"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.
Probably the latter, since they both lost at least once. A real AI trying to get out would devote all its energies to counterfeiting friendliness and probably succeeding.
Boxing is non-viable only in the same sense that locks, passwords, treaties, contracts, testing, peer review, seatbelts, and all other imperfect precautions are non-viable.
Pile on enough of them, in combination, and perhaps they will buy a few years or seconds in which to react. All things equal, is there any reason why an AI of unknown friendliness is any safer without being boxed?
A flawed containment method is still better at containing than no containment method (if implemented with awareness of its flaws) but apparently a flawed friendly AI will miss a very small target in goalspace and for practical purposes be unfriendly. So, if we spent 5 minutes considering the alternatives, would we continue to believe that better boxes are a less tractable problem than friendly AI?
Not that particular AI. But if you think yours is Friendly and others under development have a sufficient probability of being UnFriendly, then trivially, letting it run (in both senses) beats boxing. Oh, and people will die 'naturally' while you dither. I hope that thinking this much about making an AI Friendly will prepare someone to get the job done ASAP once the AGI part seems more feasible.