PhilosophyTutor

(EDIT: See below.) I'm afraid that I am now confused. I'm not clear on what you mean by "these traits", so I don't know what you think I am being confident about. You seem to think I'm arguing that AIs will converge on a safe design and I don't remember saying anything remotely resembling that.

EDIT: I think I figured it out on the second or third attempt. I'm not 100% committed to the proposition that if we make an AI and know how we did so that we can definitely make sure it's fun and friendly, as opposed to fundamentally uncontrollable and unkn... (read more)

I won't argue against the claim that we could conceivably create an AI without knowing anything about how to create an AI. It's trivially true in the same way that we could conceivably turn a monkey loose on a typewriter and get strong AI.

I also agree with you that if we got an AI that way we'd have no idea how to get it to do any one thing rather than another and no reason to trust it.

I don't currently agree that we could make such an AI using a non-functioning brain model plus "a bit of evolution". I am open to argument on the topic but currently it seems to me that you might as well say "magic" instead of "evolution" and it would be an equivalent claim.

A universal measure for anything is a big demand. Mostly we get by with some sort of somewhat-fuzzy "reasonable person" standard, which obviously we can't fully explicate in neurological terms either yet, but which is much more achievable.

Liberty isn't a one-dimensional quality either, since for example you might have a country with little real freedom of the press but lots of freedom to own guns, or vice versa.

What you would have to do to develop a measure with significant intersubjective validity is to ask a whole bunch of relevantly educated p... (read more)

I tend to think that you don't need to adopt any particular position on free will to observe that people in North Korea lack freedom from government intervention in their lives, access to communication and information, a genuine plurality of viable life choices and other objectively identifiable things humans value. We could agree for the sake of argument that "free will is an illusion" (for some definitions of free will and illusion) yet still think that people in New Zealand have more liberty than people in North Korea.

I think that you are basi... (read more)

I said earlier in this thread that we can't do this and that it is a hard problem, but also that I think it's a sub-problem of strong AI and we won't have strong AI until long after we've solved this problem.

I know that Word of Eliezer is that disciples won't find it productive to read philosophy, but what you are talking about here has been discussed by analytic philosophers and computer scientists as "the frame problem" since the eighties and it might be worth a read for you. Fodor argued that there are a class of "informationally unencaps... (read more)

I didn't think we needed to put the uploaded philosopher under billions of years of evolutionary pressure. We would put your hypothetical pre-God-like AI in one bin and update it under pressure until it becomes God-like, and then we upload the philosopher separately and use them as a consultant.

(As before I think that the evolutionary landscape is unlikely to allow a smooth upward path from modern primate to God-like AI, but I'm assuming such a path exists for the sake of the argument).

I think there is insufficient information to answer the question as asked.

If I offer you the choice of a box with $5 in it, or a box with $500 000 in it, and I know that you are close enough to a rational utility-maximiser that you will take the $500 000, then I know what you will choose and I have set up various facts in the world to determine your choice. Yet it does not seem on the face of it as if you are not free.

On the other hand if you are trying to decide between being a plumber or a blogger and I use superhuman AI powers to subtly intervene in you... (read more)

If I was unclear, I was intending that remark to apply to the original hypothetical scenario where we do have a strong AI and are trying to use it to find a critical path to a highly optimal world. In the real world we obviously have no such capability. I will edit my earlier remark for clarity.

The standard LW position (which I think is probably right) is that human brains can be modelled with Turing machines, and if that is so then a Turing machine can in theory do whatever it is we do when we decide that something ls liberty, or pornography.

There is a degree of fuzziness in these words to be sure, but the fact we are having this discussion at all means that we think we understand to some extent what the term means and that we value whatever it is that it refers to. Hence we must in theory be able to get a Turing machine to make the same distinction although it's of course beyond our current computer science or philosophy to do so.

If you can do that, then you can just find someone who you think understands what we mean by "liberty" (ideally someone with a reasonable familiarity with Kant, Mill, Dworkin and other relevant writers), upload their brain without understanding it, and ask the uploaded brain to judge the matter.

