SilentCal comments on Stupid questions thread, October 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: philh 13 October 2015 07:39PM

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Comment author: gjm 14 October 2015 04:01:18PM 2 points [-]

Someone downvoted the question above. What the hell? (My guess: it's VoiceOfRa doing his downvote-the-enemy thing again.)

To the actual question: first of all, I think it's entirely possible that we have additional layers (sys1 means "fast heuristic", sys2 means "slow deliberate reasoning"; we surely have a big bag of heuristics, and I bet there are cases where we have extra-fast heuristics, fastish heuristics, and slow deliberate reasoning); and it seems like one could envisage an AI with (1) nothing like sys1 at all because its "proper" reasoning is cheap enough to be used all the time, (2) a human-like bag of heuristics that get used when circumstances allow, producing much the same distinction as we have, (3) smoothly varying how-much-approximation knobs that adjust according to how valuable quicker answers are, interpolating continuously between "system 1" and "system 2", and probably (4) all sorts of other things I haven't thought of.

The sort of provably-safe AI that MIRI would like to see would presumably either be in category 1, or be designed so that in some sense sufficiently consequential decisions always get made "properly". The latter seems like it would be hard to reason about. (Er, or it might be in category 4 in which case by definition I have nothing to say about it.)

Comment author: SilentCal 14 October 2015 09:56:27PM 0 points [-]

I'd expect MIRI to build the "proper reasoning" layer, and then the AI would use its "proper reasoning" to design fast heuristic layers.

One example of a very-hard-to-avoid layering would be if the AI were distributed over large areas (global or perhaps interplanetary), there would probably have to be decisions made locally, but other decisions made globally. You could say the local processes are subagents and only the global process is the real AI, but it wouldn't change the fact that the AI has designed trustworthy faster less-accurate decision processes.