I can imagine some good ways to control reality perception. For example, if an addicted person wants to stop smoking, it could be helpful to have a reality filter which removes all smoking-related advertising, and all related products in shop.
Generally, reality-controlling spam filters could be great. Imagine a reality-AdBlock that removes all advertising from your view, anywhere. (It could replace the advertisement with a gray area, so you are aware that there was something, and you can consciously decide to look at it.) Of course that would lead to an arms race with advertisement sellers.
Now here is an evil thing Google could do: If they make you wear Google glasses, they gain access to your physical body, and can collect some information. For example, how much you like what you see. Then they can experiment with small changes in your vision to increase your satisfaction. In other words, very slow wireheading, not targeting your brain, but your eyes.
A real-world adblock would be great; you could also use this type of augmented reality to improve your driving, walk through your city and see it in a completely different era, use it for something like the Oculus Rift...the possibilities are limitless.
Companies will act in their own self-interest, by giving people what it is they want, as opposed to what they need. Some of it will be amazingly beneficial, and some of it will be...not in a person's best interest. And it will depend on how people use it.
The Register talks to Google's Alfred Spector:
Google's approach toward artificial intelligence embodies a new way of designing and running complex systems. Rather than create a monolithic entity with its own modules for reasoning about certain inputs and developing hypotheses that let it bootstrap its own intelligence into higher and higher abstractions away from base inputs, as other AI researchers did through much of the 60s and 70s, Google has instead taken a modular approach.
"We have the knowledge graph, [the] ability to parse natural language, neural network tech [and] enormous opportunities to gain feedback from users," Spector said in an earlier speech at Google IO. "If we combine all these things together with humans in the loop continually providing feedback our systems become ... intelligent."
Spector calls this his "combination hypothesis", and though Google is not there yet – SkyNet does not exist – you can see the first green buds of systems that have the appearance of independent intelligence via some of the company's user-predictive technologies such as Google Now, the new Maps and, of course, the way it filters search results according to individual identity.
(Emphasis mine.) I don't have a transcript, but there are videos online. Spector is clearly smart, and apparently he expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does. And he has all the resources and financing he wants, probably 3-4 orders of magnitude over MIRI's. His approach, if workable, also appears safe: it requires human feedback in the loop. What do you guys think?