(Off-topic: I suspect that you cannot actually get a markedly superhuman AI that way, because the human brain could well be at or near a peak in the evolutionary landscape so that there is no evolutionary pathway from a current human brain to a vastly supe... (read more)

Why? Just because the problem is less complicated, does not mean it will be solved first. A more complicated problem can be solved before a less complicated problem, especially if there is more known about it.

To clarify, it seems to me that modelling hairyfigment's ability to decide whether people have liberty is not only simpler than modelling hairyfigment's whole brain, but that it is also a subset of that problem. It does seem to me that you have to solve all subsets of Problem B before you can be said to have solved Problem B, hence you have to have... (read more)

We have identified the point on which we differ, which is excellent progress. I used fictional worlds as examples, but would it solve the problem if I used North Korea and New Zealand as examples instead, or the world in 1814 and the world in 2014? Those worlds or nations were not created to be transparent to human examination but I believe you do have the faculty to distinguish between them.

I don't see how this is harder than getting an AI to handle any other context-dependant, natural language descriptor, like "cold" or "heavy". "... (read more)

I'll try to lay out my reasoning in clear steps, and perhaps you will be able to tell me where we differ exactly.

1. Hairyfigment is capable of reading Orwell's 1984, and Banks' Culture novels, and identifying that the people in the hypothetical 1984 world have less liberty than the people in the hypothetical Culture world.
2. This task does not require the full capabilities of hairyfigment's brain, in fact it requires substantially less.
3. A program that does A+B has to be more complicated than a program that does A alone, where A and B are two different, signi

I really am. I think a human brain could rule out superficially attractive dystopias and also do many, many other things as well. If you think you personally could distinguish between a utopia and a superficially attractive dystopia given enough relevant information (and logically you must think so, because you are using them as different terms) then it must be the case that a subset of your brain can perform that task, because it doesn't take the full capabilities of your brain to carry out that operation.

I think this subtopic is unproductive however, for... (read more)

I could be wrong but I believe that this argument relies on an inconsistent assumption, where we assume we have solved the problem of creating an infinitely powerful AI, but we have not solved the problem of operationally defining commonplace English words which hundreds of millions of people successfully understand in such a way that a computer can perform operations using them.

It seems to me that the strong AI problem is many orders of magnitude more difficult than the problem of rigorously defining terms like "liberty". I imagine that a relat... (read more)

The strong AI problem is much easier to solve than the problem of motivating an AI to respect liberty. For instance, the first one can be brute forced (eg AIXItl with vast resources), the second one can't.

I don't believe that strong AI is going to be as simple to brute force as a lot of LessWrongers believe, personally, but if you can brute force strong AI then you can just get it to run a neuron-by-neuron simulation of the brain of a reasonably intelligent first year philosophy student who understands the concept of liberty and tell the AI not to take... (read more)

I think Asimov did this first with his Multivac stories, although rather than promptly destroy itself Multivac executed a long-term plan to phase itself out.

Precisely and exactly! That's the whole of the problem - optimising for one thing (appearance) results in the loss of other things we value.

This just isn't always so. If you instruct an AI to optimise a car for speed, efficiency and durability but forget to specify that it has to be aerodynamic, you aren't going to get a car shaped like a brick. You can't optimise for speed and efficiency without optimising for aerodynamics too. In the same way it seems highly unlikely to me that you could optimise a society for freedom, education, just distribution of ... (read more)

I think this and the "finite resources therefore tradeoffs" argument both fail to take seriously the interconnectedness of the optimisation axes which we as humans care about.

They assume that every possible aspect of society is an independent slider which a sufficiently advanced AI can position at will, even though this society is still going to be made up of humans, will have to be brought about by or with the cooperation of humans and will take time to bring about. These all place constraints on what is possible because the laws of physics and... (read more)

I don't think you have highlighted a fundamental problem since we can just specify that we mean a low percentage of conceptions being deliberately aborted in liberal societies where birth control and abortion are freely available to all at will.

My point, though, is that I don't think it is very plausible that "marketing worlds" will organically arise where there are no humans, or no conception, but which tick all the other boxes we might think to specify in our attempts to describe an ideal world. I don't see how there being no conception or no h... (read more)