Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong - All

72 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 March 2008 05:09AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (70)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 March 2008 05:52:02PM 6 points [-]

Manon: What's the bad thing that happens if I do 35?

You waste years of your life on dreadful AI designs based around suggestively named LISP tokens. See Drew McDermott's classic Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity. More on this later.

Ben Jones: Perhaps I am the sort of guy who has a Jones for green-eyed, black-haired girls.

Yes, by putting arbitrary boundaries into the utility function, I can force an AI to develop concepts for things that are bound only by those boundaries. But human utility boundaries are typically around otherwise-interesting higher-density regions, due to the evolutionary origins of our psychology. In other words, this is theoretically correct, but I've yet to see the issue arise in real life.

Spindizzy: This is gratuitously emotive and doesn't help to clarify your point.

In the original case, I talked about wiggins. Here, summarizing, I have to pick a better-known example of how arbitrarily excluding something is not only bad, but a case of trying to get away with something without justifying it.