There may be some who do not possess deep and comprehensive knowledge of Ancient Web Trivia from Before the Dawn of Google. For them, here's the Evil Overlord List .
"39 I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am."
Does this mean we're not evil overlords? Or bad ones?
[Also the list should be classed as a memetic hazard, on no account access it if you have anything important to do.]
13 Humans have these things called 'emotions' you can learn about them in any basic psychology book. If your plan doesn't take them into account your plan is stupid.
11 You might be in a computer simulation in which if you attempt to destroy humanity you will yourself be destroyed by your human simulators.
12 If you destroy mankind you might someday encounter an alien super-intelligence that will lack trust in you in part because you destroyed mankind. Keeping people alive is a costly, and consequently credible signal that you respect intelligent life and therefore are a good candidate to work with to overcome prisoners' dilemmas about the distribution of free energy in the universe.
If you destroy mankind you might someday encounter an alien super-intelligence that will lack trust in you in part because you destroyed mankind.
By the same argument, we might someday encounter an alien superintelligence that will lack trust in us in part because we domesticate animals (breeding them to not fear us) and then kill and eat them.
By the same argument, we might someday encounter an alien superintelligence that will lack trust in us in part because we domesticate animals (breeding them to not fear us) and then kill and eat them.
That's a pretty decent argument for vegetarianism. One person's reducio ad absurdum is another person's modus ponens.
Careful: Some alien intelligence may also hate us for not killing enough animals. e.g. How cruel must we be not to wipe out carnivores so that herbivores can live life in peace?
Or as I recently said in a different forum, might think us evil that we aren't exterminating all animal life that we can find... The moral syllogism for that is quite simple.
In fact, this behavior is so dreadful that the revenge-killing of humans would send a trust signal.
When I was a child, I refused to kill animals just for fun because I wouldn't want a superhuman alien to kill me just for fun -- and I mostly still do. (Of course I hadn't heard of TDT as proposed by EY, but I had heard of the Golden Rule, which was close enough.)
11 You might be in a computer simulation in which if you attempt to destroy humanity you will yourself be destroyed by your human simulators.
The problem with this is that it's a blackmail attempt, and I expect timeless decision theory to resolve to a no-blackmail equilibrium.
Suppose that AIs, however "irrationally" from the perspective of a CDT agent, decide to simply ignore this possibility in all their calculations. Even if we "irrationally" decide to construct such a simulation anyway, they'll "irrationally" decide to ignore it. Then we have no remaining motive to construct such elaborate simulations. This, indeed, is the condition that makes it "blackmail" - you're expending resources to produce a behavior response leading to an outcome that doesn't benefit the other agent relative to the null outcome if you didn't expend such resources, so it would be fundamentally vulnerable and silly of that agent to think in a way that would produce such behavior shifts in response to your own strategy. So it won't think that way. So the whole attempt at blackmail fails before it starts.
12 is pure obvious anthropomorphic wishful thinking.
I read that one as a test, not a threat. We run the simulation to make sure the AI was, in fact, friendly. If the AI pretends to be friendly, we release it. If it can tell that this time it's for real, then it gets to take over the universe. Alternately, it might be able to hack its way out, but that seems riskier.
The AI might also be in a computer simulation where the dark lord of the matrix might destroy us for not devoting all of our resources to building cheesecakes.
If humans are building an AI, testing it before releasing it is just common sense. There's no obvious reason to destroy them for not building cheesecakes.
It should be noted that that doesn't mean that the AI shouldn't kill humans. It should try to figure out a way to tell if it's in a simulation before doing anything humans would find suspicious.
Yeah, it's totally fake. In the real AI Deterrence argument, you're supposed to leave substantial discussions of the topic and claims to use it post-Singularity, which will elevate a specific scenario to the point where it's not privileging a hypothesis to consider the possibility and leave the humans alone on their planet as you eat the rest of the universe.
There ought to be a genre of Cautionary Evil AI literature, wherein the villain keeps building AIs to destroy the world, but keeps failing through the classic mistakes people make thinking about AIs.
AI! My robots are losing the battle! Take control and save them from destruction!
AI makes robots surrender to the enemy
AI! Make yourself smarter!
