That depends what your initial probability is and why. If it already low due to updates on predictions about the system, then updating on "unpredictable" will increase the probability by lowering the strength of those predictions. Since destruction of humanity is rather important, even if the existential AI risk scenario is of low probability it matters exactly how low.
The importance should not weight upon our estimation, unless you proclaim that I should succumb to a bias. Furthermore, it is the destruction of the mankind that is the predicti...
Well, that's the Luke's aspirations; I was referring to the work done so far. The whole enterprise has the feeling of over optimistic startup with ill defined extremely ambitious goals; those don't have any success rate even for much much simpler goals.
A suggestion: it may be a bad idea to use word 'artificial intelligence' in the name without qualifiers, as to serious people in the field
the 'artificial intelligence' has much, much broader meaning than what SI is concerning itself with
there is very significant disdain for the commonplace/'science fiction' use of 'artificial intelligence'
Center for Helpful Artificial Optimizer Safety
What concerns me is lack of research into artificial optimizers in general... Artificial optimizers are commonplace already, they are algorithms to find optimal solutions to mathematical models, not to optimize the real world in the manner that SI is concerned with (correct me if I am wrong). Furthermore the premise is that such optimizers would 'foom', and i fail to see how foom is not a type of singularity.
Hmm what do you think would have happened with that someone if the name was more attractive and that person spent more time looking into SI? Do you think that person wouldn't ultimately dismiss it? Many of the premises here seem more far fetched than singularity. I know that from our perspective it'd be great to have feedback from such people, but it wastes their time and it is unclear if that is globally beneficial.
From what I gathered SI's relevance rests upon an enormous conjunction of implied and a very narrow approach as solution, both of which were decided upon significant time in the past. Subsequently, truly microscopic probability of relevance is easily attained; I estimate at most 10^-20 due to multiple use of narrow guesses into a huge space of possibilities.
I certainly agree, and I am not even sure what the official SI position is on the probability of such failure. I know that Eliezer in hist writing does give the impression that any mistake will mean certain doom, which I believe to be an exaggeration. But failure of this kind is fundamentally unpredictable, and if a low probability even kills you, you are still dead, and I think that it is high enough that the Friendly AI type effort would not be wasted.
Unpredictable is a subjective quality. It'd look much better if the people speaking of unpredictabili...
There's probably a lot of low hanging fruit, for example use of correct priors, e.g. given Gaussian prior distribution, a quite strong proof should be needed before you should believe someone (including yourself) has very high intelligence or expertise on a task.
Furthermore, many ways of evaluating people are to some extent self reinforcing as the people being evaluated are aware of evaluation. A smart person or expert can relatively cheaply demonstrate intelligence and/or expertise, in some way that provides very strong evidence, and will do so even for ...
I think what may be confusing about expected outcome is the name. You don't actually expect to get 5 dollars out of this :) . You don't even expect to get, say, 5 million dollars after 1 million games, such would be rather unlikely. You do expect to get 5$ per game if you played infinitely many games, though, and if you are playing such games on small amounts of money you can choose the game to play based on expected outcome.
Just because it doesn't do exactly what you want doesn't mean it is going to fail in some utterly spectacular way.
You aren't searching for solutions to a real world problem, you are searching for solutions to a model (ultimately, for solutions to systems of equations), and not only you have limited solution space, you don't model anything irrelevant. Furthermore, the search space is not 2d and not 3d, and not even 100d, the volume increases really rapidly with size. The predictions of many systems are fundamentally limited by Lyapunov's exponent. I suggest...
Well, if that's the whole point, SI should dissolve today (shouldn't even have formed in first place). The software is not magic; "once the software can achieve any serious objectives" is when we know how to restrict the search space; it won't happen via mere hardware improvement. We don't start with philosophical ideal psychopathic 'mind', infinitely smart, and carve friendly mind out of it. We build our sculpture grain by grain using glue.
I think the bigger issue is the collapsing of the notion of 'incredibly useful software that would be able to self improve and solve engineering problems' with philosophical notion of mind. The philosophical problem of how do we make the artificial mind not think about killing mankind, may not be solvable over the philosophical notion of the mind, and the solutions may be useless. However, practically it is a trivial part of much bigger problem of 'how do we make the software not explore the useless parts of the solution space'; it's not the killing of man...
What does Solomonoff Induction actually say?
I believe this one has been closed ages ago by Alan Turing, and practically demonstrated for approximations by the investigation into busy beaver function for example. We won't be able to know BB(10) from God almighty. Ever.
Of course, but one can lack information and conclude "okay, I don't have enough information", or one may not arrive at such conclusion due to the overconfidence (for example).
That's an interesting question. Eliezer has said on multiple occasions that most AI researchers now are lunatics, and he is probably correct; how would outsider distinguish Friendly AI team from the most? The fact of concern with safety, alone, is a poor indicator of sanity; many insane people are obsessed with safety of foods, medications, air travel, safety from the government, etc etc.
Well, the value of life, lacking specifiers, should be able to refer to the total of the value of life (as derived from other goals and intrinsic value if any); my post is rather explicit in that it speaks of the total. Of course you can take 'value life' to mean only the intrinsic value of life, but it is pretty clear that is not what OP meant if we assume that OP is not entirely stupid. He is correct in the sense that the full value of life is affected by rationality. Rational person should only commit suicide in some very few circumstances where it trul...
This raises interesting off-topic question: does 'intelligence' itself confer significant advantage over such methods (which can certainly be implemented without anything resembling agent's real world utility)?
We are transitioning to being bottlenecked (in our technological progress, at least) by optimization software implementing such methods, rather than being bottlenecked by our intelligence (that is in part how the exponential growth is sustained despite constant human intelligence); if the AI can't do a whole lot better than our brainstorming, it probably won't have upper hand over dedicated optimization software.
I think something is missing here. Suppose that water has some unknown property Y that may allow us to do Z. This very statement requires that water somehow refers to object in the real world, so that we would be interested in experimenting with the water in the real world instead of doing some introspection into our internal notion of 'water'. We want our internal model of water to match something that is only fully defined externally.
Other example, if water is the only liquid we know, we may have combined notions of 'liquid' and 'water', but as we explo...
Does a purely rational mind value life less or more?
Specifying that a mind is rational does not specify how much it values life.
That is correct but it is also probably the case that rational mind would propagate better from it's other values, to the value of it's own life. For instance if your arm is trapped under boulder, human as is would either be unable to cut off own arm, or do it at suboptimal time (too late), compared to the agent that can propagate everything that it values in the world, to the value of it's life, and have that huge value win...
Well, one has to distinguish between purely rational being that has full set of possible propositions with correct probabilities assigned to them, and a bounded agent which has a partial set of possible propositions, generated gradually by exploring starting from some of the most probable propositions; the latter can't even do Bayesian statistics properly due to the complex non-linear feedback via proposition generation process, and is not omniscient enough to foresee as well as your argument requires.
Any references? I haven't seen anything that is in any way relevant to the type of optimization that we currently know how to implement. The SI is concerned with notion of some 'utility function', which appears very fuzzy and incoherent - what it is, a mathematical function? What does it have at input and what it has at output? The number of paperclips in the universe is given as example of 'utility function', but you can't have 'universe' as the input domain to a ma... (read more)