A good prediction :)
Logical depth is not entropy.
The function I've proposed is to maximize depth-of-universe-relative-to-humanity-divided-by-depth-of-universe.
Consider the decision to kill off people and overwrite them with a very fast SAT solver. That would surely increase depth-of-universe, which is in the denominator. I.e. increasing that value decreases the favorability of this outcome.
What increases the favorability of the outcome, in light of that function, are the computation of representations that take humanity as an input. You could imagine the supercontroller doing a lot to, say, accelerate human history. I think that would likely either involve humans or lots of simulations of humans.
Do you follow this argument?
Ah, okay, my bad for just thinking of it as maximizing relative depth.
So what's really pushed are things that are logically deep in their simplest expression in terms of humanity, but not logically deep in terms of fundamental physics.
Depending on how this actually gets cashed out, the "human" that encodes deep computational results rather than actually living is still a very desirable object.
Here's a slightly more alive dystopia: Use humanity to embody a complicated turing machine (like how the remark goes that chimpanzees are turing complete be...
I attended Nick Bostrom's talk at UC Berkeley last Friday and got intrigued by these problems again. I wanted to pitch an idea here, with the question: Have any of you seen work along these lines before? Can you recommend any papers or posts? Are you interested in collaborating on this angle in further depth?
The problem I'm thinking about (surely naively, relative to y'all) is: What would you want to program an omnipotent machine to optimize?
For the sake of avoiding some baggage, I'm not going to assume this machine is "superintelligent" or an AGI. Rather, I'm going to call it a supercontroller, just something omnipotently effective at optimizing some function of what it perceives in its environment.
As has been noted in other arguments, a supercontroller that optimizes the number of paperclips in the universe would be a disaster. Maybe any supercontroller that was insensitive to human values would be a disaster. What constitutes a disaster? An end of human history. If we're all killed and our memories wiped out to make more efficient paperclip-making machines, then it's as if we never existed. That is existential risk.
The challenge is: how can one formulate an abstract objective function that would preserve human history and its evolving continuity?
I'd like to propose an answer that depends on the notion of logical depth as proposed by C.H. Bennett and outlined in section 7.7 of Li and Vitanyi's An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications which I'm sure many of you have handy. Logical depth is a super fascinating complexity measure that Li and Vitanyi summarize thusly:
The mathematics is fascinating and better read in the original Bennett paper than here. Suffice it presently to summarize some of its interesting properties, for the sake of intuition.