Comment on Should you try to do good work on LW?

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 02:08:10 GMT

We see a path to building systems which have values over the real world.

The path he sees has values over internal model, but internal model is perfect AND it is faster than the real world, which stretches it a fair lot if you ask me. It's not really a path, he's simply using "sufficiently advanced model is indistinguishable from the real thing". And we still can't define what paperclips are if we don't know the exact model that will be used, as the definition is only meaningful in context of a model.

The objection I have is that it is a: unnecessary to define the values over real world (the alternatives work fine for e.g. finding imaginary cures for imaginary diseases which we make match real diseases), b: very difficult or impossible to define values over the real world, and c: values over real world are necessary for the doomsday scenario. If this can be narrowed down, then there's precisely the bit of AI architecture that has to be avoided.

We humans are messy creatures. It is very plausible (in light of potential irreducibility of 'values over real world') that we value internal states on the model, and we also receive negative reinforcement for model-world inconsistencies (when the model-prediction of the senses does not match the senses), resulting in learned preference not to lose correspondence between model and world, in place of straightforward "I value real paperclips therefore I value having a good model of the world" which looks suspiciously simple and poorly matches the observations (no matter how much you tell yourself you value real paperclips, you may procrastinate).

edit: and if I don't make my position clear, it looks so because I am opposed to fuzzy ill defined woo where the distinction between models and worlds is poorly defined and the intelligence is a monolithic blob. It's hard to define an objection to an ill defined idea which always off-shoots some anthropomorphic idea (e.g. wireheading gets replaced with real world goal to have a physical wire in a physical head that is to be kept alive with the wire).

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