On the subject of how an FAI team can avoid accidentally creating a UFAI, Carl Shulman wrote:
If we condition on having all other variables optimized, I'd expect a team to adopt very high standards of proof, and recognize limits to its own capabilities, biases, etc. One of the primary purposes of organizing a small FAI team is to create a team that can actually stop and abandon a line of research/design (Eliezer calls this "halt, melt, and catch fire") that cannot be shown to be safe (given limited human ability, incentives and bias).
In the history of philosophy, there have been many steps in the right direction, but virtually no significant problems have been fully solved, such that philosophers can agree that some proposed idea can be the last words on a given subject. An FAI design involves making many explicit or implicit philosophical assumptions, many of which may then become fixed forever as governing principles for a new reality. They'll end up being last words on their subjects, whether we like it or not. Given the history of philosophy and applying the outside view, how can an FAI team possibly reach "very high standards of proof" regarding the safety of a design? But if we can foresee that they can't, then what is the point of aiming for that predictable outcome now?
Until recently I haven't paid a lot of attention to the discussions here about inside view vs outside view, because the discussions have tended to focus on the applicability of these views to the problem of predicting intelligence explosion. It seemed obvious to me that outside views can't possibly rule out intelligence explosion scenarios, and even a small probability of a future intelligence explosion would justify a much higher than current level of investment in preparing for that possibility. But given that the inside vs outside view debate may also be relevant to the "FAI Endgame", I read up on Eliezer and Luke's most recent writings on the subject... and found them to be unobjectionable. Here's Eliezer:
On problems that are drawn from a barrel of causally similar problems, where human optimism runs rampant and unforeseen troubles are common, the Outside View beats the Inside View.
Does anyone want to argue that Eliezer's criteria for using the outside view are wrong, or don't apply here?
And Luke:
One obvious solution is to use multiple reference classes, and weight them by how relevant you think they are to the phenomenon you're trying to predict.
[...]
Once you've combined a handful of models to arrive at a qualitative or quantitative judgment, you should still be able to "adjust" the judgment in some cases using an inside view.
These ideas seem harder to apply, so I'll ask for readers' help. What reference classes should we use here, in addition to past attempts to solve philosophical problems? What inside view adjustments could a future FAI team make, such that they might justifiably overcome (the most obvious-to-me) outside view's conclusion that they're very unlikely to be in the possession of complete and fully correct solutions to a diverse range of philosophical problems?
It's hard for me to argue with multiple people simultaneously. When I argue with someone I tend to adopt most of their assumptions in order to focus on what I think is the core disagreement, so to argue with someone else I have to "swap in" a different set of assumptions and related arguments. The OP was aimed mostly at Eliezer, so it assumed that intelligence explosion is relatively easy. (Would you agree that if intelligence explosion was easy, then it would be hard to achieve a good outcome in the way that you imagine, by incrementally solving "the AI control problem"?)
If we instead assume that intelligence explosion isn't so easy, then I think the main problem we face is value drift and Malthusian outcomes caused by competitive evolution (made worse by brain emulations and AGIs that can be easily copied), which can only be prevented by building a singleton. (A secondary consideration involves other existential risks related to technological progress, such as physics/nanotech/biotech disasters.) I don't think humanity as a whole is sufficiently strategic to solve this problem before it's too late (meaning a lot of value drift has already occurred or building a singleton becomes impossible due to space colonization). I think the fact that you are much more optimistic about this accounts for much of our disagreement on overall strategy, and I wonder if you can explain why. I don't mean to put the burden of proof on you, but perhaps you have some ready explanation at hand?
I don't think that fast intelligence explosion ---> you have to solve the kind of hard philosophical problems that you are alluding to. You seem to grant that there are no particular hard philosophical problems we'll have to solve, but you think that nevertheless every approach to the problem will require solving such problems. Is it easy to state why you expect this? Is it because approaches we can imagine in detail today involve solving hard problems?
Regarding the hardness of defining "remain in control," it is not the case that you need to ... (read more)