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CarlShulman comments on Q&A with new Executive Director of Singularity Institute - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: lukeprog 07 November 2011 04:58AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 15 November 2011 10:08:25PM *  26 points [-]

What I'm afraid of is that a design will be shown to be safe, and then it turns out that the proof is wrong, or the formalization of the notion of "safety" used by the proof is wrong. This kind of thing happens a lot in cryptography, if you replace "safety" with "security". These mistakes are still occurring today, even after decades of research into how to do such proofs and what the relevant formalizations are. From where I'm sitting, proving an AGI design Friendly seems even more difficult and error-prone than proving a crypto scheme secure, probably by a large margin, and there is no decades of time to refine the proof techniques and formalizations. There's good recent review of the history of provable security, titled Provable Security in the Real World, which might help you understand where I'm coming from.

Comment author: CarlShulman 15 November 2011 10:25:41PM 1 point [-]

What I'm afraid of is that a design will be shown to be safe, and then it turns out that the proof is wrong, or that the formalization of the notion of "safety" used by the proof is wrong.

Thanks for clarifying.

This kind of thing happens a lot in cryptography,

I agree.