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I've never heard of people locking their refrigerator doors at night.
In response to
Consistently Inconsistent
When I saw that, I thought it was going to be an example of a nonsensical question, like "When did you stop beating your wife?".
In response to
Rationalist approach to developing Writing skills
I get writers block, or can't get past a simple explanation of an idea, unless I'm conversing online (usually some form of debate) in which case I can write pages and pages with no special effort.
Most professional computer scientists and programmers I know routinely talk about "smart", "dumb", "intelligent" etc algorithms. In context, a smarter algorithm exploits more properties of the input or the problem. I think this is a reasonable use of language, and it's the one I had in mind.
(I am open to using some other definition of algorithmic intelligence, if you care to supply one.)
I don't see why making an algorithm smarter or more general would make it dangerous, so long as it stays fundamentally a (non-self-modifying) translation algorithm. There certainly will be biases in a smart algorithm. But dumb algorithms and humans have biases too.
I generally go with cross domain optimization power. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Optimization_process Note that optimization target is not the same thing as a goal, and the process doesn't need to exist within obvious boundaries. Evolution is goalless and disembodied.
If an algorithm is smart because a programmer has encoded everything that needs to be known to solve a problem, great. That probably reduces potential for error, especially in well-defined environments. This is not what's going on in translation programs, or even the voting system here. (based on reddit) As systems like this creep up in complexity, their errors and biases become more subtle. (especially since we 'fix' them so that they usually work well) If an algorithm happens to be powerful in multiple domains, then the errors themselves might be optimized for something entirely different, and perhaps unrecognizable.
By your definition I would tend to agree that they are not dangerous, so long as their generalized capabilities are below human level, (seems to be the case for everything so far) with some complex caveats. For example 'non-self-modifying' is a likely false sense of security. If an AI has access to a medium which can be used to do computations, and the AI is good at making algorithms, then it could (Edit: It could build a powerful if not superintelligent program.)
Also, my concern in this thread has never been about the translation algorithm, the tax program, or even the paperclipper. It's about some sub-process which happens to be a powerful optimizer. (in a hypothetical situation where we do more AI research on the premise that it is safe if it is in a goalless program.
Consider automatic document translation. Making the translator more complex and more accurate doesn't imbue it with goals. It might easily be the case that in a few years, we achieve near-human accuracy at automatic document translation without major breakthroughs in any other area of AI research.
Making it more accurate is not the same as making it more intelligent. The question is: How does making something "more intelligent" change the nature of the inaccuracies? In translation especially there can be a bias without any real inaccuracy .
Goallessness at the level of the program is not what makes translators safe. They are safe because neither they nor any component is intelligent.
In response to
The Blue-Minimizing Robot
The conclusion I'd draw from this essay is that one can't necessarily derive a "goal" or a "utility function" from all possible behavior patterns. If you ask "What is the robot's goal?", the answer is, "it doesn't have one," because it doesn't assign a total preference ordering to states of the world. At best, you could say that it prefers state [I SEE BLUE AND I SHOOT] to state [I SEE BLUE AND I DON'T SHOOT]. But that's all.
This has some implications for AI, I think. First of all, not every computer program has a goal or a utility function. There is no danger that your TurboTax software will take over the world and destroy all human life, because it doesn't have a general goal to maximize the number of completed tax forms. Even rather sophisticated algorithms can completely lack goals of this kind -- they aren't designed to maximize some variable over all possible states of the universe. It seems that the narrative of unfriendly AI is only a risk if an AI were to have a true goal function, and many useful advances in artificial intelligence (defined in the broad sense) carry no risk of this kind.
Do humans have goals? I don't know; it's plausible that we have goals that are complex and hard to define succinctly, and it's also plausible that we don't have goals at all, just sets of instructions like "SHOOT AT BLUE." The test would seem to be if a human goal of "PROMOTE VALUE X" continues to imply behaviors in strange and unfamiliar circumstances, or if we only have rules of behavior in a few common situations. If you can think clearly about ethics (or preferences) in the far future, or the distant past, or regarding unfamiliar kinds of beings, and your opinions have some consistency, then maybe those ethical beliefs or preferences are goals. But probably many kinds of human behavior are more like sets of instructions than goals.
