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This is MIRI; they do really interesting theoretical philosophy and worryingly small amounts of practical research.
by bbctol 10y ago
This is MIRI; they do really interesting theoretical philosophy and worryingly small amounts of practical research.
- jey 10y agoWhat is your definition of practical?
- bonoboTP 10y agoMy concept of practical is stuff like: implementing things, doing experiments with prototypes, producing stuff that is imperfect but does something and can be improved upon. Theoretical stuff is like: proving theorems, conceptualizing the task at hand, philosophical inquiry into the nature of agents/intelligence/reasoning/goals/human values I'm not trying to argue which is more important, but surely MIRI focuses more on the theoretical.
- jpt4 10y agoMIRI is entirely Blue Team - they work to create theoretical [0] safeguards on AI agents yet to be developed. I've long envisioned a counterpart Red Team that does nothing but build AIs that attempt to subvert these safety features, since the rest of the world of non Friendly AI [1] research is only unco-ordinated para-red behavior. [0] In the sense of "valid under these known precepts", not "speculative". [1] Non "Friendly AI", not "non-Friendly" AI.
- gallabytes 10y agoI find that perception fairly surprising, as for a very long time it felt like we did more red team than blue team. I do acknowledge that this has been changing recently, but only significantly in the context of building on the results in this paper.
- jpt4 10y agoWould you please direct me to an example of MIRI's Red Team efforts that isn't the recent "Malevolent AI" paper [0]? Adherence to the belief that UFAI is a threshold-grade existential risk seems to compel a "define first, delay implementation" strategy, lest any step forward be the irrevocable wrong one. [0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02817 http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02817
- gallabytes 10y agoThis makes me think the only thing we disagree on is the meaning of the words "red team" and "blue team" :) When I say it feels like we spend a lot of time red teaming, that means I think we spend somewhere between 30 and 60% of research time trying to break things and see how they fail. This is fully compatible with not immediately implementing things - it's much less expensive to break something /before/ you build it.
- jpt4 10y agoIt is refreshing when only the maps, and not the objects, are under serious contention. I suspect I still might prefer walking a shade closer to the line dividing definitely intra and potentially extra boxed agents, but you are the ones actually in the arena - do keep up the interesting work.
- Jach 10y agoAt least public practical research. But I've long wondered what their bank account would look like if they had a side venture into exploiting narrow AI for commercial use rather than rely on donations.
- bonoboTP 10y agoMaybe they have a problem attracting those types of researchers for some reason.