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asr comments on Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014 - Less Wrong
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I don't see any discussion about this blog post by Mike Travern.
His point is that people trying to solve for Friendly AI are doing so because it's an "easy", abstract problem well into the future. He contends that we are already taking significant damage from artificially created human systems like the financial system, which can be ascribed agency and it's goals are quite different from improving human life. These systems are quite akin to "Hostile AI". This, he contends, is the really hard problem.
Here is a quote from the blogpost (which is from a Facebook comment he made):
It's a short post, so you can read it quickly. What do you think about his argument?
I think it's silly. I suspect MIRI and every other singulatarian organization, and every other individual working on the challeges of unfriendly AI, could fit comfortably in a 100-person auditorium.
In contrast, "trying to fix industrial capitalism" is one of the main topics of political dispute everywhere in the world. "How to make markets work better" is one of the main areas of research in economics. The American Economic Association has 18,000 members. We have half a dozen large government agencies, with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars each, to protecting people from hostile capitalism. (The SEC, the OCC, the FTC, etc etc, are all ultimately about trying to curb capitalist excess. Each of these organizations has a large enforcement bureaucracy, and also a number of full-time salaried researchers.)
The resources and human energy devoted to unfriendly AI are tiny compared to the amount expended on politics and economics. So it's strange to complain about the diversion of resources.
Excellent point. I'm surprised this did not occur to me. This reminds me of Scott Aaronson's reply when someone suggested that quantum computational complexity is quite unimportant compared to experimental approaches to quantum computing and therefore shouldn't get much funding:
It looks to me like the room in this picture contains more than 100 people.
Yes. I will revise upwards my impression of how many people are working on Singularity topics. That said, not everybody who showed up at the summit was working on singularity-problems. Some were just interested bystanders.