4 ms·

> That said, you put it exactly right. The arguments about the potential long-term risk are persuasive regardless of where we are today. It bothers me to see th

by maaku 12y ago

> That said, you put it exactly right. The arguments about the potential long-term risk are persuasive regardless of where we are today. It bothers me to see this argument ignored time and time again. Actually I am almost completely unpersuaded by the arguments of Bostrom, Yudkowsky, et al, at least in their presented strong form. Superintelligent AI is not a magical black box with infinite compute capacity, the two assumptions which really underlie the scary existential risk scenarios if you look closely. It is not at all clear to me that there will not exist mechanisms by which superintelligences can be contained or their proposed actions properly vetted. I have a number of ideas for this myself. In the weak form it is true that for most of the history of AI its proponents have more or less ignored the issue of machine morality. There were people in the 90's and earlier who basically advocated for building superintelligent AI and then sitting back and letting it do its thing to enact a positive singularity. That indeed would have been crazy stupid. Kudos to Yudkowsky and others for pointing out that intelligence and morality (mostly?) orthogonal. But it's a huge unjustified leap from "machines don't necessarily share our values" to "the mere existence of a superintelligent amoral machine will inevitably result in the destruction of humanity." (not an actual quote)

csallen 12y ago
You're right: AGI might not be as powerful as some predict it can be. And there might be a way to contain it if it is. And we might be able to enforce said containment strategy on researches worldwide. And the AGI might be benevolent even if it is super powerful and uncontainable. The authors above are unpersuasive in arguing that these things are inevitable, but they are persuasive in arguing that these things are possible. And if they are possible, then what matters to me is their likelihood. Based on current estimates, are we talking about a 50-50 chance here? 80-20? 99-1? 99.999-0.001? If we're talking about the future of the human race, these chances matter. But instead it seems everyone is just waving their hands at the what-ifs simply because they aren't 100%.
Micaiah_Chang 12y ago
I agree with a lesser form (timescale on which the AI self improves is probably going to be long enough for humans to deal with it) of your first argument, but I'm confused at how, given 'merely' lots of compute capacity can be countered by 'a number of ideas for this myself'. Security for human level threats is already very poor, and we already have a relatively good threat model. If you suppose that an AI could have radically different incentives and vectors than than a human, it seems implausible that you could be secure, even in practice. I suppose you could say that these would be implemented in time, but it's not at all clear to me that a humanity which has trouble coordinating to stop global warming or unilateral nuclear disarmament would recognize this in time. On the other hand, I'm slightly puzzled by why you think there's a huge unjustified leap between lack of value alignment and threat to the human race. Does most of your objection lie in 1) the lack of threat any given superintelligent AI would pose, because they're not going to be that much smarter than humans or 2) the lack of worry that they'll do anything too harmful to humans, because they'll do something relatively harmless, like trade with us or go into outer space? For 1, I buy that it'd be a lot smarter than humans, because even if it initially starts out as humanlike, it can copy itself and be productive for longer periods of time (imagine what you could do if you didn't have to sleep, or could eat more to avoid sleeping). And we know that any "superintelligent" machine can be at least as efficient as the smartest humans alive. I would still not want to be in a war against a nation full of von Neumanns on weapons development, Muhammads on foreign policy and Napoleons on Military strategy. For 2... I would need to hear specifics on how their morality would be close enough to ours to be harmless. But judging by your posts cross thread this doesn't seem to be the main point. By the way, I must thank you for your measured tone and willingness to engage on this issue. You seem to be familiar with some of the arguments, and perhaps just give different weights to them than I do. I've seen many gut level dismissals and I'm very happy to see that you're laying out your reasoning process.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
I just want to point out: the history of software, just regular software, has been typified by the New Jersey approach and the MIT approach. The former consists in just hacking together something that kinda-mostly works, releasing fast, and trying to ameliorate problems later. The latter consists in thoroughly considering what the software needs to do, designing the code correctly the first time with all necessary functionality, (ideally) proving the code correct before releasing it, putting it through a very thorough QA process, and then releasing with a pre-made plan for dealing with any remaining bugs (that you didn't catch in the verification, testing, and other QA stages). Only the latter is used for programming important things like airplanes, missile silos, and other things that can kill people and cost millions or billions of dollars when they go wrong -- the things in which society knows we cannot afford software errors. I don't think it's even remotely a leap to say that we ought to apply only this thorough school of engineering to artificial general intelligence, whether it's at the level of an idiotic teenager or whether it's a superintelligent scifi thingy. Now, if we think we can't really solve the inherent philosophical questions involved in making a "world optimization" AI that cannot go wrong, then we should be thinking about ways to write the software so that it simply doesn't do any "world optimization", but instead just performs a set task on behalf of its human owners, and does nothing else at all. But either way, I think leaving it up to New Jersey kludging is a Very Bad Idea.
- maaku 12y ago
  No one is making "world optimizations" engines. The concept doesn't even make sense when he wheels hit the road. No AI research done anytime in the foreseeable future would even be at risk of resulting in a runaway world optimizer, and contrary to exaggerated claims being made there would be plenty of clear signs something was amis if it did happen and planty of time to pull the plug.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    I think you missed the last sentence: your software doesn't need to be a "runaway world optimizer" to be a very destructive machine merely because it's a bad machine that was put in an important job. Again: add up the financial and human cost of previous software bugs, and then extrapolate to consider the kind of problems we'll face when we're using deterministically buggy intelligent software instead of stochastically buggy human intellect. At the very least, we have a clear research imperative to ensure that "AI", whatever we end up using that term to mean, "fails fuzzily" like a human being does: that a small mistake in programming or instructions only causes a small deviation from desired behavior.

