Evidence for the orthogonality thesis

Stuart_Armstrong

One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.

Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.

I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?

Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.

One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.

Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.

Yeees... though I'm not sure how 'normal' it was, it could be mainly group effects.

I can only extrapolate from a single point, and "there isn't anything I find even the tiniest bit tempting about nailing the skins of Yermy Wibble's family to a newsroom wall". Sadistically killing a 'not real' game character can be fun, but if I try to imagine doing the same to a 'sufficiently real' character, like uploaded person, then it... doesn't work.

Yeees... though I'm not sure how 'normal' it was, it could be mainly group effects.

What does this distinction mean? A normal person in those groups would commit torture, and there's no such thing as a 'normal person' completely abstracted from 'group effects'; a Homo sapiens without memes isn't really a person.

For large numbers of people to abhor torture as much as we do is a bizarre (from a historical POV) recent phenomenon, AFAIK.

0pedanterrific14y

In the interests of allowing you to extrapolate from two points, have an anecdote: Assuming 'get away scot-free' is included, I'd torture a thirty-year-old white male for a billion dollars. That's my starting bid, you could probably bargain me down to less money or more objectionable kinds of people if you tried.