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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