or by subverting the system through some design or implementation flaw
I discuss the most concerning-to-me instance of this in problem (1) here; it seems like that discussion applies equally well to anything that might work fine at first but then break when you become a sufficiently smart reasoner.
I think the basic question is whether you can identify and exploit such flaws at exactly the same time that you recognize their possibility, or whether you can notice them slightly before. By “before” I mean with a version of you that is less clever, has less time to think, has a weaker channel to influence the world, or is treated with more skepticism and caution.
If any of these versions of you can identify the looming problem in advance, and then explain it to the aliens, then they can correct the problem. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a possible flaw that wasn’t noticeable “before” it was exploitable in one of these senses. But I may just be overlooking them, and of course even if we can’t think of any it’s not such great reassurance.
Of course even if you can’t identify such flaws, you can preemptively improve the setup for the aliens, in advance of improving your own cognition. So it seems like we never really care about the case where you are radically smarter than the designer of the system, we care about the case where you are very slightly smarter. (Unless this system-improvement is a significant fraction of the difficulty of actually improving your cognition, which seems far-fetched.)
The point is that my behavior while my abilities are less than super-alien are not a very good indication of how safe I will eventually be.
Other than the issue from the first part of this comment, I don't really see why the behavior changes (in a way that invalidates early testing) when you become super-alien in some respects. It seems like you are focusing on errors you may make that would cause you to receive a low payoff in the RL game. As you become smarter, I expect you to make fewer such errors. I certainly don't expect you to predictably make more of them.
(I understand that this is a bit subtle, because as you get smarter the problem also may get harder, since your plans will e.g. be subject to more intense scrutiny and to more clever counterproposals. But that doesn't seem prone to lead to the kinds of errors you discuss.)
Other than the issue from the first part of this comment, I don't really see why the behavior changes (in a way that invalidates early testing) when you become super-alien in some respects. It seems like you are focusing on errors you may make that would cause you to receive a low payoff in the RL game. As you become smarter, I expect you to make fewer such errors.
Paraphrasing, I think you're saying that, if the reinforcement game setup continues to work, you expect to make fewer errors as you get smarter. And the only way getting smarter hurts you is if it breaks the game (by enabling you to fall into traps faster than you can notice and avoid them).
Is that right?
I put "Friendliness" in quotes in the title, because I think what we really want, and what MIRI seems to be working towards, is closer to "optimality": create an AI that minimizes the expected amount of astronomical waste. In what follows I will continue to use "Friendly AI" to denote such an AI since that's the established convention.
I've often stated my objections MIRI's plan to build an FAI directly (instead of after human intelligence has been substantially enhanced). But it's not because, as some have suggested while criticizing MIRI's FAI work, that we can't foresee what problems need to be solved. I think it's because we can largely foresee what kinds of problems need to be solved to build an FAI, but they all look superhumanly difficult, either due to their inherent difficulty, or the lack of opportunity for "trial and error", or both.
When people say they don't know what problems need to be solved, they may be mostly talking about "AI safety" rather than "Friendly AI". If you think in terms of "AI safety" (i.e., making sure some particular AI doesn't cause a disaster) then that does looks like a problem that depends on what kind of AI people will build. "Friendly AI" on the other hand is really a very different problem, where we're trying to figure out what kind of AI to build in order to minimize astronomical waste. I suspect this may explain the apparent disagreement, but I'm not sure. I'm hoping that explaining my own position more clearly will help figure out whether there is a real disagreement, and what's causing it.
The basic issue I see is that there is a large number of serious philosophical problems facing an AI that is meant to take over the universe in order to minimize astronomical waste. The AI needs a full solution to moral philosophy to know which configurations of particles/fields (or perhaps which dynamical processes) are most valuable and which are not. Moral philosophy in turn seems to have dependencies on the philosophy of mind, consciousness, metaphysics, aesthetics, and other areas. The FAI also needs solutions to many problems in decision theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics, in order to not be stuck with making wrong or suboptimal decisions for eternity. These essentially cover all the major areas of philosophy.
For an FAI builder, there are three ways to deal with the presence of these open philosophical problems, as far as I can see. (There may be other ways for the future to turns out well without the AI builders making any special effort, for example if being philosophical is just a natural attractor for any superintelligence, but I don't see any way to be confident of this ahead of time.) I'll name them for convenient reference, but keep in mind that an actual design may use a mixture of approaches.
The problem with Normative AI, besides the obvious inherent difficulty (as evidenced by the slow progress of human philosophers after decades, sometimes centuries of work), is that it requires us to anticipate all of the philosophical problems the AI might encounter in the future, from now until the end of the universe. We can certainly foresee some of these, like the problems associated with agents being copyable, or the AI radically changing its ontology of the world, but what might we be missing?
Black-Box Metaphilosophical AI is also risky, because it's hard to test/debug something that you don't understand. Besides that general concern, designs in this category (such as Paul Christiano's take on indirect normativity) seem to require that the AI achieve superhuman levels of optimizing power before being able to solve its philosophical problems, which seems to mean that a) there's no way to test them in a safe manner, and b) it's unclear why such an AI won't cause disaster in the time period before it achieves philosophical competence.
White-Box Metaphilosophical AI may be the most promising approach. There is no strong empirical evidence that solving metaphilosophy is superhumanly difficult, simply because not many people have attempted to solve it. But I don't think that a reasonable prior combined with what evidence we do have (i.e., absence of visible progress or clear hints as to how to proceed) gives much hope for optimism either.
To recap, I think we can largely already see what kinds of problems must be solved in order to build a superintelligent AI that will minimize astronomical waste while colonizing the universe, and it looks like they probably can't be solved correctly with high confidence until humans become significantly smarter than we are now. I think I understand why some people disagree with me (e.g., Eliezer thinks these problems just aren't that hard, relative to his abilities), but I'm not sure why some others say that we don't yet know what the problems will be.