Help us name a short primer on AI risk!

lukeprog

11 Help us name a short primer on AI risk!

17th Sep 2013

2 min read

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MIRI will soon publish a short book by Stuart Armstrong on the topic of AI risk. The book is currently titled “AI-Risk Primer” by default, but we’re looking for something a little more catchy (just as we did for the upcoming Sequences ebook).

The book is meant to be accessible and avoids technical jargon. Here is the table of contents and a few snippets from the book, to give you an idea of the content and style:

Terminator versus the AI
Strength versus Intelligence
What Is Intelligence? Can We Achieve It Artificially?
How Powerful Could AIs Become?
Talking to an Alien Mind
Our Values Are Complex and Fragile
What, Precisely, Do We Really (Really) Want?
We Need to Get It All Exactly Right
Listen to the Sound of Absent Experts
A Summary
That’s Where You Come In …

The Terminator is a creature from our primordial nightmares: tall, strong, aggressive, and nearly indestructible. We’re strongly primed to fear such a being—it resembles the lions, tigers, and bears that our ancestors so feared when they wandered alone on the savanna and tundra.

…

As a species, we humans haven’t achieved success through our natural armor plating, our claws, our razor-sharp teeth, or our poison-filled stingers. Though we have reasonably efficient bodies, it’s our brains that have made the difference. It’s through our social, cultural, and technological intelligence that we have raised ourselves to our current position.

…

Consider what would happen if an AI ever achieved the ability to function socially—to hold conversations with a reasonable facsimile of human fluency. For humans to increase their social skills, they need to go through painful trial and error processes, scrounge hints from more articulate individuals or from television, or try to hone their instincts by having dozens of conversations. An AI could go through a similar process, undeterred by social embarrassment, and with perfect memory. But it could also sift through vast databases of previous human conversations, analyze thousands of publications on human psychology, anticipate where conversations are leading many steps in advance, and always pick the right tone and pace to respond with. Imagine a human who, every time they opened their mouth, had spent a solid year to ponder and research whether their response was going to be maximally effective. That is what a social AI would be like.

So, title suggestions?

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11 Help us name a short primer on AI risk!

by lukeprog

17th Sep 2013

2 min read

11

The book is meant to be accessible and avoids technical jargon. Here is the table of contents and a few snippets from the book, to give you an idea of the content and style:

Terminator versus the AI
Strength versus Intelligence
What Is Intelligence? Can We Achieve It Artificially?
How Powerful Could AIs Become?
Talking to an Alien Mind
Our Values Are Complex and Fragile
What, Precisely, Do We Really (Really) Want?
We Need to Get It All Exactly Right
Listen to the Sound of Absent Experts
A Summary
That’s Where You Come In …

The Terminator is a creature from our primordial nightmares: tall, strong, aggressive, and nearly indestructible. We’re strongly primed to fear such a being—it resembles the lions, tigers, and bears that our ancestors so feared when they wandered alone on the savanna and tundra.

…

As a species, we humans haven’t achieved success through our natural armor plating, our claws, our razor-sharp teeth, or our poison-filled stingers. Though we have reasonably efficient bodies, it’s our brains that have made the difference. It’s through our social, cultural, and technological intelligence that we have raised ourselves to our current position.

…

Consider what would happen if an AI ever achieved the ability to function socially—to hold conversations with a reasonable facsimile of human fluency. For humans to increase their social skills, they need to go through painful trial and error processes, scrounge hints from more articulate individuals or from television, or try to hone their instincts by having dozens of conversations. An AI could go through a similar process, undeterred by social embarrassment, and with perfect memory. But it could also sift through vast databases of previous human conversations, analyze thousands of publications on human psychology, anticipate where conversations are leading many steps in advance, and always pick the right tone and pace to respond with. Imagine a human who, every time they opened their mouth, had spent a solid year to ponder and research whether their response was going to be maximally effective. That is what a social AI would be like.

So, title suggestions?

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gjm13y160

I don't like all the clever-clever titles being proposed because (1) they probably restrict the audience and (2) one of the difficulties MIRI faces is persuading people to take the risk seriously in the first place -- which will not be helped by a title that's flippant, or science-fiction-y, or overblown, or just plain confusing.

You don't need "primer" or anything like it in the title; if the book has a fairly general title, and is short, and has a preface that begins "This book is an introduction to the risks posed by artificial intelligence" or something, you're done. (No harm in having something like "primer" or "introduction" in the title, if that turns out to make a good title.)

Spell out "artificial intelligence". (Or use some other broadly equivalent term.)

I would suggest simply "Risks of artificial intelligence" or maybe "Risks of machine intelligence" (matching MIRI's name).

ChrisHallquist13y10

These are reasonable concerns, but a boring title will restrict the audience in its own way. Michael's "Smarter than Us" suggestion avoids both risks, though, I think.

Edit: Wait, that wasn't Michael's idea originally, he was just endorsing it, but I agree with his endorsement and reasoning why. Definitely sends shivers down my spine.

2palladias13y

I think titles also follow the "the only goal of the first sentence is to make the reader want to read the second sentence" rule. If MIRI is pitching this book at bright laypeople, I think it's good to be a bit jazzy and then dismantle the Skynet assumptions early on (as it looks like this does). If the goal is for it to be a technical manual for people in math and CS, I'd agree that anything that sounds like pop sci or Gladwell is probably a turn-off. Of course, you could always have two editions, with two titles (and differing amounts of LaTeX)

3Paul Crowley13y

I take your point, but it looks like the book they've decided to write is one that's at least a little flippant and science-fiction-y, and that being so the title should reflect that.

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