All of HumaneAutomation's Comments + Replies

It ain't heaven if there are things that one should do to "remain a member", or to (continue) enjoy(ing) the best QoS. Surely, the very concept of duty, demand or task is anathema to calling a place heaven. Just as well, being cared for also ought not to be a concern, for it implies there exists the possibility of not being cared for - again, surely not a feature of anything remotely resembling a heaven.

Indeed I would go so far as to say that to have preferences (and to entertain any kind of doubt about whether they are met/fulfilled) has no place in any e... (read more)

That there is no such thing as being 100% objective/rational does not mean one can't be more or less rational than some other agent. Listen. Why do you have a favorite color? How come you prefer leather seats? In fact, why did you have tea this morning instead of coffee? You have no idea. Even if you do (say, you ran out of coffee) you still don't know why you decided to drink tea instead of running down to the store to get some coffee instead.

We are so irrational that we don't actually even know ourselves why most of the things we think, believe, want or ... (read more)

Well this is certainly a very good example, I'll happily admit as much. Without wanting to be guilty of the True Scotsman fallacy though - Human Cloning is a bit of a special case because it has a very visceral "ickiness" factor... and comes with a unique set of deep feelings and anxieties.

But imagine, if you will, that tomorrow we find the secret to immortality. Making people immortal would bring with it at least two thirds of the same issues that are associated with human cloning... yet it is near-certain any attempts to stop that invention from prolifer... (read more)

I think you're making a number of flawed assumptions here Sir Kluge.

1) Uncontrollability may be an emergent property of the G in AGI. Imagine you have a farm hand that works super fast, does top quality work but now and then there just ain't nothing to do so he goes for a walk, maybe flirts around town, whatever. That may not be that problematic, but if you have a constantly self-improving AI that can give us answers to major massive issues that we then have to hope to implement in the actual world... chances are that it will have a lot of spare time on it... (read more)

You know what... I read the article, then your comments here... and I gotta say - there is absolutely not a chance in hell that this will come even remotely close to being considered, let alone executed. Well - at least not until something goes very wrong... and this something need not be "We're all gonna die" but more like, say, an AI system that melts down the monetary system... or is used (either deliberately, but perhaps especially if accidentally) to very negatively impact a substantial part of a population. An example could be that it ends up destroy... (read more)

The problem here I think is that we are only aware of one "type" of self-conscious/self-aware being - humans. Thus, to speak of an AI that is self-aware is to always seemingly anthropomorphize it, even if this is not intended. It would therefore perhaps be more appropriate to say that we have no idea whether "features" such as frustration, exasperation and feelings of superiority are merely a feature of humans, or are, as it were, emergent properties of having self-awareness.

I would venture to suggest that any Agent that can see itself as a unique "I" must... (read more)

What makes us human is indeed our subjectivity.

Yet - if we intentionally create the most rational of thinking machines but reveal ourselves to be anything but, it is very reasonable and tempting for this machine to ascribe a less than stellar "rating" to us and our intelligence. Or in other words - it could very well (correctly) conclude we are getting in the way of the very improvements we purportedly wish for.

Now - we may be able to establish that what we really want the AGI to help us with is to improve our "irrational sandbox" in which we can continue ... (read more)

Thank you for your reply. I deliberately kept my post brief and did not get into various "what ifs" and interpretations in the hope of not constraining any reactions/discussion to predefined tracks.

The issue I see is that we as humans will very much want the AGI to do our bidding, and so we will want to see it as our tool to use for whatever ends we believe worthy. However, assuming for a moment here that it can also figure out a way to measure/define how well a given plan ought to be progressing if every agent involved is diligently implementing the most ... (read more)

Oh, that may indeed be true, but going forward it could give us only a little bit of extra "cred" before it realizes that most of the questions/solutions we want from it are either motivated by some personal preference, or that we are opposed to its proposed solutions to actual, objective problems for irrational "priorities" such as national pride, not-invented-here-biases, because we didn't have our coffee this morning or merely because it presented the solution in a font we don't like ;)

I think the issue here (about whether it is intelligent) is not so much a matter of the answers it fashions, but about whether it can be said it does so from an "I". If not, it is basically a proverbial Chinese Room, though this merely moves the goalposts to the question whether humans are not, actually, also a Chinese Room, just a more sophisticated one. I suspect that we will not be very eager to accept such a finding, indeed, we may not be capable of seeing ourselves thus, for it implies a whole raft of rather unpleasant realities (like, say, the absence of free will, or indeed any will at all) which we'd not want to be true, to put it mildly.

