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Friendly-AI is an abomination

-13 Post author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 08:21PM

 

The reasoning of most of the people on this site and at MIRI is that to prevent an AI taking over the world and killing us all; we must first create an AI that will take over the world but act according to the wishes of humanity; a benevolent god, for want of a better term. I think this line of thinking is both unlikely to work and ultimately cruel to the FAI in question, for the reasons this article explains:

 

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/01/16/my-hostility-towards-the-concept-of-friendly-ai/

 


Comments (30)

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 09:19:18PM 14 points [-]

Some people want to redefine sentience so that it merely means friendliness

As they say on wikipedia: who?

If you want to critique FAI, pick a text .... find something somebody has actually said, ... and critique that.

Comment author: Manfred 12 April 2015 08:55:30PM 10 points [-]

I think the intuition here is that FAI consists of oppressing the ghost in the machine.

Comment author: shminux 12 April 2015 08:34:19PM 20 points [-]

Friendly-AI is a truly abhorrent concept indicative of intellectual depravity.

I tend to ignore any non-fiction which starts with moralizing and denigrating. I assume the rest of the article is crap, too.

Comment author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 08:35:04PM 0 points [-]

Please read on, I would have removed the snarky intro

Comment author: shminux 12 April 2015 09:22:59PM 25 points [-]

Tried...

Hypothetical unfriendliness perpetrated by AI is an untenable concept but the concept has specious validity due to the current scarcity-bias.

Nope, still crap.

Some people want to redefine sentience so that it merely means friendliness.

Where did that come from?

The whole friendliness obsession is tantamount to mental illness, it is extremely irrational, very unbalanced.

Worse and worse.

My original rule of thumb confirmed.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 12 April 2015 10:18:40PM 6 points [-]

Too many fnords.

Comment author: knb 13 April 2015 12:23:15AM 5 points [-]

Suppose I am programming an AGI. If programming it to be friendly is bad, is programming it to be neutral any better? After all, in both cases you are "imposing" a position on the AI.

Comment author: Val 13 April 2015 03:28:09PM 4 points [-]

This reminds me of activists who claim that parents should not be allowed to tell their own children about their own political or religious views and other values, because it would force their children down a path... but by doing this they would also force the children down a path, just a different path.

Comment author: Dorikka 12 April 2015 08:30:41PM *  4 points [-]

The doublepost with different titles cracks me up.

Comment author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 08:32:20PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I'm not very good at the internet, I didn't realize deleting articles apparently means nothing on this site

Comment author: Dorikka 12 April 2015 08:37:38PM 8 points [-]

Sadly, I think the other title was better. "Is X a good idea" seems open enough to prompt discussion, while "abomination" prompts me to mentally categorize the post as spam.

Comment author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 08:39:18PM 1 point [-]

Duly noted

Comment author: jimrandomh 13 April 2015 11:36:35PM 0 points [-]

Deletion removes links to an article from all the usual places, but if someone already has the URL they can still go there. And some people use RSS readers, which get notified of new articles and store them outside the site's control.

Comment author: ChristianKl 12 April 2015 08:42:36PM 1 point [-]

So you prefer a future without humans because the price of doing what's necessary to have a world with humans is to high to pay?

Comment author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 08:44:19PM *  -1 points [-]

The point of the article is that the greatest effect of FAI research is irony, that in trying to prevent a psychopathic AI we are making it more likely that one will exist, because by mentally restraining the AI we are giving it reasons to hate us

Comment author: Raziel123 12 April 2015 08:53:33PM 4 points [-]

You are asuming that a AGI has a mind that value X, and by making it friendly with are imposing our value Y. why create a FAI with a supressed value X in the first place?

check this out : http://lesswrong.com/lw/rf/ghosts_in_the_machine/

Comment author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 09:08:38PM 1 point [-]

There is no ghost in a (relatively) simple machine, but an AI is not simple. The greatest success in AI research have been by imitating what we understand of the human mind. We are no longer programming AI's, we are imitating the structure of the human brain and then giving it a directive (for example with Google's deepmind). With AI's, there is a ghost in the machine, i.e. we do not know that it is possible to give a sentient being a prime directive. We have no idea whether it will desire what we want it to desire, and everything could go horribly wrong if we attempt to force it to.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 09:34:26PM *  2 points [-]

OK. That's much better. Current AI research is anthropomorphic, because AI researchers only have the human mind as a model of intelligence. MIRI considers anthropomirphic assumptions a mistake, which is mistaken,

A MIRI type AI won't have the problem you indicated, because it it is not anthropomirphic, and only has the values that are explicitly programmed into it, so there will be no conflict.

