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If you think that you can wait until AI looks like it's going to be developed now, and then suddenly develop all the math you need for the actually quite differ
by Eliezer 17y ago
If you think that you can wait until AI looks like it's going to be developed now, and then suddenly develop all the math you need for the actually quite different design problem of Friendly AI, you have a very romantic view of how long it takes to do new basic math. I sometimes call this the intuitive theory of "science by press release", i.e., when science is needed, you just need someone to issue one of those press releases you read about. And if someone hasn't shown that they're good at issuing press releases, why fund them?
It's quite routine to read a math textbook in which there's an equation, and then one line below it a slightly improved equation, and five years passed in between the two.
- giardini 17y agoIf you think that, with our current limited knowledge and relatively limited resources, we can anticipate what is necessary to constrain AI to be "friendly" or that we can somehow protect ourselves from something that can reproduce the entire logical thought process of mankind in minutes then you have a very romantic view of human accomplishment. Indeed, that would make you the "John Henry" of AI.
- Eliezer 17y agoOn this I can only refer you to e.g. http://singinst.org/AIRisk.pdf http://singinst.org/AIRisk.pdf. This is a standard reaction, and the standard reply is "The goal is to build something that doesn't want to hurt you in the first place." No one's trying to "constrain" anything, except in the sense that a programmer "constrains" code, not by fighting it, but by writing that particular piece of code into existence out of an exponentially vast space of possible alternatives.