Suppose you buy the argument that humanity faces both the risk of AI-caused extinction and the opportunity to shape an AI-built utopia. What should we do about that? As Wei Dai asks, "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive intelligence explosion?"
This post serves as a table of contents and an introduction for an ongoing strategic analysis of AI risk and opportunity.
Contents:
- Introduction (this post)
- Humanity's Efforts So Far
- A Timeline of Early Ideas and Arguments
- Questions We Want Answered
- Strategic Analysis Via Probability Tree
- Intelligence Amplification and Friendly AI
- ...
Why discuss AI safety strategy?
The main reason to discuss AI safety strategy is, of course, to draw on a wide spectrum of human expertise and processing power to clarify our understanding of the factors at play and the expected value of particular interventions we could invest in: raising awareness of safety concerns, forming a Friendly AI team, differential technological development, investigating AGI confinement methods, and others.
Discussing AI safety strategy is also a challenging exercise in applied rationality. The relevant issues are complex and uncertain, but we need to take advantage of the fact that rationality is faster than science: we can't "try" a bunch of intelligence explosions and see which one works best. We'll have to predict in advance how the future will develop and what we can do about it.
Core readings
Before engaging with this series, I recommend you read at least the following articles:
- Muehlhauser & Salamon, Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import (2013)
- Yudkowsky, AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk (2008)
- Chalmers, The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis (2010)
Example questions
Which strategic questions would we like to answer? Muehlhauser (2011) elaborates on the following questions:
- What methods can we use to predict technological development?
- Which kinds of differential technological development should we encourage, and how?
- Which open problems are safe to discuss, and which are potentially dangerous?
- What can we do to reduce the risk of an AI arms race?
- What can we do to raise the "sanity waterline," and how much will this help?
- What can we do to attract more funding, support, and research to x-risk reduction and to specific sub-problems of successful Singularity navigation?
- Which interventions should we prioritize?
- How should x-risk reducers and AI safety researchers interact with governments and corporations?
- How can optimal philanthropists get the most x-risk reduction for their philanthropic buck?
- How does AI risk compare to other existential risks?
- Which problems do we need to solve, and which ones can we have an AI solve?
- How can we develop microeconomic models of WBEs and self-improving systems?
- How can we be sure a Friendly AI development team will be altruistic?
Salamon & Muehlhauser (2013) list several other questions gathered from the participants of a workshop following Singularity Summit 2011, including:
- How hard is it to create Friendly AI?
- What is the strength of feedback from neuroscience to AI rather than brain emulation?
- Is there a safe way to do uploads, where they don't turn into neuromorphic AI?
- How possible is it to do FAI research on a seastead?
- How much must we spend on security when developing a Friendly AI team?
- What's the best way to recruit talent toward working on AI risks?
- How difficult is stabilizing the world so we can work on Friendly AI slowly?
- How hard will a takeoff be?
- What is the value of strategy vs. object-level progress toward a positive Singularity?
- How feasible is Oracle AI?
- Can we convert environmentalists into people concerned with existential risk?
- Is there no such thing as bad publicity [for AI risk reduction] purposes?
These are the kinds of questions we will be tackling in this series of posts for Less Wrong Discussion, in order to improve our predictions about which direction we can nudge the future to maximize the chances of a positive intelligence explosion.
Assuming your argument is correct, wouldn't it make more sense to blow ourselves up with nukes rather than pollute the universe with UFAI? There may be other intelligent civilizations out there leading worthwhile lives that we threaten unfairly by unleashing UFAI.
I'm skeptical that friendly AI is as difficult as all that because, to take an example, humans are generally considered pretty "wicked" by traditional writers and armchair philosophers, but lately we haven't been murdering each other or deliberately going out of way to make each other's lives miserable very often. For instance, say I were invincible. I could theoretically stab everyone I meet without any consequences, but I doubt I would do that. And I'm just human. Goodness may seem mystical and amazingly complex from our current viewpoint, but is it really as complex as all that? There were a lot of things in history and science that seemed mystically complex but turned out to be formalizable in compressed ways, such as the mathematics of Darwinian population genetics. Who would have imagined that the "Secrets of Life and Creation" would be revealed like that? But they were. Could "sufficient goodness that we can be convinced the agent won't put us through hell" also have a compact description that was clearly tractable in retrospect?
There might be countless planets that are about to undergo an evolutionary arms race for the next few billions years resulting in a lot of suffering. It is very unlikely that there is a single source of life that is exactly on the right stage of evolution with exactly the right mind design to n... (read more)