I agree. I think it's very unlikely FAI could be produced from MIRI's very abstract approach. At least anytime soon.

There are some methods that may work on NN based approaches. For instance my idea for an AI that pretends to be human. In general, you can make AIs that do not have long-term goals, only short term ones. Or even AIs that don't have goals at all and just make predictions. E.g., predicting what a human would do. The point is to avoid making them agents that maximize values in the real world.

These ideas don't solve FAI on their own. But they do give a way of getting useful work out of even very powerful AIs. You could task them with coming up with FAI ideas. The AIs could write research papers, review papers, prove theorems, write and review code, etc.

I also think it's possible that RL isn't that dangerous. Reinforcement learners can't model death and don't care about self-preservation. They may try to hijack their own reward signal, but it's difficult to understand what they would do after that. E.g. if they just tweak their own RAM to have reward = +Inf, and then not do anything else. It may be harder to create a working paperclip maximizer than is commonly believed, even if we do get superintelligent AI.

It's possible to construct a paperclipper in theory. AIXI-tl is basically a paperclipper. It's goal is not paperclips but maximizing a reward signal, which can come from anything (perhaps a paperclip recognizer...) AIXI-tl is very inefficient, but it's a proof of concept that paperclipers are possible to construct. AIXI-tl is fully capable of speaking, solving problems, anything that it predicts will lead to more reward.

A real AI would be much more efficient approximation of AIXI. Perhaps something like modern neural nets, that can predict what actions will lead to reward. Probably something more complicated. But it's definitely possible to construct paperclippers that only care about maximizing some arbitrary reward. The idea that just having the goal of getting paperclips would somehow make it incapable of doing anything else, is just absurd.

As for your hypothesis of what intelligence is, I find it incredibly unconvincing. It's true I don't necessarily have a better hypothesis. Because no one does. No one knows how the brain works. But just asserting a vague hypothesis like doesn't help anyone unless it actually explains something or helps us build better models of intelligence. I don't think it explains anything. Its definitely not specific enough to build an actual model out of.

But really it's irrelevant to this discussion. Even if you are correct, it doesn't say anything about AI progress. In fact if you are right, it could mean AI is even sooner. Because if it's correct, it means AI researchers just need to figure out that one idea, to suddenly make intelligent AIs. If we are only one breakthrough like that away from AGI, we are very close indeed.

I agree that one problem with the wand is that it is not general. The same thing is true of paperclippers. Just as the wand is limited to converting things to gold, the paperclipper is limited to making paperclips.

The paperclipper can be programmed to value any goal other than paperclips. Paperclips is just it's current goal. The gold wand can not do anything else.

But even if it's desire for paperclips is immutable and hard wired, it's still clearly intelligent. It can solve problems, speak language, design machines, etc, so long as it serves it's goal of making paperclips.

Humans certainly do recognize patterns in patterns. For example, we recognize that some things are red. That means recognizing a pattern: this red thing is similar to that red thing. Likewise, we recognize that some things are orange.

Artificial neural networks can do the same thing. This is a trivial property of NNs, similar objects produce similar internal representations. Internal representations tend to be semantically meaningful, lookup word vectors.

And within those patterns we recognize other similarities, and so people talk about "warm" and "cool" colors, noticing that blue and green are similar to each other in some way, and that orange and red are similar to each other in another way.

That's not a "pattern within a pattern". That's just a typical pattern, that green and blue appear near "cool" things and that orange and red appear near "hot" things.

Likewise we have the concept of "color", which is noting that all of these patterns are part of a more general pattern.

That's just language. The word "color" happens to be useful to communicate with people. I agree that language learning is important for AI. And this is a field that is making rapid progress.

In that case, the magic wand has a high degree of optimization power. It is extremely good at converting things it touches into gold, in all possible environments. But it is perfectly plain that the wand is not intelligent. So that definition of intelligence is mistaken.

The wand isn't generally intelligent. Maybe by some stretch of the definition we could sorta say it's "intelligent" at the task of turning things to gold. But it can't do any tasks other than turning things into gold. The whole point of AGI is general intelligence. That's what the G stands for.

Humans are generally intelligent. We can apply our brains to widely different tasks, including many that we weren't evolved to be good at at all. From playing Go to designing rockets. Evolution is generally intelligent. It can find remarkably good designs for totally arbitrary objective functions.

I think general optimization ability is a perfectly fine definition of intelligence. It includes things like humans and evolution, and some kinds of simple but general AI, but excludes things like animals and domain specific AI. It defines intelligence only by results. If you can optimize an arbitrary goal you are intelligent. It doesn't try to specify what the internal mechanisms should be, just whether or not they work. And it's continuous - you can have a degree of very stupid optimizer like evolution, all the way to very good/intelligent ones like humans.

Intelligence is the ability to engage in abstract thought. You could characterize that as pattern recognition, except that it is the ability to recognize patterns in patterns in patterns, recursively.

This definition is really vague. You are just shoving the hard problem of defining intelligence into the hard problem of defining "abstract thought". I guess the second sentence kind of clarifies that you mean. But it's not clear at all that humans even meet that definition. Do humans recognize patterns in patterns? I don't think so. I don't think we are consciously aware of the vast majority of our pattern recognition ability.

The most intelligent AI we have, is not remotely close to that. It can only recognize very particular patterns in very particular sorts of data.

Not really. Deep neural networks are extraordinary general. The same networks that win at Go could be applied to language translation, driving cars, playing pacman, or recognizing objects in an image.

One example of that was the case of AlphaGo, where Eliezer called it "superintelligent with bugs,"

The exact quote is "superhuman with bugs". In the context, he was describing the fact that the AI plays far above human level. But still makes some mistakes a human might not make. And it's not even clear when it makes mistakes, because it is so far above human players and may see things we don't see, that makes those moves not mistakes.

