XerxesPraelor comments on Debunking Fallacies in the Theory of AI Motivation - Less Wrong
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Excuse me, but you are really failing to clarify the issue. The basic UFAI doomsday scenario is: the AI has vast powers of learning and inference with respect to its world-model, but has its utility function (value system) hardcoded. Since the hardcoded utility function does not specify a naturalization of morality, or CEV, or whatever, the UFAI proceeds to tile the universe in whatever it happens to like (which are things we people don't like), precisely because it has no motivation to "fix" its hardcoded utility function.
A similar problem would occur if, for some bizarre-ass reason, you monkey-patched your AI to use hardcoded machine arithmetic on its integers instead of learning the concept of integers from data via its, you know, intelligence, and the hardcoded machine math had a bug. It would get arithmetic problems wrong! And it would never realize it was getting them wrong, because every time it tried to check its own calculations, your monkey-patch would cut in and use the buggy machine arithmetic again.
The lesson is: do not hard-code important functionality into your AGI without proving it correct. In the case of a utility/value function, the obvious research path is to find a way to characterize finding out the human operators' desires as an inference problem, thus ensuring that the AI cares about learning correctly from the humans and then implementing what it learned rather than anything hard-coded. Moving moral learning into inference also helps minimize the amount of code we have to prove correct, since it simply isn't AI without correct, functioning learning and inference abilities.
Also, little you've written about CLAI or Swarm Connectionist AI corresponds well to what I've seen of real-world cognitive science, theoretical neuroscience, or machine learning research, so I can't see how either of those blatantly straw-man designs are going to turn into AGI. Please go read some actual scientific material rather than assuming that The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is up-to-date with the current literature ;-).
The content of your post was pretty good from my limited perspective, but this tone is not warranted.
Perhaps not, but I don't understand why "AI" practitioners insist on being almost as bad as philosophers for butting in and trying to explain to reality that it needs to get into their models and stay there, rather than trying to understand existing phenomena as a prelude to a general theory of cognition.