It seems that the narrative of unfriendly AI is only a risk if an AI were to have a true goal function, and many useful advances in artificial intelligence (defined in the broad sense) carry no risk of this kind.
What does it mean for a program to have intelligence if it does not have a goal? (or have components that have goals)
The point of any incremental intelligence increase is to let the program make more choices, and perhaps choices at higher levels of abstraction. Even at low intelligence levels, the AI will only 'do a good job' if the basis of those choices adequately matches the basis we would use to make the same choice. (a close match at some level of abstraction below the choice, not the substrate and not basic algorithms)
Creating 'goal-less' AI still has the machine making more choices for more complex reasons, and allows for non-obvious mismatches between what it does and what we intended it to do.
Yes, you can look at paperclip-manufacturing software and see that it is not a paper-clipper, but some component might still be optimizing for something else entirely. We can reject the anthropomorphically obvious goal and there can still be an powerful optimization process that affects the total system, at the expense of both human values and produced paperclips.
What is the robot's goal? To follow the program detailed in the first paragraph?
I suspect Richard would say that the robot's goal is minimizing its perception of blue. That's the PCT perspective on the behavior of biological systems in such scenarios.
However, I'm not sure this description actually applies to the robot, since the program was specified as "scan and shoot", not "notice when there's too much blue and get rid of it.". In observed biological systems, goals are typically expressed as perception-based negative feedback loops implemented in hardware, rather than purely rote programs OR high-level software algorithms. But without more details of the robot's design, it's hard to say whether it really meets the PCT criterion for goals.
Of course, from a certain perspective, you could say at a high level that the robot's behavior is as if it had a goal of minimizing its perception of blue. But as your post points out, this idea is in the mind of the beholder, not in the robot. I would go further as to say that all such labeling of things as goals occurs in the minds of observers, regardless of how complex or simple the biological, mechanical, electronic, or other source of behavior is.
I suspect Richard would say that the robot's goal is minimizing its perception of blue. That's the PCT perspective on the behavior of biological systems in such scenarios.
This 'minimization' goal would require a brain that is powerful enough to believe that lasers destroy or discolor what they hit.
If this post were read by blue aliens that thrive on laser energy, they'd wonder they we were so confused as to the purpose of a automatic baby feeder.
Hypothesis: Quirrell is positioning Harry to be forced to figure out how to dissolve the wards at Hogwarts. (or at least that's the branch of the Xanatos pileup we're on.)
In response to
The True Rejection Challenge
I have two reasons not to use your system:
One: If you're committed to doing the action if you yourself can find a way to avoid the problems, then as you come to such solutions your instinct to flinch away will declare the list 'not done yet' and add more problems, and perhaps problems more unsolvable in style, until the list is an adequate defense against doing the thing.
One way to possibly mitigate this is to try not to think of any solutions until the list is done, and perhaps some scope restrictions on the allowable conditions. Despite this, there is another problem:
Two: The sun is too big.
Well, this can actually be done (yes, in Prolog with a few metaprogramming tricks), and it's not really that hard - only very inefficient, i.e. feasible only for relatively small problems. See: Inductive logic programming.
No, not learning. And the 'do nothing else' parts can't be left out.
This shouldn't be a general automatic programing method, just something that goes through the motions of solving this one problem. It should already 'know' whatever principles lead to that solution. The outcome should be obvious to the programmer, and I suspect realistically hand-traceable. My goal is a solid understanding of a toy program exactly one meta-level above hanoi.
This does seem like something Prolog could do well, if there is already a static program that does this I'd love to see it.
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Please paraphrase the conclusion in the introduction. This should be something more like an abstract, so I can an answer with minimal digging.
The opposite end of this spectrum has network news teasers. "Will your childrens' hyberbolic discounting affect your retirement? Find out at 11"