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I don't think the difference between "conscious being with a purpose" and "oblivious but powerful optimization process" is important here. (Maybe it is? A huma
by gjm11 4y ago
I don't think the difference between "conscious being with a purpose" and "oblivious but powerful optimization process" is important here.
(Maybe it is? A human engineer trying to design something that maximizes its inclusive genetic fitness might make it do so more explicitly. Maybe that would produce things that are better about doing it in practice than we are. But "evolution is smarter than you are" and I think we would have trouble actually doing better than evolution by designing deliberate fitness-maximizers. After all, our present best attempts in the direction of making machines smart enough to survive in the world have largely given up on trying to program particular goals and purposes into them directly!)
- thfuran 4y agoEvolution took over five hundred million years to get from first brain to human brains. I'd say AI research is doing pretty well.
- gjm11 4y agoI agree, it's doing spectacularly well. My point isn't "AI research is doing badly", it's "we should probably expect AI systems not to be perfectly effective optimizers of the things we try to build them to optimize; we may try to design them to do X but that doesn't necessarily mean they will actually do X, any more than we consistently do the things evolution has tried to design us to do".