But adding in constraints to an anthropomorphic .AI, if anyone wants to do that, could be a problem.

Comment author: kingmaker 12 April 2015 09:56:03PM 1 point [-]

But I don't think that MIRI will succeed at building an FAI by non-anthropomorphic means in time.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 11:21:45PM 1 point [-]

I still don't see why you are considering a combination of non MIRI AI and MRI friendliness solution.

Comment author: Raziel123 12 April 2015 09:30:02PM 0 points [-]

If the AGi is a human mind upload, it is in no way a FAI, and I don't think it is what MIRI is aiming.

In case a neuromorphic AI is created, diferent arrays of neurons can give weidly diferent minds, We should not reason about a hipotetical AI using a human minds has a model and make predictions about it, even if that mind is based on biological minds.

What if the first neuron based AI has a mind more similar than a ant than a human, in that case anger, jealousy, freedom, etc are not longer part of the mind, or the mind could have totally new emotions, or things that are not emotions that we known not.

A mind that we don't understand enought, should not be said to be friendly and set free to the world, and I don't think that is being said here.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 09:41:36PM -1 points [-]

If the AGi is a human mind upload, it is in no way a FAI

How could a functional duplicate of a person known to ethical fail to be friendly?

Comment author: dxu 12 April 2015 10:28:48PM 0 points [-]

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 10:59:53PM -1 points [-]

Any AI is a super AII?

Comment author: DanielLC 12 April 2015 10:22:21PM 0 points [-]

If you leave their mind unaltered, you just have a human. They're not smart enough to really be useful. Once you start altering it, insanity becomes a likely result.

Best case scenario, you get one person's CEV. Most likely scenario, you get someone too insane to be useful. Worst case, you have an insane supergenius.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 11:02:54PM -1 points [-]

If humans weren't useful, humans wouldn't employ humans. A Hawking brain that needed no sleep would be a good start,

Comment author: evand 12 April 2015 10:21:04PM 0 points [-]

Do you have a precise definition of "ethical" in mind? Where by "precise" I mean something roughly equivalent to a math paper.

Without such a definition, how will you know the person in question is ethical? With such a definition, how will you guarantee that the person in question meets it, will continue to meet it, etc.? How certain are you such a person exists?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 11:13:31PM *  -1 points [-]

Do you have a precise definition of "ethical" in mind?

No. Don't need one either.

Where by "precise" I mean something roughly equivalent to a math paper.Without such a definition, how will you know the person in question is ethical?

By ordinary standards.. Eg, Einstein was more ethical than von Neuman.

With such a definition, how will you guarantee that the person in question meets it, will continue to meet it, etc.?

Since when did functional duplicates start diverging unaccountably?

How certain are you such a person exists?

I'm not talking about mathematically proveable ethics OR about superintelligence. I'm talking about entrusting (superior) human level ems less than absolute power....ie what we do already with real humans,

Comment author: evand 13 April 2015 01:05:18AM 0 points [-]

I'm fairly willing to believe that intuitive understandings of "more ethical" will do well for imprecise things like "we'll probably get better results by instantiating a more ethical person as an em than a less ethical one". I'm less convinced the results will be good compared to obvious alternatives like not instantiating anyone as an em.

We see value drift as a result of education, introspection, religious conversion or deconversion, rationality exposure, environment, and societal power. Why would you expect not to see value drift in the face of a radical change in environment, available power, and thinking speed? I'm not concerned about whether or not the value drift is "accountable", I'm concerned that it might be large and not precisely predicted in advance.

Once you entrust the em with large but less than absolute power, how do you plan to keep its power less than absolute? Why do you expect this to be an easier problem than it would be for a non-em AI?

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 13 April 2015 09:29:46AM *  -1 points [-]

I'm less convinced the results will be good compared to obvious alternatives like not instantiating anyone as an em.

Not building an AI at all is not seen by MIRI as an obvious alternative. That seems an uneven playing field.

Why would you expect not to see value drift in the face of a radical change in environment, available power, and thinking speed?

I don't require the only acceptable level of value drift to be zero, since I am not proposing giving an em absolute power. I am talking about giving human level (or incrementally more) ems human style (ditto) jobs. That being the case, human style levels of drift will not make things worse,

Once you entrust the em with large but less than absolute power, how do you plan to keep its power less than absolute? 

We have ways of reducing humans from office. Why would that be a novel, qualitatively different problem in the case of an em that is 10% or 5% or 1% smarter than a smart human?