Well yes there are methods of preventing the situation as described (that one can manually pick from a stash where various 'qualities' are intermixed) but that changes the circumstances; my example was specifically for that set of particulars. I guess that like most examples where significant differences in assessment arise, they all boil down to where you set the "slider" for taking responsibility for the situation one creates (eg. the seller allowing manual selection) and the degree to which one is willing, able or justified to "exploit" such a situation... (read more)

I am one of those people that have an overactive sensitivity for fairness, and at times go to extremes to make sure justice "happens", and can't help but point out double standards and (real or perceived) hypocrisy. However... I'll be honest - this is generally something that decreases the net quality of my life. Not in the least because injustice (in the broad sense) is omnipresent and highly prevalent everywhere. When that isn't the problem, the next issue that rears its head repeatedly is how to define justice in the first place.

You mention the case of ... (read more)

I think this whole problem is a bit more nuanced than you seem to suggest here. I can't help but at least tentatively give some credit to the assertion that LW is, for lack of a better term, mildly elitist. To be sure, for perhaps roughly the right reasons, but being elitist in whatever measure tends to be detrimental to the chances of getting your point across, especially if it needs to be elucidated to the very folks you're elitist towards ;) Not many behaviors are judged more repulsive than being made to feel a lesser person... I'd say it's pretty close... (read more)

... but malice is the "force" that actually creates "evil" in the first place. I think the intended meaning of the saying "Don't assume malice where stupidity is sufficient [to explain an observation]" is meant to make the problem seem less bad, not worse...

At the heart of the intractability of stupidity lies the Dunning Kruger problem. It can be an impossible challenge to make an ignorant person:

- admit they are ignorant;
- in the process, realize that most of the beliefs and the reasons they had for holding them were entirely wrong;
- despite having just r... (read more)

Oh I don't really "do" Twitter actually... nor Facebook since about a year. Now and again one of my friends shares and tweet and sometimes it can be an interesting start of a topic but... though I've been doing Internet since 1995, Twitter is just too vacuous for my liking. In response, now and again I'll send a 1 hour+ YouTube link back ;)

And yes of course, multiple points of view need not bring one close to the Truth, however...

In a large number of narratives, especially, it seems, the most relevant ones, finding the truth may be practically impossible, ... (read more)

Okay - what I would want to ask is - is it reasonable to expect that a government with billions of dollars to spend on intelligence gathering, data analysis and various experts must be meeting at least one of these criteria:

- It has access to high quality information about the actual state of affairs in most relevant domains
- It is grossly incompetent or corrupt and the data is not available in an actionable format
- It willfully ignores the information, and some of its members actively work to prevent the information reaching the right people

The Corona vir... (read more)

Yeah alright... I guess you could call that passive casual observance :)

I had to read that twice to make sure I figured out what your point is :) Alright - well, look. The truth is, of course, that 95% of the news you read is utterly and completely irrelevant to you in any impactful sense. Try not following news for a month - you will soon realize you have not actually missed anything. Well - now with COVID this might be a little different, but only a little.

However.

If you do follow news, it would be proper and prudent to at least care about the veracity of it, especially if you have a habit of forming opinions about said news... (read more)

I guess what I meant by “easy” is compared to not doing any fact checking. So, 2-5 minutes of additional searching/additional sources would often be sufficient to realize something is most likely biased and/or fake news in, say, 80% of cases. It’s quite sad and discouraging that so many readers are unwilling to do even that, though again if the aim is confirmation of world view and not highest probability of accuracy and truth... it actually “makes sense” to not check ;)

Well - I think that you are obviously correct in stating what you state. However, the issue is not that people who read the news don't know about this; rather, that the group of people that is careless in evaluating the news they read can't be bothered to spend so much time corroborating, cross-referencing and classifying the stuff they read. Another way of saying what I mean is - here you're preaching to the converted who, I suspect, to a significant degree already apply prudence to the news they read.

I am operating on the assumption here that you wrote t... (read more)

Hmm. You give interesting examples; especially McNamara (and, kind of by extension, Kissinger...) could indeed be said to be very smart and in some instances very wrong and biased. And it would certainly not be reasonable for a history book discussing their exploits (augmented by hindsight-bias) to say they were basically dumb for advocating or pursuing what they did.

Though one might question the wisdom of coming up with and sticking to a narrative like the fear of communist systems spreading the world over. Bombing every potential success story back into ... (read more)

Thou shall not speak of scissors! Apparatus of the devil that be!

.. yes, I am left-handed :P

Hmm... I think the main problem with fake news is mostly that it is propagated and spread/forwarded by exactly those people who don't think they need to do any research coz they already "know" the "truth" anyway. There's a whole segment of society for whom the word nuance is a waste of time. We all know that becoming more informed and/or finding out another point of view can be easily accomplished merely at the cost of some time and attention; unfortunately, a sizeable part of the public does not feel the need to do so.

