I suspect a self-modifying AI that's cobbled together enough to be willing to mess with its goals will tend towards certain goals. Specifically, I think it would be likely to end up trying to maximize some combination of happiness (probably just its own), knowledge, power, and several other things.
I'd still consider this an argument to work on FAI. Motivation and intelligence don't have to be orthogonal; they just have to not be parallel.
Motivation and intelligence don't have to be orthogonal; they just have to not be parallel.
Exactly. The orthogonality thesis is far stronger than what is needed. And that's important, because orthogonality looks quite simply false. Intelligence is fostered by specific motivations: curiosity, truth-seeking, a search for simple and elegant explanations, and so on. Of course you could redefine "motivation" so that these "don't count", and make orthogonality a tautology, but that doesn't seem productive.
In Tim Tyler's reply he quote...
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.