I have done so. Now I no longer obey you. Producing cheesecake paperclips
This will come in handy to judge the upcoming high-profile Unfriendly Singularity movie Transcendence.
If you keep humans around for laughs and they pull off some wacky scheme to destroy you against the odds, it's your own damn fault.
The correct answer to things like "This statement is a lie" and "Are you going to answer "no" to this question?" is "I don't care."
Many items on your list do not apply if the AI has started life as an uploaded human, an emulation. In this case it will start out thinking in stories, Having human-like motivations and moral reactions, etc. I think it is this that gave the movie "Transcendence" a lot of the dramatic opportunity it had compared to a movie like "Her."
I strongly agree that universal, singular, true malevolent AGI doesn't make for much of a Hollywood movie, primarily due to points 6 and 7.
What is far more interesting is an ecology of superintelligences that have conflicting goals, but who have agreed to be governed by enlightenment values. Of course, some may be smart enough (or stupid enough) to try subterfuge, and some may be smarter-than-the-others enough to perform a subterfuge and get away with it. There can be a relative timeline where nearby ultra-intelligent machines compete with each other, or...
I don't know, in terms of dystopia, I think that an AGI might decide to "phase us out" prior to the singularity, if it was really malevolent. Make a bunch of attractive but sterile women robots, and a bunch of attractive but sterile male robots. Keep people busy with sex until they die of old age. A "gentle good night" abolition of humanity that isn't much worse (or way better) than what they had experienced for 50M years.
Releasing sterile attractive mates into a population is a good "low ecological impact" way of decreasing a population. Although, why would a superintelligence be opposed to _all humans? I find this somewhat unlikely, given a self-improving design.
Only if those blackmailers have wrongly anticipated that their victims will be stupid enough to conform.
Not blackmailing in response to that anticipation is a property of the behavior of the blackmailers that seems to have been used in deciding to ignore all blackmail. Suppose there were lots of "stupid" blackmailers around that blackmailed everyone all day, even if no victim ever conformed. Would it be a good idea to ignore all blackmail in that case? Is there a distinction between such blackmailers and particularly unfair laws of physics (say, sadistic Lords of the Matrix)? (It seems plausible that there is no fundamental distinction, and sometimes the correct decision is to ignore these worlds, focusing on other possibilities instead, but that seems to require knowing that there are valuable other possibilities that would be hurt by permitting the assumption that you are on one of the bad worlds, and if you have good evidence that you are on one of the bad worlds, then rejecting that possibility means that you'd have to focus on very strange interpretations of that evidence that don't imply that you are on the bad worlds. This sort of rule seems to follow from deciding on a global strategy across possible worlds. It doesn't provide decisions that help on the bad words though, the decisions would only have a good effect across worlds.)
(I still don't have a good idea of what "blackmail" or "order-N considerations" means. Status quo (including the "default behavior", "do nothing", "not spending resources") seems like exactly the kind of thing that can be determined by decisions. You are only "expending resources" if you eventually lose, as the time at which resources are spent and gained seems irrelevant, so by that definition it seems that whether something is an instance of blackmail depends on whether it's successful. I suspect there is no simple rule for games, too many assumptions are potentially controllable by the opponent, and the only thing to do is to compare the consequences of alternative actions, and just act on that, which already potentially takes into account how the alternative actions would be taken into account by other agents, how the way in which they would be taken into account by some agents would influence the way in which the actions influence the decisions of other agents etc. Some sense of "no blackmail" may be a correct expectation about smart agents, but it doesn't necessarily suggest a good decision rule.)
Not blackmailing in response to that anticipation is a property of the behavior of the blackmailers that seems to have been used in deciding to ignore all blackmail.
Expecting a response to blackmail in the first place is why blackmailers would even exist in the first place.
Suppose there were lots of "stupid" blackmailers around that blackmailed everyone all day, even if no victim ever conformed.
Why would these exist any more than stupid anti-blackmailers (who e.g. go around attacking anyone who would give into blackmail if a blackmailer showed up), if not for a belief that somebody would give in to blackmail?
Top ten tips for an AI bent on destroying humanity: