ewbrownv

Good insight.

No, even a brief examination of history makes it clear that the lethality of warfare is almost completely determined by the culture and ideology of the people involved. In some wars the victors try to avoid civilian casualties, while in others they kill all the adult males or even wipe out entire populations. Those fatalities dwarf anything produced in the actual fighting, and they can and have been inflicted with bronze age technology. So anyone interested making war less lethal would be well advised to focus on spreading tolerant ideologies ... (read more)

It's a recitation of arguments and anecdotes in favor of secrecy, so of course it's an argument in that direction. If that wasn't the intention there would also have been anti-secrecy arguments and anecdotes.

I don't actually agree with the assertion, but I can see at least one coherent way to argue it. The thinking would be:

The world is currently very prosperous due to advances in technology that are themselves a result of the interplay between Enlightenment ideals and the particular cultures of Western Europe and America in the 1600-1950 era. Democracy is essentially irrelevant to this process - the same thing would have happened under any moderately sane government, and indeed most of the West was neither democratic nor liberal (in the modern sense) during m... (read more)

Historically it has never worked out that way. When a society gets richer the people eat more and better food, buy more clothes, live in bigger houses, buy cars and appliances, travel more, and so on. Based on the behavior of rich people we can see that a x10 or even x100 increase from current wealth levels due to automation would just continue this trend, with people spending the excess on things like mansions, private jets and a legion of robot servants.

Realistically there's probably some upper limit to human consumption, but it's so far above current pr... (read more)

Because you can't create real, 100% physical isolation. At a minimum you're going to have power lines that breach the walls, and either people moving in and out (while potentially carrying portable electronics) or communication lines going out to terminals that aren't isolated. Also, this kind of physical facility is very expensive to build, so the more elaborate your plan is the less likely it is to get financed.

Military organizations have been trying to solve these problems ever since the 1950s, with only a modest degree of success. Even paranoid, well-funded organizations with a willingness to shoot people have security breaches on a fairly regular basis.

Indeed. What's the point of building an AI you're never going to communicate with?

Also, you can't build it that way. Programs never work the first time, so at a minimum you're going to have a long period of time where programmers are coding, testing and debugging various parts of the AI. As it nears completion that's going to involve a great deal of unsupervised interaction with a partially-functional AI, because without interaction you can't tell if it works.

So what are you going to do? Wait until the AI is feature-complete on day X, and then box it? Do y... (read more)

I do. It implies that it is actually feasible to construct a text-only channel, which as a programmer I can tell you is not the case.

If you build your AI on an existing OS running on commercial hardware there are going to be countless communication mechanisms and security bugs present for it to take advantage of, and the attack surface of the OS is far too large to secure against even human hackers. The fact that you'll need multiple machines to run it with current hardware amplifies this problem geometrically, and makes the idea that a real project could ... (read more)

Your second proposal, trying to restrict what the AI can do after it's made a decision, is a lost cause. Our ability to specify what is and is not allowed is simply too limited to resist any determined effort to find loopholes. This problem afflicts every field from contract law to computer security, so it seems unlikely that we're going to find a solution anytime soon.

Your first proposal, making an AI that isn't a complete AGI, is more interesting. Whether or not it's feasible depends partly on your model of how an AI will work in the first place, and par... (read more)

Actually, this would be a strong argument against CEV. If individual humans commonly have incoherent values (which they do), there is no concrete reason to expect an automated extrapolation process to magically make them coherent. I've noticed that CEV proponents have a tendency to argue that the "thought longer, understood more" part of the process will somehow fix all objections of this sort, but given the complete lack of detail about how this process is supposed to work you might as well claim that the morality fairy is going to descend from ... (read more)

<A joke so hysterically funny that you'll be too busy laughing to type for several minutes>

See, hacking human brains really is trivial. Now I can output a few hundred lines of insidiously convincing text while you're distracted.

Yes, I'm saying that to get human-like learning the AI has to have the ability to write code that it will later use to perform cognitive tasks. You can't get human-level intelligence out of a hand-coded program operating on a passive database of information using only fixed, hand-written algorithms.

So that presents you with the problem of figuring out which AI-written code fragments are safe, not just in isolation, but in all their interactions with every other code fragment the AI will ever write. This is the same kind of problem as creating a secure brow... (read more)

What I was referring to is the difference between:

A) An AI that accepts an instruction from the user, thinks about how to carry out the instruction, comes up with a plan, checks that the user agrees that this is a good plan, carries it out, then goes back to an idle loop.

B) An AI that has a fully realized goal system that has some variant of 'do what I'm told' implemented as a top-level goal, and spends its time sitting around waiting for someone to give it a command so it can get a reward signal.

Either AI will kill you (or worse) in some unexpected way if... (read more)

I thought that too until I spent a few hours thinking about how to actually implement CEV, after which I realized that any AI capable of using that monster of an algorithm is already a superintelligence (and probably turned the Earth into computronium while it was trying to get enough CPU power to bootstrap its goal system).

Anyone who wants to try a "build moderately smart AGI to help design the really dangerous AGI" approach is probably better off just making a genie machine (i.e. an AI that just does whatever its told, and doesn't have explicit... (read more)

The last item on your list is an intractable sticking point. Any AGI smart enough to be worth worrying about is going to have to have the ability to make arbitrary changes to an internal "knowledge+skills" representation that is itself a Turing-complete programming language. As the AGI grows it will tend to create an increasingly complex ecology of AI-fragments in this way, and predicting the behavior of the whole system quickly becomes impossible.

So "don't let the AI modify its own goal system" ends up turning into just anther way of s... (read more)

Why would you expect the social dominance of a belief to correlate with truth? Except in the most trivial cases, society has no particular mechanism that selects for true beliefs in preference to false ones.

The Darwinian competition of memes selects strongly for those that provide psychological benefits, or are politically useful, or serve the self-interest of large segments of the population. But truth is only relevant if the opponents of a belief can easily and unambiguously disprove it, which is only possible in rare cases.

If true, this is fairly strong evidence that the effort to turn the study of economics into a science has failed. If the beliefs of professional economists about their field of study are substantially affected by their gender, they obviously aren't arriving at those beliefs by a reliable objective process.

Censorship is generally not a wise response to a single instance of any problem. Every increment of censorship you impose will wipe out an unexpectedly broad swath of discussion, make it easier to add more censorship later, and make it harder to resist accusations that you implicitly support any post you don't censor.

If you feel you have to Do Something, a more narrowly-tailored rule that still gets the job done would be something like: "Posts that directly advocate violating the laws of in a manner likely to create criminal liability will be deleted... (read more)

Knowing that philosophers are the only people who two-box on Newcomb's problem, and they constitute a vanishingly small fraction of Earth's population, I confidently one-box. Then I rush out to spend my winnings as quickly as possible, before the inevitable inflation hits.

Telling me what X is will have no effect on my action, because I already have that information. Making copies of me has no effect on my strategy, for the same reason.