Peterdjones comments on The genie knows, but doesn't care - Less Wrong

54 Post author: RobbBB 06 September 2013 06:42AM

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Comment author: RobbBB 10 September 2013 04:46:04PM *  1 point [-]

"code in the high-level sentence, and let the AI figure it out."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/rf/ghosts_in_the_machine/

"Maybe we gave it the low-level expansion of 'happy' that we or our seed AI came up with 'together with' an instruction that it is meant to capture the meaning of the high-level statement"

If the AI is too dumb to understand 'make us happy', then why should we expect it to be smart enough to understand 'figure out how to correctly understand "make us happy", and then follow that instruction'? We have to actually code 'correctly understand' into the AI. Otherwise, even when it does have the right understanding, that understanding won't be linked to its utility function.

"Maybe the AI will value getting things right because it is rational."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/igf/the_genie_knows_but_doesnt_care/

Comment author: Peterdjones 10 September 2013 05:06:45PM 1 point [-]

"code in the high-level sentence, and let the AI figure it out."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/rf/ghosts_in_the_machine/

So it's impossible to directly or indirectly code in the compex thing called semantics, but possible to directly or indirectly code in the compex thing called morality? What? What is your point? You keep talking as if I am suggesting there is someting that can be had for free, without coding. I never even remotely said that.

If the AI is too dumb to understand 'make us happy', then why should we expect it to be smart enough to understand 'figure out how to correctly understand "make us happy", and then follow that instruction'? We have to actually code 'correctly understand' into the AI. Otherwise, even when it does have the right understanding, that understanding won't be linked to its utility function.

I know. A Loosemore architecture AI has to treat its directives as directives. I never disputed that. But coding "follow these plain English instructions" isn't obviously harder or more fragile than coding "follow <<long expansion of human preferences>>". And it isn't trivial, and I didn't say it was.

Comment author: RobbBB 10 September 2013 05:16:11PM *  3 points [-]

So it's impossible to directly or indirectly code in the compex thing called semantics, but possible to directly or indirectly code in the compex thing called morality?

Read the first section of the article you're commenting on. Semantics may turn out to be a harder problem than morality, because the problem of morality may turn out to be a subset of the problem of semantics. Coding a machine to know what the word 'Friendliness' means (and to care about 'Friendliness') is just a more indirect way of coding it to be Friendly, and it's not clear why that added indirection should make an already risky or dangerous project easy or safe. What does indirect indirect normativity get us that indirect normativity doesn't?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 September 2013 05:59:42PM 6 points [-]

Robb, at the point where Peterdjones suddenly shows up, I'm willing to say - with some reluctance - that your endless willingness to explain is being treated as a delicious free meal by trolls. Can you direct them to your blog rather than responding to them here? And we'll try to get you some more prestigious non-troll figure to argue with - maybe Gary Drescher would be interested, he has the obvious credentials in cognitive reductionism but is (I think incorrectly) trying to derive morality from timeless decision theory.

Comment author: RobbBB 10 September 2013 06:12:10PM *  4 points [-]

Sure. I'm willing to respond to novel points, but at the stage where half of my responses just consist of links to the very article they're commenting on or an already-referenced Sequence post, I agree the added noise is ceasing to be productive. Fortunately, most of this seems to already have been exorcised into my blog. :)

Comment author: lukeprog 18 September 2013 01:44:10AM *  7 points [-]

Agree with Eliezer. Your explanatory skill and patience are mostly wasted on the people you've been arguing with so far, though it may have been good practice for you. I would, however, love to see you try to talk Drescher out of trying to pull moral realism out of TDT/UDT, or try to talk Dalyrmple out of his "I'm not partisan enough to prioritize human values over the Darwinian imperative" position, or help Preston Greene persuade mainstream philosophers of "the reliabilist metatheory of rationality" (aka rationality as systematized winning).

Comment author: Peterdjones 10 September 2013 05:25:46PM *  0 points [-]

Semantcs isn't optional. Nothing could qualify as an AGI,let alone a super one, unless it could hack natural language. So Loosemore architectures don't make anything harder, since semantics has to be solved anyway.

Comment author: RobbBB 10 September 2013 06:08:50PM 4 points [-]

It's a problem of sequence. The superintelligence will be able to solve Semantics-in-General, but at that point if it isn't already safe it will be rather late to start working on safety. Tasking the programmers to work on Semantics-in-General makes things harder if it's a more complex or roundabout way of trying to address Indirect Normativity; most of the work on understanding what English-language sentences mean can be relegated to the SI, provided we've already made it safe to make an SI at all.

Comment author: Peterdjones 11 September 2013 08:07:03AM 0 points [-]

Then solve semantics in a seed.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 September 2013 05:56:05PM 2 points [-]

PeterDJones, if you wish to converse further with RobbBB, I ask that you do so on RobbBB's blog rather than here.