XiXiDu comments on A Brief Overview of Machine Ethics - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (86)
Why is evil stupid and what evidence is there that Yudkowsky is smart enough not to be evil?
If you got someone working on friendly AI you better ask if the person is friendly in the first place. You also shouldn't make conclusions based on the output of the subject of your conclusions. If Yudkowsky states what is right and states that he will do what is right that provides no evidence about the rightness and honesty of those statements. Besides, the most advanced statements about Yudkowsky's intentions are CEV and the meta-ethics sequence. Both are either criticized or not understood.
The question should be, what is the worst-case scenario regarding Yudkowsky and the SIAI and how can we discern it from what he is signaling? If the answer isn't clear, one should ask for transparency and oversight.
You seem to be under the impression that Eliezer is going to create an artificial general intelligence, and oversight is necessary to ensure that he doesn't create one which places his goals over humanity's interests. It is important, you say, that he is not allowed unchecked power. This is all fine, except for one very important fact that you've missed.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can't program. He's never published a nontrivial piece of software, and doesn't spend time coding. In the one way that matters, he's a muggle. Ineligible to write an AI. Eliezer has not positioned himself to be the hero, the one who writes the AI or implements its utility function. The hero, if there is to be one, has not yet appeared on stage. No, Eliezer has positioned himself to be the mysterious old wizard - to lay out a path, and let someone else follow it. You want there to be oversight over Eliezer, and Eliezer wants to be the oversight over someone else to be determined.
But maybe we shouldn't trust Eliezer to be the mysterious old wizard, either. If the hero/AI programmer comes to him with a seed AI, then he knows it exists, and finding out that a seed AI exists before it launches is the hardest part of any plan to steal it and rewrite its utility function to conquer the universe. That would be pretty evil, but would "transparency and oversight" make things turn out better, or worse? As far as I can tell, transparency would mean announcing the existence of a pre-launch AI to the world. This wouldn't stop Eliezer from make a play to conquer the universe, but it would present that option to everybody else, including at least some people and organizations who are definitely evil.
So that's a bad plan. A better plan would be to write a seed AI yourself, keep it secret from Eliezer, and when it's time to launch, ask for my input instead.
I disagree based on the following evidence:
You further write:
I'm not aware of any reason to believe that recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence is going to be something you can 'run away with'. It looks like some people here think so, that there will be some kind of, with hindsight, simple algorithm for intelligence that people can just run and get superhuman intelligence. Indeed, transparency could be very dangerous in that case. But that doesn't mean it is an all or nothing decision. There are many other reasons for transparency, including reassurance and the ability to discern a trickster or impotent individual from someone who deserves more money. But as I said, I don't see that anyway. It'll more likely be a blue sheet of different achievements that are each not dangerous on their own. I further think it will be not just a software solution but also a conceptual and computational revolution. In those cases an open approach will allow public oversight. And even if someone is going to run with it, you want them to use your solution rather than one that will most certainly be unfriendly.
Evil is not necessarily stupid (well, it is, if we are talking about humans, but let's abstract from that). Still, it would take a stupid Dr Evil to decide that pretending to be Eliezer Yudkowsky is the best available course of action.
You don't think that being Eliezer Yudkowsky is an effective way to accomplish the task at hand? What should Dr Evil do, then?
FWIW, my usual comparison is not with Dr Evil, but with Gollum. The Singularity Instutute have explicitly stated said they are trying to form "The Fellowship of the AI". Obviously we want to avoid Gollum's final scene.
Gollum actually started out good - it was the exposure to the ring that caused problems later on.
I seem to remember Smeagol being an unpleasant chap even before Deagol found the ring. But admittedly, we weren't given much.
Transparency is listed as being desirable here:
However, apparently, this doesn't seem to mean open source software - e.g. here:
You equivocate two unrelated senses of "transparency".
Uh, what? Transparency gets listed as a "socially important" virtue in the PR documents - but the plans apparently involve keeping the source code secret.
He means "transparent" as in "you can read its plans in the log files/with a debugger", not as in "lots of people have access". Transparency in the former sense is a good thing, since it lets the programmer verify that it's sane and performing as expected. Transparency in the latter sense is a bad thing, because if lots of people had access then there would be no one with the power to say the AI wasn't safe to run or give extra hardware, since anyone could take a copy and run it themselves.
You are confusing socially important with societally important. Microsoft, for example, seeks to have its source code transparent to inspection, because Microsoft, as a corporate culture, produces software socially - that is, utilizing an evil conspiracy involving many communicating agents.
I deny confusing anything. I understand that transparency can be a matter of degree and perspective. What I am pointing out is lip-service to transparency. Full transparency would be different.
Microsoft's software is not very transparent - and partly as a result it is some of the most badly-designed, insecure and virus-ridden software the planet has ever seen. We can see the mistake, can see its consequences - and know how to avoid it - but we have to, like actually do that - and that involves some alerting of others to the problems often associated with closed-source proposals.