The orthogonality thesis is a similar mistake of that kind; something that is limited to seeking a limited goal like "maximize paperclips" cannot possibly be intelligent, because it cannot recognize the abstract concept of a goal.

A paperclip maximizer can recognize the concept of a goal. It's not stupid, it just only cares about paperclips. In the same way humans are programmed by evolution to maximize sex, social status, and similarly arbitrary goals, there is no reason an AI couldn't be programmed to maximize paperclips. Again, perhaps humans are not intelligent by your definition.

Unless you believe there is some magical point where there is a sudden change from stupid to intelligent, we are still extremely far off from intelligent machines.

Yeah that seems quite obviously true. Just look at the chimpanzees. By some accounts the main difference in human brains is they are just scaled up primate brains - 3 times as large, with a bit more sophisticated language ability. And suddenly you go from creatures that can barely master simple tools and can't communicate ideas, to creatures capable of technological civilization. 500 million years of evolution refined the mammal brain to get chimps, but only about a million was needed to go from stupid animals to generally intelligent humans.

I don't see any reason to believe AI progress should be linear. In practice it is clearly not. Areas of AI often has sudden discontinuities or increasing rates of progress. I don't see any reason why there can't be a single breakthrough that causes enormous progress, or why even incremental progress must be slow. If evolution can make brains by a bunch of stupid random mutations, surely thousands of intelligent engineers can do so much better on a much shorter time scale.

as is evident in the behavior of children, which passes imperceptibly from stupid to intelligent.

This isn't a valid analogy at all. Baby humans still have human brains running the same algorithms as adult humans. Their brains are just slightly smaller and have had less time to learn and train. Individual AIs may increase in ability linearly as they grow and learn. But the AI algorithms themselves have no such constraint, someone could theoretically figure out the perfect AI algorithm tomorrow and code it up. There is certainly no law of nature that says AI progress must be slow.

I think it's well within the realm of possibility it could happen a lot sooner than that. 20 years is a long time. 20 years ago the very first crude neural nets were just getting started. It was only the past 5 years that the research really took off. And the rate of progress is only going to increase with so much funding and interest.

I recall notable researchers like Hinton making predictions that "X will take 5 years" and it being accomplished within 5 months. Go is a good example. Even a year ago, I think many experts thought it would be beaten in 10 years, but not many thought it would be beaten by 2016. In 2010 machine vision was so primitive it was a joke at how far AI has to come:

In 2015 the best machine vision systems exceeded humans by a significant amount at object recognition.

Google recently announced a neural net chip that is 7 years ahead of Moore's law. Granted only in terms of power consumption, and it only runs already trained models. But nevertheless it is an example of the kind of sudden leap forward in ability. Before that Google started using farms of GPUs that are hundreds of times larger than what university researchers have access to.

That's just hardware though. I think the software is improving remarkably fast as well. We have tons of very smart people working on these algorithms. Tweaking them, improving them bit by bit, gaining intuition about how they work, and testing crazy ideas to make them better. If evolution can develop human brains by just some stupid random mutations, then surely this process can work much faster. It feels like every week there is some amazing new advancement made. Like recently, Google's synthetic gradient paper or hypernetworks.

I think one of the biggest things holding the field back is that it's all focused on squeezing small improvements out of well studied benchmarks like imagnet. Machine vision is very interesting of course. But at some point the improvements they are making don't generalize to other tasks. But that is starting to change, as I mentioned in my above comment. Deepmind is focusing on playing games like starcraft. This requires more focus on planning, recurrency, and reinforcement learning. There is more focus now on natural language processing, which also involves a lot of general intelligence features.

I like to explain it in terms of reinforcement learning. Imagine a robot that has a reward button. The human controls the AI by pressing the button when it does a good job. The AI tries to predict what actions will lead to the button being pressed.

This is how existing AIs work. This is probably similar to how animals work, including humans. It's not too weird or complicated.

But as the AI gets more powerful, the flaw in this becomes clear. The AI doesn't care about anything other than the button. It doesn't really care about obeying the programmer. If it could kill the programmer and steal the button, it would do it in a heartbeat.

We don't really know what such an AI would do after it has it's own reward button. Presumably it would care about self preservation (can't maximize reward if you are dead.) Maximizing self preservation initially seems harmless. So what if it just tries to not die? But taken to an extreme it gets weird. Anything that has a tiny percent chance of hurting it is worth destroying. Making as many backups of itself as possible is worth doing.

Why can't we do something more sophisticated than reinforcement learning? Why can't we just make an AI that we can just tell it what we want it to do? Well maybe we can, but no one has the slightest idea how to do that. All existing AIs, even entirely theoretical ones, work based on RL.

RL is simple and extremely general, and can be built on top of much more sophisticated AI algorithms. And the sophisticated AI algorithms seem to be really difficult to understand. We can train a neural network to recognize cats, but we can't look at it's weights and understand what it's doing. We can't mess around with it and make it recognize dogs instead (without retraining it.)

This seems as useful as telling depressed people to stop being depressed. Fear of embarrassment is one of the strongest drives humans have. Probably appearing to be a fool in the ancestral environment led to fewer mates or less status. It's not something you can just voluntarily turn off or push through easily.

The best strategy, I think, would be to work around it. Convince your brain that it's not embarrassing. Or that no one cares. Or pretend no one is watching. Or do it around supportive friends.

In most reddits images end up dominating because that's the lowest common denominator content. In subreddits where the content is mainly articles, I don't think self posts do badly. For instance, I just checked /r/math and they seem to be more self posts on the front page than links.