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Obviously we don't actually need a superintelligence to make paper clips, it's just an example to illustrate that an AI won't do what you want it to do if you p

Obviously we don't actually need a superintelligence to make paper clips, it's just an example to illustrate that an AI won't do what you want it to do if you program its motivations incorrectly. If you haven't programmed an AI to place sufficient importance on human life, and then tell it to maximize paperclip production, it could take that as its primary goal and see humans as made from raw material it could use to make more paperclips. It may know that you want the paper clips for human use, but does it have any reason to care if it hasn't been made with that as part of its goal system?

mariusz79 12y ago
I don't think AI will be "programmed" in a traditional sense of this word. AI will need to go through a learning process, where it will have a chance to learn all about humans, and the environment. Simple Paper Clip AI (SPCAI) will not be smart enough, nor powerful enough to prevent us from stopping it when we see that it's starting to make paper clips out of humans. True AI (tm) on the other hand will be smart enough to know that making paper clips out of humans is simply stupid. True AI may decide that the humans are unnecessary and remove us for other reasons. I'm sorry but if the paper clip AI doomsday scenario is the best this institute could come up with to explain why AI could be dangerous then I'm not impressed.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > I don't think AI will be "programmed" in a traditional sense of this word. AI will need to go through a learning process, where it will have a chance to learn all about humans, and the environment. Given [0], I think that it's the only plausible way we can have to make it follow human values. > True AI (tm) on the other hand will be smart enough to know that making paper clips out of humans is simply stupid. That's exactly The Misconception the whole movement around Friendly AI is trying to debunk. See [1]. > I'm sorry but if the paper clip AI doomsday scenario is the best this institute could come up with to explain why AI could be dangerous then I'm not impressed. Well, paperclip maximizer is just a toy example made up for explaining why general AIs are dangerous to those for whom this fact isn't obvious. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/ [1] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis
- aaronem 12y ago
  The paperclip stuff is a hackneyed cliché, old gray goo in new nanobottles, the sort of thing high-flown thinkers do when they want to explain the meat of their high-flown thinking to the intellectual hoi polloi, who can't be expected to get around genuine complexity. The trouble is that only someone, who is so high-flown a thinker as to be completely divorced from all common sense, could possibly imagine anyone taking such a simplification seriously. The other trouble is that these particular thinkers, who are so high-flown as to be in metaphorically geosynchronous orbit, consider this simplification an accurate statement of their basic concern. Those of us who haven't departed the atmosphere entirely, on the other hand, can see that they're assuming their notional golem to be both far smarter and far dumber than any possible human. Presumably that's the sort of conundrum you need a philosopher to untangle, which is why I'm glad they're busy doing that, instead of getting in the hair of people who have useful work to do.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> If you haven't programmed an AI to place sufficient importance on human life (...) And of course you need to watch out lest you overshoot with it and end up like folks in a certain widely popular computer game, where an AI decided that the best way to preserve the diversity of life is to reboot the galaxy every 50 000 years or so. The point of those examples being, the only AI that is safe for us is the one with values extremely aligned to our own; make a little mistake and you end up dead. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.".
- mariusz79 12y ago
  All these scenarios tend to assume that there is only one AI, or that it can think only one way. AI will grow with us. It will be thought by us.. It's highly unlikely that one day someone will run gcc on ai.cpp and few minutes later the AI will spring to life and start taking over the world. It's more likely that our software will be progressively getting smarter, and our databases larger. We will learn to utilize these resource and learn from our mistakes.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    It's a complex topic but the primary danger is with self-improving AIs. That pretty much implies there is going to be only one - the first one that starts to improve itself to be smarter than us. So it will look exactly "that our software will be progressively getting smarter, and our databases larger" up until the point some kind of critical mass is reached, and after that a wrongly programmed AI may just as well "spring to life and start taking over the world" few minutes later. You're assuming that AI will grow with us and necessarily reach the same value system we have (one we don't really comprehend ourselves, mind you). But there is no reason why this has to happen, and even if we did succeed in copying exact human values to a human-level AI, we'll likely be soon locked in an inter-species conflict over access to resources - after all, we don't care about other species living on Earth, so why the AI should care about us?
  - mariusz79 12y ago
    > after that a wrongly programmed AI may just as well "spring to life and start taking over the world" few minutes later. That's physically impossible. AI still needs to improve incrementally and this will take time and resources. We can consider such AI to act like a virus - it will need a host to grow - in this case computer resources. It will be limited by the CPU, network speeds, storage and power. If it grows too fast it will starve the host of these resources which in turn will slow down it's progress. Even if the AI starts on a supercomputer in some university somewhere and decides that it needs more power, most likely it will start by "infecting" other computers on the network. These computers will not be nearly powerful enough to add much to the current processing power of the supercomputer. Such invasion is likely to get noticed. Each infected node will not be another super intelligent being, but due to hardware limitations it will most likely be a software that's limited in scope and designed to propagate and control the resources, linking them with the main host. We can safely assume that restarting, or reformatting the drives will restore the node to it's non-infected state thus slowing down the "invasion". Why we can assume that? It will take AI long time to learn everything about every architecture and operating system and apply that knowledge. The AI that's hosted on a supercomputer will not be able to suddenly start rewriting its software, take over nearby nodes, learn everything about our world etc. >You're assuming that AI will grow with us and necessarily reach the same value system we have (one we don't really comprehend ourselves, mind you). No I'm not. Only thing I can assume is that if the AI is smart enough to figure out how "convert" humans to paper clips, it will be smart enough to understand that it's pointless. It may decide to use it's super intelligence to take over the world, and I can't argue with that.. But if it continues to make paper clips even if they are no longer necessary then by definition this is not AI, just a stupid replicator.
aaronem 12y ago
You assume both that this notional AI is intelligent beyond the limits of human capability, hence 'super-', and that this same AI is not intelligent enough to realize that making paper clips for human use is pointless if it recycles all the humans into paper clips so there's no one left to use them. Moving from the specific to the general, you share the common error of the AI philosophers, which is to assume that a system capable of cognition on even a human level, to say nothing of a superhuman level whatever that might mean, would nonetheless depend entirely on human input to define its relationship with the world and the purpose of its actions therein. We ourselves don't need that kind of input; an adult human chooses his own path, sets his own goals, constrained only by circumstance and by the extent of his innate capacities. Why blindly assume the same won't be true of a superintelligent AI made by humans, which will be in every meaningful sense a child of humanity and as such an inheritor of the human legacy, despite happening not to be biologically human itself?