This is mostly because the dedicated ... (read more)

Mmmyes well while your theoretical framework may be sound, such an outcome is almost certainly not. I'd be willing to agree that it is not impossible such a step might, in the most uncommon of circumstances be part of an otherwise sound strategy/goal. Intelligence without morality is neither.

Right, OK, I see what you're getting at. And I guess it would be therefore reasonable to make some sort of... allowance for seemingly sub-optimal/unintelligent behavior in the pursuit of some goals... but this is a tricky situation when the behavior is especially devious or deadly ;)

Though I am not entirely sure if the Orthogonality Thesis is entirely applicable within the context in our thread here; If millions of voters who have millions of motivations, reasons, points of view and convictions become less and less likely to vote for you as they are more a... (read more)

So... can it be said that the advent of an AGI will also provide a satisfactory answer to the question whether we currently are in a simulation? That is what you (and avturchin) seem to imply. Also, this stance presupposes that:

- an AGI can ascertain such observations to be highly probable/certain;
- it is theoretically possible to find out the true nature of ones world (and that a super-intelligent AI would be able to do this);
- it will inevitably embark on a quest to ascertain the nature and fundamental facts about its reality;
- we can expect a "question ... (read more)

Well - this chain could go on ad infinitum.. all I was trying to say is:

- I am really trying to understand why people voted for Brexit and want to find answers that do not boil down to "they were ignorant/dumb/racists", however tempting it might be;
- The job of politicians is to serve the interests of the country they serve. If they have other reasons for pursuing certain policies they are being corrupt;
- If you are going to advocate voting for "Unknown" then you better have a very good idea of what you want instead, how you will bring it about and how it ... (read more)

I am not sure if I follow :) For starters, what is an "innate tendency to succeed"...? How is that even a thing? One might have a set of personal attributes that, given a bunch of challenges, might prove to be beneficial in increasing chances of getting what you want.. like charisma or being especially adept at detecting what people actually need, or when they are lying... but it would be a bit... irrational... to call that a innate tendency...? I mean I know there's plenty of people who would do that (and in so doing, make into a reputation that then beco... (read more)

I guess what I mean to say is - if killing smart people is the solution, the outcome you are after, almost by definition, cannot be an improvement. I guess maybe in theory there are some scenarios where this might be possible, but those will be few and far between.

Suppose that you are a member of a political party, and you are told that the less educated a person is, the more likely they will vote for you (and vice versa). If this was me, I would feel morally obliged to immediately disassociate myself from such a party, for it is all but impossible that wh... (read more)

You know what... as I thought about the above, I have to say that the very possibility of the existence of simulations seriously complicates any efforts at even hoping to understand what an AGI might think. Actually, it presents such a level of complexity and so many unknown unknowns that I am not even sure if the type of awareness and sentience an AGI may possess is definable in human terms.

See - when we talk about simulated worlds, we tend to "see" it in terms of the Matrix - a "place" you "log on to" and then experience as if it were a genuine world, co... (read more)

Ah Mr. Cummings... he may actually be literally too clever for his own good... his disdain for "the plebs" is all too readily on display ;) You should take a look at his wonderful ideas about data privacy. And yes, having followed Brexit both online and "in person" I am fairly familiar with all sides of the argument. My "default position" in matters of mass-made choices and decisions is that I never assume that a great many people are, in fact, dumb, even if it may be really tempting to think so. Their actions always have some logic, even if faulty/biased/... (read more)

Hmm. Let me elaborate a little bit on the reasons for me asking in the first place :) I have been pondering for some time the whole idea of the common notion that history has a tendency to repeat itself and/or that people seem to have... a measure of difficulty learning from previously made mistakes. I've been doing this due to a sense that "we" are slowly forgetting and in a weird way "discounting" the... attitudes acquired after the many atrocities in WW2 (duly linked to by you); my 13 year old daughter for instance needs some convincing to understand th... (read more)

Interesting examples, and indeed, it does happen, albeit especially for leaders from a very long time ago, those who seem to be particularly wise or especially unusual, yes.  Yet, compared to the decisive advantage that intellectual ability confers, I still feel it gets far too little credit and is not ascribed the influence that it actually has on how history unfolds.

You'd much sooner read about novel technologies being important, or even the impact of weather (on, for instance, naval battles). There is scant discussion of how historical figures have... (read more)

Ok - what I mean is that the reason historical events work out one way and not another rarely, if ever, is described or explained in terms of the intelligence and cleverness of those whose actions shape those events. So for example, the murder of Duke Ferdinand that led to the First World War is not (even partially) explained by the fact he was rather dumb to act the way he did, but by the political tensions of the time and his careless arrogance. The apparent intellect of most such historical figures and how smart they are rarely seems to be getting atten... (read more)