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timtyler comments on AI Risk and Opportunity: Humanity's Efforts So Far - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (47)
The idea and its explanation both seem pretty speculative to me.
Pavlovian conditioning is settled science; the pain being negative utility value for intelligence etc, not so much.
The "idea" was:
...and its explanation was:
I'm inclined towards scepticism - significant injuries often hurt a considerable amount - and small ones do not hurt by disproportionally large amounts - at least as far as I know.
There do seem to be some ceiling-llike effects - to try and prevent people passing out and generally going wrong. I don't think that is to do with your hypothesis.
The very fact that you can pass out from pain and otherwise the pain interfering with thought and actions, implies that the pain doesn't work remotely like utility should. Of course one does factor in pain into the utility, but that is potentially dangerous for survival (as you may e.g. have to cut your hand off when its stuck under boulder and you already determined that cutting the hand off is the best means of survival). You can expect interference along the lines of passing out from the network training process. You can't expect interference from utility values being calculated.
edit:
Okay for the middle ground: would you agree that pain has Pavlovian conditioning role? The brain also assigns it negative utility, but the pain itself isn't utility, it evolved long before brains could think very well. And in principle you'd be better off assigning utility to lasting damage rather than to pain (and most people do at least try).
edit: that is to say, removing your own appendix got to be easy (for surgeons) if pain was just utility, properly summed with other utilities, making you overall happy that you got the knife for the procedure and can save yourself, through the entire process. It'd be like giving up an item worth $10 for $10 000 000 . There the values are properly summed first, not making you feel the loss and feel the gain separately.
You don't think consciousness should be sacrificed - no matter what the degree of damage - in an intelligently designed machine? Nature sacrifices consciousness under a variety of circumstances. Can you defend your intuition about this issue? Why is nature wrong to permit fainting and passing out from excessive pain?
Of course pain should really hurt. It is supposed to distract you and encourage you to deal with it. Creatures in which pain didn't really, really hurt are likely to have have left fewer descendants.
Well, in so much as the intelligence is not distracted and can opt to sit still play dead, there doesn't seem to be a point in fainting. Any time i have somewhat notable injury (falling off bike, ripping the chin, and getting nasty case of road rash), the pain is less than pain of minor injuries.
Contrast the anticipation of pain with actual pain. Those feel very different. Maybe it is fair to say that the pain is instrumental in creating anticipation of pain, which acts more like utility for intelligent agent. It also serves as a warning signal, and for conditioning, and generally as something that stops you from eating yourself. (and perhaps for telling the intelligence what is and isn't your body). The pain is supposed to encourage you to deal with the damage, but not to distract you from dealing with the damage.
I don't pretend to know exactly why nature does it - but I expect there's a reason. It mat be that sometimes being conscious is actively bad. This is one of the reasons for administering anaesthetics - there are cases where a conscious individual in a lot of pain willl ineffectually flail around and get themselves into worse trouble - where they would be better off being quiet and still - "playing dead".
As to why not "play dead" while remaining conscious - that's a bit like having two "off" switches. There's already an off switch. Building a second one that bypasses all the usual responses of the conscious mind while remaining conscious could be expensive. Perhaps not ideal for a rarely-used feature.
A lot of the time something is just a side effect. E.g. you select less aggressive foxes, you end up with foxes with floppy ears and white spots on fur.
With regards to flailing around that strikes me as more of reflex than utility driven behaviour. For playing dead, I mean, I can sit still when having teeth done without anaesthesia.
The problem with just fainting is that it is reflex - when conditions, do faint, when other conditions, flail around - not a proper utility maximizing agent behaviour - what are the consequences to flailing around, what are the consequences of sitting still, choose the one that has better consequences.
It seems to me that originally the pain was to train the neural network not to eat yourself, then it got re-used for other stuff, that it is not very suitable for.
Well, it's a consequence of resource limitation. A supercomputer with moment-by-moment control over actions might never faint. However, when there's a limited behavioural repertoire, with less precise control over what action to take - and a limited space in which to associate sensory stimulii and actions, occasionally fainting could become a more reasonable course of action.
The pleasure-pain axis is basically much the same idea as a utility value - or perhaps the first derivative of a utility. The signal might be modulated by other systems a little, but that's the essential nature of it.
Then why the anticipated pain feels so different from actual ongoing pain?
Also, I think it's more of a consequence of resource limitations of a worm or a fish. We don't have such severe limitations.
Other issue: consider 10 hours of harmless but intense pain vs perfectly painless lobotomy. I think most of us would try harder to avoid the latter than the former, and would prefer the pain. edit: furthermore, we could consciously and wilfully take a painkiller, but not lobotomy-fear-neutralizer.