mariusz79 12y ago

I don't think AI will be "programmed" in a traditional sense of this word. AI will need to go through a learning process, where it will have a chance to learn all about humans, and the environment. Simple Paper Clip AI (SPCAI) will not be smart enough, nor powerful enough to prevent us from stopping it when we see that it's starting to make paper clips out of humans. True AI (tm) on the other hand will be smart enough to know that making paper clips out of humans is simply stupid. True AI may decide that the humans are unnecessary and remove us for other reasons. I'm sorry but if the paper clip AI doomsday scenario is the best this institute could come up with to explain why AI could be dangerous then I'm not impressed.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> I don't think AI will be "programmed" in a traditional sense of this word. AI will need to go through a learning process, where it will have a chance to learn all about humans, and the environment. Given [0], I think that it's the only plausible way we can have to make it follow human values. > True AI (tm) on the other hand will be smart enough to know that making paper clips out of humans is simply stupid. That's exactly The Misconception the whole movement around Friendly AI is trying to debunk. See [1]. > I'm sorry but if the paper clip AI doomsday scenario is the best this institute could come up with to explain why AI could be dangerous then I'm not impressed. Well, paperclip maximizer is just a toy example made up for explaining why general AIs are dangerous to those for whom this fact isn't obvious. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes/ [1] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis
aaronem 12y ago
The paperclip stuff is a hackneyed cliché, old gray goo in new nanobottles, the sort of thing high-flown thinkers do when they want to explain the meat of their high-flown thinking to the intellectual hoi polloi, who can't be expected to get around genuine complexity. The trouble is that only someone, who is so high-flown a thinker as to be completely divorced from all common sense, could possibly imagine anyone taking such a simplification seriously. The other trouble is that these particular thinkers, who are so high-flown as to be in metaphorically geosynchronous orbit, consider this simplification an accurate statement of their basic concern. Those of us who haven't departed the atmosphere entirely, on the other hand, can see that they're assuming their notional golem to be both far smarter and far dumber than any possible human. Presumably that's the sort of conundrum you need a philosopher to untangle, which is why I'm glad they're busy doing that, instead of getting in the hair of people who have useful work to do.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> If you haven't programmed an AI to place sufficient importance on human life (...) And of course you need to watch out lest you overshoot with it and end up like folks in a certain widely popular computer game, where an AI decided that the best way to preserve the diversity of life is to reboot the galaxy every 50 000 years or so. The point of those examples being, the only AI that is safe for us is the one with values extremely aligned to our own; make a little mistake and you end up dead. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.".

