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DanArmak comments on Wanted: "The AIs will need humans" arguments - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 14 June 2012 11:01AM

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Comment author: timtyler 17 June 2012 08:49:48PM *  1 point [-]

Being inexhaustible, even if true, is not enough. Keeping humans around (or simulated) would have to be a better use of resources (marginally) than anything else the AGI could think of. That's a strong claim; why do you think that?

History is valuable, and irreplaceable if lost. Possibly a long sequence of wars early on might destroy it before it could be properly backed up - but the chances of such a loss seem low. Human history seems particularly significant when considering the forms of possible aliens. But, I could be wrong about some of this. I'm not overwhelmingly confident of this line of reasoning - though I am prettty sure that many others are neglecting it without having good reasons for doing so.

Comment author: DanArmak 17 June 2012 09:04:05PM 1 point [-]

Why is human history so important, or useful, in predicting aliens? Why would it be better than:

  • Analyzing the AIs and their history (cheaper, since they exist anyway)
  • Creating and analyzing other tailored life forms (allows testing hypotheses rather than analyzing human history passively)
  • Analyzing existing non-human life (could give data about biological evolution as well as humans could; experiments about evolution of intelligence might be more useful than experiments on behavior of already-evolved intelligence)
  • Simulating, or actually raising, some humans and analyzing them (may be simpler or cheaper than recreating or recording human history due to size, and allows for interactive experiments and many scenarios, unlike the single scenario of human history)
Comment author: timtyler 17 June 2012 10:17:50PM *  0 points [-]

Human history's importance gets diluted once advanced aliens are encountered - though the chances of any such encounter soon seem slender - for various reasons. Primitive aliens would still be very interesting.

Experiments that create living humans are mostly "fine by me".

They'll (probably) preserve a whole chunk of our ecosystem - for the reasons you mention, though only analysing non-human life (or post human life) skips out some of the most interesting bits of their own origin story, which they (like us) are likely to be particularly interested in.

After a while, aliens are likely to be our descendants' biggest threat. They probably won't throw away vital clues relating to the issue casually.

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