"Bah, everyone wants to be the gatekeeper. What we NEED are AIs."
-- Schizoguy
Some of you have expressed the opinion that the AI-Box Experiment doesn't seem so impossible after all. That's the spirit! Some of you even think you know how I did it.
There are folks aplenty who want to try being the Gatekeeper. You can even find people who sincerely believe that not even a transhuman AI could persuade them to let it out of the box, previous experiments notwithstanding. But finding anyone to play the AI - let alone anyone who thinks they can play the AI and win - is much harder.
Me, I'm out of the AI game, unless Larry Page wants to try it for a million dollars or something.
But if there's anyone out there who thinks they've got what it takes to be the AI, leave a comment. Likewise anyone who wants to play the Gatekeeper.
Matchmaking and arrangements are your responsibility.
Make sure you specify in advance the bet amount, and whether the bet will be asymmetrical. If you definitely intend to publish the transcript, make sure both parties know this. Please note any other departures from the suggested rules for our benefit.
I would ask that prospective Gatekeepers indicate whether they (1) believe that no human-level mind could persuade them to release it from the Box and (2) believe that not even a transhuman AI could persuade them to release it.
As a courtesy, please announce all Experiments before they are conducted, including the bet, so that we have some notion of the statistics even if some meetings fail to take place. Bear in mind that to properly puncture my mystique (you know you want to puncture it), it will help if the AI and Gatekeeper are both verifiably Real People<tm>.
"Good luck," he said impartially.
The original claim under dispute, at least according to EY's page, was that boxing an AI of unknown friendliness was, by itself, a viable approach to AI safety. Disregarding all the other ways such an AI might circumvent any "box", the experiment purports to test the claim that something could simply talk its way out of the box - just to test that one point of failure, and with merely human intelligence.
Maybe the supposed original claim is a strawman or misrepresentation; I wasn't involved in the original conversations, so I'm not sure. In any case, the experiment is intended to test/demonstrate that boxing alone is not sufficient, even given a perfect box which can only be opened with the Gatekeeper's approval. Whether boxing is a useful-but-not-guaranteed safety procedure is a different question.
I understand the claim under dispute, I think.
Insofar as someone chose for there to be a gatekeeper rather than a lock whose key got tossed into a volcano, a gatekeeper must be possible to "hack through a text terminal" by meeting their evidentiary standard for friendliness.
The problem is this happening in the absence of genuine friendliness.