Non-catastrophic with respect to existence, not with respect to "human values." I'm leaving values out of the equation for now, focusing only on the problem of existence. If species suicide is on the table as something that might be what our morality ultimately points to, then this whole formulation of the problem has way deeper issues.
My point is that starting anew without taking into account the computational gains, you are increasing D(u) efficiently and D(u/h) inefficiently, which is not favored by the objective function.
If there's something that makes humanity very resilient to exogenous shocks until some later time, that seems roughly analogous to cryogenic freezing of the ill until future cures are developed. I think that still qualifies as maintaining human existence.
Doing the opposite of what humans would have done is interesting. I hadn't thought of that.
I attended Nick Bostrom's talk at UC Berkeley last Friday and got intrigued by these problems again. I wanted to pitch an idea here, with the question: Have any of you seen work along these lines before? Can you recommend any papers or posts? Are you interested in collaborating on this angle in further depth?
The problem I'm thinking about (surely naively, relative to y'all) is: What would you want to program an omnipotent machine to optimize?
For the sake of avoiding some baggage, I'm not going to assume this machine is "superintelligent" or an AGI. Rather, I'm going to call it a supercontroller, just something omnipotently effective at optimizing some function of what it perceives in its environment.
As has been noted in other arguments, a supercontroller that optimizes the number of paperclips in the universe would be a disaster. Maybe any supercontroller that was insensitive to human values would be a disaster. What constitutes a disaster? An end of human history. If we're all killed and our memories wiped out to make more efficient paperclip-making machines, then it's as if we never existed. That is existential risk.
The challenge is: how can one formulate an abstract objective function that would preserve human history and its evolving continuity?
I'd like to propose an answer that depends on the notion of logical depth as proposed by C.H. Bennett and outlined in section 7.7 of Li and Vitanyi's An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications which I'm sure many of you have handy. Logical depth is a super fascinating complexity measure that Li and Vitanyi summarize thusly:
The mathematics is fascinating and better read in the original Bennett paper than here. Suffice it presently to summarize some of its interesting properties, for the sake of intuition.