DanArmak comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - Less Wrong

11 Post author: PhilGoetz 18 May 2012 12:48AM

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Comment author: DanArmak 24 May 2012 07:59:15PM 0 points [-]

If the resources are so scarce that dividing them is so important that even CEV-s agree on the necessity of killing, then again, I prefer humans to decide who gets them.

The resources are not scarce at all. But, there's no consensus of CEVs. The CEVs of 80% want to kill the rest. The CEVs of 20% obviously don't want to be killed. Because there's no consensus, your version of CEV would not interfere, and the 80% would be free to kill the 20%.

No. CEV does not updates anyone's beliefs. It is calculated by extrapolating values in the presence of full knowledge and sufficient intelligence.

I meant that the AI that implements your version of CEV would forcibly update people's actual beliefs to match what it CEV-extrapolated for them. Sorry for the confusion.

As I said elsewhere, if a person's beliefs are THAT incompatible with truth, I'm ok with ignoring their volition. Note, that their CEV is undefined in this case. But I don't believe there exist such people (excluding totally insane).

A case could be made that many millions of religious "true believers" have un-updatable 0/1 probabilities. And so on.

Your solution is to not give them a voice in the CEV at all. Which is great for the rest of us - our CEV will include some presumably reduced term for their welfare, but they don't get to vote on things. This is something I would certainly support in a FAI (regardless of CEV), just as I would support using CEV<few people + me> or even CEV<few people like me in crucial respects> to CEV<everyone>.

The only difference between us then is that I estimate there to be many such people. If you believed there were many such people, would you modify your solution, or is ignoring them however many they are fine by you?

PD reasoning says you should cooperate (assuming cooperation is precommittable).

As I said before, this reasoning is inapplicable, because this situation is nothing like a PD.

  1. The PD reasoning to cooperate only applies in case of iterated PD, whereas creating a singleton AI is a single game.
  2. Unlike PD, the payoffs are different between players, and players are not sure of each other's payoffs in each scenario. (E.g., minor/weak players are more likely to cooperate than big ones that are more likely to succeed if they defect.)
  3. The game is not instantaneous, so players can change their strategy based on how other players play. When they do so they can transfer value gained by themselves or by other players (e.g. join research alliance 1, learn its research secrets, then defect and sell the secrets to alliance 2).
  4. It is possible to form alliances, which gain by "defecting" as a group. In PD, players cannot discuss alliances or trade other values to form them before choosing how to play.
  5. There are other games going on between players, so they already have knowledge and opinions and prejudices about each other, and desires to cooperate with certain players and not others. Certain alliances will form naturally, others won't.

adoption of total transparency for everybody of all governmental and military matters.

This counts as very weak evidence because it proves it's at least possible to achieve this, yes. (If all players very intensively inspect all other players to make sure a secret project isn't being hidden anywhere - they'd have to recruit a big chunk of the workforce just to watch over all the rest.)

But the probability of this happening in the real world, between all players, as they scramble to be the first to build an apocalyptic new weapon, is so small it's not even worth discussion time. (Unless you disagree, of course.) I'm not convinced by this that it's an easier problem to solve than that of building AGI or FAI or CEV.

Comment author: dlthomas 24 May 2012 08:14:36PM *  0 points [-]

Because there's no consensus, your version of CEV would not interfere, and the 80% would be free to kill the 20%.

There may be a distinction between "the AI will not prevent the 80% from killing the 20%" and "nothing will prevent the 80% from killing the 20%" that is getting lost in your phrasing. I am not convinced that the math doesn't make them equivalent, in the long run - but I'm definitely not convinced otherwise.

Comment author: DanArmak 24 May 2012 08:24:21PM 0 points [-]

I'm assuming the 80% are capable of killing the 20% unless the AI interferes. That's part of the thought experiment. It's not unreasonable, since they are 4 times as numerous. But if you find this problematic, suppose it's 99% killing 1% at a time. It doesn't really matter.

Comment author: dlthomas 24 May 2012 08:28:40PM 1 point [-]

My point is that we currently have methods of preventing this that don't require an AI, and which do pretty well. Why do we need the AI to do it? Or more specifically, why should we reject an AI that won't, but may do other useful things?

Comment author: DanArmak 24 May 2012 08:34:02PM *  0 points [-]

There have been, and are, many mass killings of minority groups and of enemy populations and conscripted soldiers at war. If we cure death and diseases, this will become the biggest cause of death and suffering in the world. It's important and we'll have to deal with it eventually.

The AI under discussion not just won't solve the problem, it would (I contend) become a singleton and prevent me from building another AI that does solve the problem. (If it chooses not to become a singleton, it will quickly be supplanted by an AI that does try to become one.)