by maaku 12y ago

csallen 12y ago

You're right: AGI might not be as powerful as some predict it can be. And there might be a way to contain it if it is. And we might be able to enforce said containment strategy on researches worldwide. And the AGI might be benevolent even if it is super powerful and uncontainable. The authors above are unpersuasive in arguing that these things are inevitable, but they are persuasive in arguing that these things are possible. And if they are possible, then what matters to me is their likelihood. Based on current estimates, are we talking about a 50-50 chance here? 80-20? 99-1? 99.999-0.001? If we're talking about the future of the human race, these chances matter. But instead it seems everyone is just waving their hands at the what-ifs simply because they aren't 100%.

Micaiah_Chang 12y ago

I agree with a lesser form (timescale on which the AI self improves is probably going to be long enough for humans to deal with it) of your first argument, but I'm confused at how, given 'merely' lots of compute capacity can be countered by 'a number of ideas for this myself'. Security for human level threats is already very poor, and we already have a relatively good threat model. If you suppose that an AI could have radically different incentives and vectors than than a human, it seems implausible that you could be secure, even in practice. I suppose you could say that these would be implemented in time, but it's not at all clear to me that a humanity which has trouble coordinating to stop global warming or unilateral nuclear disarmament would recognize this in time. On the other hand, I'm slightly puzzled by why you think there's a huge unjustified leap between lack of value alignment and threat to the human race. Does most of your objection lie in 1) the lack of threat any given superintelligent AI would pose, because they're not going to be that much smarter than humans or 2) the lack of worry that they'll do anything too harmful to humans, because they'll do something relatively harmless, like trade with us or go into outer space? For 1, I buy that it'd be a lot smarter than humans, because even if it initially starts out as humanlike, it can copy itself and be productive for longer periods of time (imagine what you could do if you didn't have to sleep, or could eat more to avoid sleeping). And we know that any "superintelligent" machine can be at least as efficient as the smartest humans alive. I would still not want to be in a war against a nation full of von Neumanns on weapons development, Muhammads on foreign policy and Napoleons on Military strategy. For 2... I would need to hear specifics on how their morality would be close enough to ours to be harmless. But judging by your posts cross thread this doesn't seem to be the main point. By the way, I must thank you for your measured tone and willingness to engage on this issue. You seem to be familiar with some of the arguments, and perhaps just give different weights to them than I do. I've seen many gut level dismissals and I'm very happy to see that you're laying out your reasoning process.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

I just want to point out: the history of software, just regular software, has been typified by the New Jersey approach and the MIT approach. The former consists in just hacking together something that kinda-mostly works, releasing fast, and trying to ameliorate problems later. The latter consists in thoroughly considering what the software needs to do, designing the code correctly the first time with all necessary functionality, (ideally) proving the code correct before releasing it, putting it through a very thorough QA process, and then releasing with a pre-made plan for dealing with any remaining bugs (that you didn't catch in the verification, testing, and other QA stages). Only the latter is used for programming important things like airplanes, missile silos, and other things that can kill people and cost millions or billions of dollars when they go wrong -- the things in which society knows we cannot afford software errors. I don't think it's even remotely a leap to say that we ought to apply only this thorough school of engineering to artificial general intelligence, whether it's at the level of an idiotic teenager or whether it's a superintelligent scifi thingy. Now, if we think we can't really solve the inherent philosophical questions involved in making a "world optimization" AI that cannot go wrong, then we should be thinking about ways to write the software so that it simply doesn't do any "world optimization", but instead just performs a set task on behalf of its human owners, and does nothing else at all. But either way, I think leaving it up to New Jersey kludging is a Very Bad Idea.

maaku 12y ago
No one is making "world optimizations" engines. The concept doesn't even make sense when he wheels hit the road. No AI research done anytime in the foreseeable future would even be at risk of resulting in a runaway world optimizer, and contrary to exaggerated claims being made there would be plenty of clear signs something was amis if it did happen and planty of time to pull the plug.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  I think you missed the last sentence: your software doesn't need to be a "runaway world optimizer" to be a very destructive machine merely because it's a bad machine that was put in an important job. Again: add up the financial and human cost of previous software bugs, and then extrapolate to consider the kind of problems we'll face when we're using deterministically buggy intelligent software instead of stochastically buggy human intellect. At the very least, we have a clear research imperative to ensure that "AI", whatever we end up using that term to mean, "fails fuzzily" like a human being does: that a small mistake in programming or instructions only causes a small deviation from desired behavior.