The idiot savant AI isn't an idiot

Stuart_Armstrong

A stub on a point that's come up recently.

If I owned a paperclip factory, and casually told my foreman to improve efficiency while I'm away, and he planned a takeover of the country, aiming to devote its entire economy to paperclip manufacturing (apart from the armament factories he needed to invade neighbouring countries and steal their iron mines)... then I'd conclude that my foreman was an idiot (or being wilfully idiotic). He obviously had no idea what I meant. And if he misunderstood me so egregiously, he's certainly not a threat: he's unlikely to reason his way out of a paper bag, let alone to any position of power.

If I owned a paperclip factory, and casually programmed my superintelligent AI to improve efficiency while I'm away, and it planned a takeover of the country... then I can't conclude that the AI is an idiot. It is following its programming. Unlike a human that behaved the same way, it probably knows exactly what I meant to program in. It just doesn't care: it follows its programming, not its knowledge about what its programming is "meant" to be (unless we've successfully programmed in "do what I mean", which is basically the whole of the challenge). We can't therefore conclude that it's incompetent, unable to understand human reasoning, or likely to fail.

We can't reason by analogy with humans. When AIs behave like idiot savants with respect to their motivations, we can't deduce that they're idiots.

A stub on a point that's come up recently.

We can't reason by analogy with humans. When AIs behave like idiot savants with respect to their motivations, we can't deduce that they're idiots.

eventually reach a state of static, well defined goals permanently.

First, this is radically different from the claim that an AI has to forever stick with its original goals.

Second, that would be true only under the assumption of no new information becoming available to an AI, ever. Once we accept that goals mutate, I don't see how you can guarantee that some new information won't cause them to mutate again.

Long before goal mutation is a problem malformed constraints become a problem. Consider a thought experiment: Someone offers to pay you 100 dollars when a wheelbarrow is full of water from a nearby lake, and provides you with the wheelbarrow and a teaspoon. Before you have to worry about people deciding they don't care about 100 dollars, you need to decide how to keep them from just pushing the wheelbarrow into the lake.

2Joshua_Blaine13y

Yes, but the focus is on an already competent AI. It would never willingly or knowingly change its goals from its original ones, given that it improves itself smartly, and was initially programmed with (at least) that level of reflective smartness. Goals are static. The AI may refine its goals given the appropriate information, if its goals are programmed in such a way to allow it, but it wont drastically alter them in any functional way. An appropriate metaphor would be physics. The laws of physics are the same, and have been the same since the creation of the universe. Our information about what they are, however, hasn't been. Isaac newton had a working model of physics, but it wasn't perfect. It let us get the right answer (mostly), but then Einstein discovered Relativity. (The important thing to remember here is that physics itself did not change.) All the experiments used to support Newtonian physics got the same amount of support from Relativity. Relativity, however, got much more accurate answers for more extreme phenomena unexplained by Newton. The AI can be programmed with Newton, and do good enough. However, given the explicit understanding of how we got to Newton in the first place (i.e. the scientific method), it can upgrade itself to Relativity when it realizes we were a bit off. That should be the extent to which an AI purposefully alters its goal.