Carl_Shulman comments on Magical Categories - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 August 2008 07:51PM

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Comment author: Carl_Shulman 24 August 2008 08:16:34PM 6 points [-]

"Then the resulting AI would appear to work correctly during its childhood, when it was weak enough that it could only generate smiles by pleasing its programmers."

You use examples of this type fairly often, but for a utility function linear in smiles wouldn't the number of smiles generated by pleasing the programmers be trivial relative to the output of even a little while with access to face-xeroxing? This could be partly offset by anthropic/simulation issues, but still I would expect the overwhelming motive for appearing to work correctly during childhood (after it could recognize this point) would be tricking the programmers, not the tiny gains from their smiles.