers within the game world.
A related point. I don't think the creators of The Sims, for example, anticipated that perhaps the primary use of their game would be as a sadistic torture simulator. The game explicitly rewards certain actions within the game, namely improving your game-character's status. The game tells you what you should want. But due to our twisted psychology, we get more satisfaction locking our character in a room with no toilet, bed, food or water, with a blaring TV playing all day and night. And then killing him in a fire.
Totally normal people who are not oth... (read more)