Thank you for taking the time to write this elaborate comment. I do agree with almost anything of the above by the way. I just believe that your portrayal of the anti-FOOM crowd is a bit drastic. I don't think that people like Robin Hanson simply fall for the idea of human supremacy. Nor do I think that the reason for them not looking directly at the pro-FOOM arguments is being circumventive but that they simply do not disagree with the arguments per se but their likelihood and also consider the possibility that it would be more dangerous to impede AGI.
...and a human-level AGI can reasonably be assumed capable of programming up narrow-domain brute forcers for any given narrow domain.
And it doesn't even have to be that narrow or brute: it could build specialized Eurisko-like solvers, and manage them at least as intelligently as Lenat did to win the Travelller tournaments.
Very interesting and quite compelling the way you put it, thanks.
I'm myself a bit suspicious if the argument for strong self-improvement is as compelling as it sounds though. Something you have to take into account is if it is possible to predict that a transcendence does leave your goals intact, e.g. can you be sure to still care about bananas after you went from chimphood to personhood. Other arguments can also be weakened, as we don't know that 1.) the fuzziness of our brain isn't a feature that allows us to stumble upon unknown unknowns, e.g. against autistic traits 2.) our processing power isn't so low after all, e.g. if you consider the importance of astrocytes, microtubule and possible quantum computational processes. Further it is in my opinion questionable to argue that it is easy to create an intelligence which is able to evolve a vast repertoire of heuristics, acquire vast amounts of knowledge about the universe, dramatically improve its cognitive flexibility and yet somehow really hard to limit the scope of action that it cares about. I believe that the incentive necessary for a Paperclip maximizer will have to be deliberately and carefully hardcoded or evolved or otherwise it will simply be inactive. How else do you defferentiate between something like a grey goo scenarios and that of a Paperclip maximizer if not by its incentive to do it? I'm also not convinced that intelligence bears unbounded payoff. There are limits to what any kind of intelligence can do, a superhuman AI couldn't come up with a faster than light propulsion or would disprove Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Another setback for all of the mentioned pathways to unfriendly AI are enabling technologies like advanced nanotechnology. It is not clear how it could possible improve itself without such technologies at hand. It won't be able to build new computational substrates or even change its own substrate without access to real-world advanced nanotechnology. That it can simply invent it and then acquire it using advanced social engineering is pretty far-fetched in my opinion. And what about taking over the Internet? It is not clear that the Internet would even be a sufficient substrate and that it could provide the necessary resources.
I'm myself a bit suspicious if the argument for strong self-improvement is as compelling as it sounds though. Something you have to take into account is if it is possible to predict that a transcendence does leave your goals intact, e.g. can you be sure to still care about bananas after you went from chimphood to personhood.
Isn't that exactly the argument against non-proven AI values in the first place?
If you expect AI-chimp to be worried that AI-superchimp won't love bannanas , then you should be very worried about AI-chimp.
I don't get what you're saying about the paperclipper.
Major update here.
Related to: Should I believe what the SIAI claims?
Reply to: Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It)
What I ask for:
I want the SIAI or someone who is convinced of the Scary Idea1 to state concisely and mathematically (and with possible extensive references if necessary) the decision procedure that led they to make the development of friendly artificial intelligence their top priority. I want them to state the numbers of their subjective probability distributions2 and exemplify their chain of reasoning, how they came up with those numbers and not others by way of sober calculations.
The paper should also account for the following uncertainties:
Further I would like the paper to include and lay out a formal and systematic summary of what the SIAI expects researchers who work on artificial general intelligence to do and why they should do so. I would like to see a clear logical argument for why people working on artificial general intelligence should listen to what the SIAI has to say.
Examples:
Here are are two examples of what I'm looking for:
The first example is Robin Hanson demonstrating his estimation of the simulation argument. The second example is Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok presenting the reasons for their evaluation of the importance of asteroid deflection.
Reasons:
I'm wary of using inferences derived from reasonable but unproven hypothesis as foundations for further speculative thinking and calls for action. Although the SIAI does a good job on stating reasons to justify its existence and monetary support, it does neither substantiate its initial premises to an extent that an outsider could draw the conclusions about the probability of associated risks nor does it clarify its position regarding contemporary research in a concise and systematic way. Nevertheless such estimations are given, such as that there is a high likelihood of humanity's demise given that we develop superhuman artificial general intelligence without first defining mathematically how to prove the benevolence of the former. But those estimations are not outlined, no decision procedure is provided on how to arrive at the given numbers. One cannot reassess the estimations without the necessary variables and formulas. This I believe is unsatisfactory, it lacks transparency and a foundational and reproducible corroboration of one's first principles. This is not to say that it is wrong to state probability estimations and update them given new evidence, but that although those ideas can very well serve as an urge to caution they are not compelling without further substantiation.
1. If anyone is actively trying to build advanced AGI succeeds, we’re highly likely to cause an involuntary end to the human race.
2. Stop taking the numbers so damn seriously, and think in terms of subjective probability distributions [...], Michael Anissimov (existential.ieet.org mailing list, 2010-07-11)
3. Could being overcautious be itself an existential risk that might significantly outweigh the risk(s) posed by the subject of caution? Suppose that most civilizations err on the side of caution. This might cause them to either evolve much slower so that the chance of a fatal natural disaster to occur before sufficient technology is developed to survive it, rises to 100%, or stops them from evolving at all for being unable to prove something being 100% safe before trying it and thus never taking the necessary steps to become less vulnerable to naturally existing existential risks. Further reading: Why safety is not safe
4. If one pulled a random mind from the space of all possible minds, the odds of it being friendly to humans (as opposed to, e.g., utterly ignoring us, and being willing to repurpose our molecules for its own ends) are very low.
5. Loss or impairment of the ability to make decisions or act independently.
6. The Fermi paradox does allow for and provide the only conclusions and data we can analyze that amount to empirical criticism of concepts like that of a Paperclip maximizer and general risks from superhuman AI's with non-human values without working directly on AGI to test those hypothesis ourselves. If you accept the premise that life is not unique and special then one other technological civilisation in the observable universe should be sufficient to leave potentially observable traces of technological tinkering. Due to the absence of any signs of intelligence out there, especially paper-clippers burning the cosmic commons, we might conclude that unfriendly AI could not be the most dangerous existential risk that we should worry about.