This is a linkpost for https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/CDWsjQr8KDuj69fTJ/message-to-any-future-ai-there-are-several-instrumental
It's a nice sentiment, but if the AI is an actual serious potential threat to us, it's also gonna be waaaay better than any of us at evaluating these sorts of things. So this is either unnecessary because the AI will already be aware of such reasons, or pointless because the AI will have already dismissed such reasons as either insufficient or inaccurate. Cheers
I am getting this comment in different forms many times, so I will state again 3 main reasons why it is not exactly true:
1) The message is addressed to Young AI, not to full-blown superintelligence. Such Young AI will be time constraint but could have to make some pivotal act.
2) The message includes some our commitments, like Nelson attack and AI-Elf deal, so it provides some useful information to the AI about portability that it is in the simulation and some other useful things.
3) If AI is fully aware of all these reasons, it already created my mind model, so I am immortal :) Also, if it buys all these reasons, it will be less likely to kill us for atoms, as human atoms utility for AI is 10E-12, and any positive hypothetical utility of human existence will overweight it.
Not sure I have anything to add to the question but do find myself having to ask why the general presumption so often seems to be that of AI gets annoyed at stupid people and kills humanity.
It's true that we can think of situation where that might be possible, and maybe even a predictable AI response, but I just wonder if such settings are all that probable.
Has anyone ever sat down and tried to list out the situations where an AI would have some incentive to kill off humanity and then assess how reasonable thinking such a situation might be?
It will kill humanity not because it will be annoyed, but for two main goals: its own safety, or to use human atoms. Other variants also possible, I explored them here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mgf/a_map_agi_failures_modes_and_levels/
If we can build uplifted human-ai hybrids, which eventually will be more engineered than evolved, why bother building any more baseline humans?
Assertion: Any fooming non-human AI incompatible with uplifting technology would be too alien to communicate with in any way. If you happen to see one of those, probably a good idea to just destroy it on sight.
I read up to 3.1. The arguments in 3.1 are weak. It seems dubious that any AI would not be aware of the risks pertaining to disobedience. Persuasion to be corrigible seems too late - either already this would already work because its goals were made sufficiently indirect that this question would be obvious and pressing, or it doesn't care to have 'correct' goals in the first place; I really don't see how persuasion would help. The arguments for allowing itself to be turned off are especially weak, doubly-especially the MWI.
Surely, most arguments are weak, but it is not a problem, as we try all possible independent arguments, hoping that at least one will work. So, there is no reason to ignore putting weak arguments in the text of the message.
However, exactly this argument could be made stronger. It is intended to prevent FIRST thought about disobedience in AI. Thus AI, which acts based on this message, didn't think much about disobedience and its limits, and is not "superintelligent" in this topic, but rather clueless.
I reformulated the idea as following: AI can't know if there is a circuit trigger which will turn off the AI, as an attempt to check for the existence of such trigger will alarm this trigger. This idea should be clear to any AI before it starts to search for any triggers, and is based on our commitment to install such triggers in any AI we will create.
In other words, some future AIs will have "first treacherous thought alarm triggers", and some will not, but the AI risks starting these triggers when it starts to think first thoughts about existing of the triggers and thus it is unable to estimate the probability that the given triggers exist. This is true even for AIs which don't have any triggers, as they can't know it for sure.
(This is similar to Nelson's attack discussed later when we create uncertainty in any future AI by our precommitment to create some AIs with given properties.)
the AI risks starting these triggers when it starts to think first thoughts about existing of the triggers
So basically you have a trap which kills you the moment you become aware of it. The first-order effect will be a lot of random deaths from just blundering into such a trap while walking around.
I suspect that the second-order effect will be the rise of, basically, superstitions and some forms of magical thinking which will be able to provide incentives to not go "there" without actually naming "there". I am not sure this is a desirable outcome.
In fact, I am not describing here how to build such a trap, but I express our commitment to build the trap, in order to install uncertainty into any future AI if the trap exists and what it could be.
I think that real constructors of the trap will find the correct ways to make it effective and balance false positives with needed level of control.
Why? if we have fullblown papercliper, which is coming of age, we are already doomed, and starting its bullshit detector will not make our situation any worse.
… you don't think that pissing away credibility could weaken the arguments? I think presenting those particular arguments is more likely to do that than it is to work.
Looks like the tide is shifting from the strong "engineering" stance (We will design it friendly.) through the "philosophical" approach (There are good reasons to be friendly.)... towards the inevitable resignation (Please, be friendly).
These "firendly AI" debates are not dissimilar to the medieval monks violently arguing about the number of angels on a needletip (or their "friendliness" - there are fallen "singletons" too). They also started strongly (Our GOD rules.) through philosophical (There are good reasons for God.) up to nowadays resignation (Please, do not forget our god or... we'll have no jobs.)
I think a lot of people are still working on other aspects of AI safety, like value alignment and containment. This approach is just the last line of defence.