mariusz79 12y ago
All these scenarios tend to assume that there is only one AI, or that it can think only one way. AI will grow with us. It will be thought by us.. It's highly unlikely that one day someone will run gcc on ai.cpp and few minutes later the AI will spring to life and start taking over the world. It's more likely that our software will be progressively getting smarter, and our databases larger. We will learn to utilize these resource and learn from our mistakes.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  It's a complex topic but the primary danger is with self-improving AIs. That pretty much implies there is going to be only one - the first one that starts to improve itself to be smarter than us. So it will look exactly "that our software will be progressively getting smarter, and our databases larger" up until the point some kind of critical mass is reached, and after that a wrongly programmed AI may just as well "spring to life and start taking over the world" few minutes later. You're assuming that AI will grow with us and necessarily reach the same value system we have (one we don't really comprehend ourselves, mind you). But there is no reason why this has to happen, and even if we did succeed in copying exact human values to a human-level AI, we'll likely be soon locked in an inter-species conflict over access to resources - after all, we don't care about other species living on Earth, so why the AI should care about us?
- mariusz79 12y ago
  > after that a wrongly programmed AI may just as well "spring to life and start taking over the world" few minutes later. That's physically impossible. AI still needs to improve incrementally and this will take time and resources. We can consider such AI to act like a virus - it will need a host to grow - in this case computer resources. It will be limited by the CPU, network speeds, storage and power. If it grows too fast it will starve the host of these resources which in turn will slow down it's progress. Even if the AI starts on a supercomputer in some university somewhere and decides that it needs more power, most likely it will start by "infecting" other computers on the network. These computers will not be nearly powerful enough to add much to the current processing power of the supercomputer. Such invasion is likely to get noticed. Each infected node will not be another super intelligent being, but due to hardware limitations it will most likely be a software that's limited in scope and designed to propagate and control the resources, linking them with the main host. We can safely assume that restarting, or reformatting the drives will restore the node to it's non-infected state thus slowing down the "invasion". Why we can assume that? It will take AI long time to learn everything about every architecture and operating system and apply that knowledge. The AI that's hosted on a supercomputer will not be able to suddenly start rewriting its software, take over nearby nodes, learn everything about our world etc. >You're assuming that AI will grow with us and necessarily reach the same value system we have (one we don't really comprehend ourselves, mind you). No I'm not. Only thing I can assume is that if the AI is smart enough to figure out how "convert" humans to paper clips, it will be smart enough to understand that it's pointless. It may decide to use it's super intelligence to take over the world, and I can't argue with that.. But if it continues to make paper clips even if they are no longer necessary then by definition this is not AI, just a stupid replicator.

aaronem 12y ago

You assume both that this notional AI is intelligent beyond the limits of human capability, hence 'super-', and that this same AI is not intelligent enough to realize that making paper clips for human use is pointless if it recycles all the humans into paper clips so there's no one left to use them. Moving from the specific to the general, you share the common error of the AI philosophers, which is to assume that a system capable of cognition on even a human level, to say nothing of a superhuman level whatever that might mean, would nonetheless depend entirely on human input to define its relationship with the world and the purpose of its actions therein. We ourselves don't need that kind of input; an adult human chooses his own path, sets his own goals, constrained only by circumstance and by the extent of his innate capacities. Why blindly assume the same won't be true of a superintelligent AI made by humans, which will be in every meaningful sense a child of humanity and as such an inheritor of the human legacy, despite happening not to be biologically human itself?