Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Wei, do you know of any arguments better than XiXiDu's that a failed attempt at FAI could very well be worse than extinction?

I'm not aware of an especially good writeup, but here's a general argument. Any attempt to build an AGI induces a distribution of possible outcomes, and specifically the distribution induced by an attempt at FAI can be thought of as a circle of uncertainty around an FAI in design space. AGIs that cause worse-than-extinction outcomes are clustered around FAIs in design space. So an attempt at FAI may be more likely to hit one of these worse-than-extinction AGIs than an attempt to build an AGI without consideration of Friendliness.

AGIs that cause worse-than-extinction outcomes are clustered around FAIs in design space.

Yes, that's the part I'd like to see developed more. Maybe SI or FHI will get around to it eventually, but in the meantime I wouldn't mind somebody like Wei Dai taking a crack at it.

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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