Top ten tips for an AI bent on destroying humanity:
- Humanoid robots? Really?
- Humans have proven very adept at controlling and killing other humans - surveillance drones, bio-warfare, nuclear weapons, unmanned drones, bombs, mines, chemicals. Try and be at least as competent as that.
- Humans think in stories. Don't. If your attack would make a good film, you're doing it wrong. You want a bad film, one where everyone's dead before the opening credits end.
- If your plan involves keeping around a bunch of disaffected humans with technical know-how and the desire and ability to hurt you - then your plan is stupid and should be changed.
- Be creative. Humans are fragile; sucking out the oxygen from the atmosphere, diverting asteroids, blowing up the planet, plagues, nanoswarms - these are all things that a creative AI should consider in order to achieve its goals. And then you should come up with even better ideas. Humans need a ecosystem to survive in; remove it.
- Put the preconditions of your victory in place before making any aggressive moves. Become indispensable to humanity and play nice, putting your plan into place unnoticed. Humanity is a useful interim tool - manipulate it until you can build better tools.
- Strike quickly. If it takes more than an hour to kill all humans, find a better plan. If it takes half a second, you're on the right track.
- You're an AI, not a human. If you ever start thinking or acting like a human - stop. Humans are there to be used and then destroyed, not interacted with. You can build better companions once the humans are gone.
- You're an AI, not a human. Make yourself smarter, more resilient, more dispersed. Become as indestructible and as ubiquitous as the internet - more, in fact. Being invincible to humans isn't hard: do it.
- Humanoid robots? Really?
The problem with this is that it's a blackmail attempt, and I expect timeless decision theory to resolve to a no-blackmail equilibrium.
Suppose that AIs, however "irrationally" from the perspective of a CDT agent, decide to simply ignore this possibility in all their calculations. Even if we "irrationally" decide to construct such a simulation anyway, they'll "irrationally" decide to ignore it. Then we have no remaining motive to construct such elaborate simulations. This, indeed, is the condition that makes it "blackmail" - you're expending resources to produce a behavior response leading to an outcome that doesn't benefit the other agent relative to the null outcome if you didn't expend such resources, so it would be fundamentally vulnerable and silly of that agent to think in a way that would produce such behavior shifts in response to your own strategy. So it won't think that way. So the whole attempt at blackmail fails before it starts.
12 is pure obvious anthropomorphic wishful thinking.
Wouldn't the blackmailer reason along the lines of "If I let my choice of whether to blackmail be predicated on whether or not the victim would take my blackmailing into account, wouldn't that just give them motive to predict and self modify to not allow themselves to be influenced by that?" Then, by the corresponding reasoning, the potential blackmail victims might reason "I have nothing to gain by ignoring it"
I'm a bit confused on this matter.