"Stupid" questions thread

gothgirl420666

r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.

What's with the ems? People who are into ems seem to make a lot of assumptions about what ems are like and seem completely unattached to present-day culture or even structure of life, seem willing to spam duplicates of people around, etc. I know that Hanson thinks that 1. ems will not be robbed of their humanity and 2. that lots of things we currently consider horrible will come to pass and be accepted, but it's rather strange just how as soon as people say 'em' (as opposed to any other form of uploading) everything gets weird. Does anthropics come into it?
Why the huge focus on fully paternalistic Friendly AI rather than Obedient AI? It seems like a much lower-risk project. (and yes, I'm aware of the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI.)

Besides Eliezer's rather strong-looking argument, ethically creating Obedient AI would require solving the following scary problems:

A "nonperson predicate" that can ensure the AI doesn't create simulations which themselves count as people. If we fail to solve this one, then I could be a simulation the AI made in order to test how people like me react to torture.
A way to ensure the AI itself does not count as a person, so that we don't feel sad if it eventually switches itself off. See here for a fuller explanation of why this matters.

Now, ... (read more)

10Eliezer Yudkowsky13y

Well, no offense, but I'm not sure you are aware of the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI, or rather, just how much F you need in a genie. If you were to actually figure out how to build a genie you would have figured it out by trying to build a CEV-class AI, intending to tackle all those challenges, tackling all those challenges, having pretty good solutions to all of those challenges, not trusting those solutions quite enough, and temporarily retreating to a mere genie which had ALL of the safety measures one would intuitively imagine necessary for a CEV-class independently-acting unchecked AI, to the best grade you could currently implement them. Anyone who thought they could skip the hard parts of CEV-class FAI by just building a genie instead, would die like a squirrel under a lawnmower. For reasons they didn't even understand because they hadn't become engaged with that part of the problem. I'm not certain that this must happen in reality. The problem might have much kinder qualities than I anticipate in the sense of mistakes naturally showing up early enough and blatantly enough for corner-cutters to spot them. But it's how things are looking as a default after becoming engaged with the problems of CEV-class AI. The same problems show up in proposed 'genies' too, it's just that the genie-proposers don't realize it.

3DanielLC13y

I didn't know "em" was a specific form of uploading. What form is it, and what other forms are there?

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