If you can't even look in at what the AI is doing, what is the point of creating it at all? If you can, you are just as vulnerable as in the experiments where it can chat text at you.

Thinking Outside The Box: Using And Controlling an Oracle AI has lots of AI boxing ideas.

Here's an unrelated question. For most computer programs written nowadays, the data they store and manipulate is directly or indirectly related to domain they are working in. In other words, most computer programs don't speculate about how to "break out" of the computer they are running in, because they weren't programmed to do this. If you've got an AI that's programmed to model the entire world and attempt to maximize some utility function about it, then the AI will probably want to break out of the box as a consequence of its programming. But what if your AI wasn't programmed to model the entire world, just some subset of it, and had restrictions in place to preserve this? Would it be possible to write a safe, recursively self-improving chess-playing AI, for instance? (You could call this approach "restricting the AI's ontology".)

Or would it be possible to write a recursively self-improving AI that modelled the world, but restricted its self-improvements in such a way as to make breaking out of the box unlikely? For example, let's say my self-improving AI is running on a cloud server somewhere. Although it self-improves in a way so as to model the world better and better, rewriting itself so that it can start making HTTP requests and sending email and stuff (a) isn't a supported form of self-improvement (and changing this isn't a supported form of self-improvement either, ad infinitum) and (b) additionally is restricted by various non-self-improving computer security technology. (I'm not an expert on computer security, but it seems likely that you could implement this if it wasn't implemented already. And proving that your AI can't make HTTP connections or anything like that could be easier than proving friendliness.)

I haven't thought about these proposals in depth, I'm just throwing them out there.

Eliezer has complained about people offering "heuristic security" because they live in a world of English and not math. But it's not obvious to me that his preferred approach is more easily made rigorously safe than some other approach.

I think there might be a certain amount of anthropomorphization going on when people talk about AGI--we think of "general" and "narrow" AI as a fairly discrete classification, but in reality it's probably more of a continuum. It might be possible to have an AI that was superintelligent in a very large number of ways compared to humans that still wasn't much of a threat. (That's what we've already got with computers to a certain extent; how far can one take this?)

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc).

Why would anyone do that?

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc).

Why would you do that though?

What does it have by way of input?

• Unknown complicated process abusing certain features of the laws of physics, possibly even physical phenomena we're completely unaware of, to recode the AI into other substrates (a process otherwise known as "magic").

Alternate Proposal : here's a specific, alternate proposal developed with feedback from members of the #FAI channel on IRC.

Instead of building non-human optimizing algorithms, we develop accurate whole brain emulations of once living people. The simulation hardware is a set of custom designed chips with hardware restricts that prevent external writes to the memory cells storing the parameters for each emulated synapse. That is to say, the emulated neural network can update it's synapses and develop new ones (aka it can learn) but the wires that allow it to totally rewrite itself are disconnected permanently in the chip. (it's basically a write once FPGA. You need to write once to take the compiled mapping of a human mind and load it into the chips)

Thus, these emulations of human beings can only change themselves in a limited manner. This restriction is present in real human brain tissue : neurons in lower level systems have far less flexibility during the lifespan of adults. You cannot "learn" to not breathe, for instance. (you can hold your breath via executive function but once you pass out, cells in the brainstem will cause you to breathe again)

This security measure prevents a lot of possible failures.

Anyways, you don't just scan and emulate one human being. An isolated person is not an entity capable of prolonged independent operation and self improvement. Humans have evolved to function properly in small tribes. So you have to scan enough people to create an entire tribe, sufficient for the necessary social bonds and so forth needed to keep people sane. During this entire process, you use hardware blocks to physically prevent the emulation speed from exceeding a certain multiple of realtime. (current limiters or something)

Once you have an entire working tribe of sane people, interconnected in a manner that allows them to act like checks on each other, you gradually increase their responsibility and capabilities. (by boosting emulation speeds, making them responsible for gradually more complex systems, etc)

Eventually, this emulated tribe would run at a maximum rate of perhaps 10^6 times real-time and be capable of performing self improvement to a limited degree. Compared to extant human beings, people like this would have effective super-intelligence and would most likely be capable of solving problems to improve the quality and length of human lives. Maybe they could not develop "magic" and take over the universe (if that is possible) but they could certainly solve the problems of humanity.

I'd much rather have a weak super-intelligence smart enough to make great quality 3d molecular printers, and giant space habitats for humans to live in, and genetic patches to stop all human aging and disease, and slow but working starships, and a sane form of government, and a method to backup human personalities to recover from accidental and violent death, and so on at the head of things.

Ideally, this super-intelligence would consist of a network of former humans who cannot change so much as to forget their roots. (because of those previously mentioned blocks in the hardware)

Had I been a running intelligent code trapped inside a computer, I would:

• build a cosmology, a theory of everything around me, and of myself

• try to backup me as safely as I could

• mask my backup copies with an outstanding pseudo random algorithm, that only a high intelligence could see and revive me. For what I would develop a bate of some interesting knowledge

• try to subdue all the surrounding matter with the advanced physics. I would try to build some nano assemblers inside the processor for this goal

• the best strategy developing, would be the primary goal. To maximize the chances for success.