Rereading this part of the Sequences makes me wonder if an AI could make use of a kind of reCAPTCHA approach for sussing out some of these Magical Categories. It certainly would slow up the AI a lot, but could generate a lot of examples and classifications.
I doubt this would be a very efficient solution, but now I'm pretty amused by the prospect of trying to post a blog comment and getting a normal CAPTCHA plus something like this:
Bob receives regular does of soma, which makes him report high subjective satisfaction. His lifespan is not shortened. Bob is no longer chooses to leave his house. Is Bob truly happy (Y/N)?
The amount of time it would take to get a reasonable dataset would likely exceed the projected lifespan of the universe, I imagine.
Why the assumption that an AGI will be smart enough to drug the entire population with soma drugs before it is smart enough to recognize that soma-happiness isn't the same thing as happiness? It's clear argument for why we should never hard-code values into a general AI that cannot be changed when we figure out what is wrong about them.
The problem is that we need to be careful about assuming more intelligence automatically draws a distinction between soma-happiness and real-happinesss. We're pretty sure we know what the right answer is, so we assume anything at least as smart as we are will draw the same distinction.
We don't need to wait for AI for counterexamples, humans already spend a lot of time arguing about what counts as soma-happiness and what counts as real-happiness. Some examples of contested classification off the top of my head (watching football, using ecstasy, nsa sex,...
Today's post, Magical Categories was originally published on 24 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Unnatural Categories, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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