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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I respect what you're saying - at least your point is that ASI "might" behave like this, rather than "will". I don't really agree, but that's ok, this is a tough speculative subject.

I can look at a shark, a dolphin and a torpedo, and will notice that all of them are streamlined so that they can move through liquid water with a minimum of drag. I am somewhat confident that if an alien species or ASI needs to move through liquid water while minimizing drag for some illegible terminal goal, they will design the object to be also streamlined. Perhaps I am wrong in some details -- for example, I might not have considered supercavitation -- but if I saw an alien using cube-shaped submarines that would be surprising.

We have many great examples of what swimming things look like. And we know the "physical laws" that limit traveling through water. We currently have only two distinct types of intelligent agents (humans and LLMs), neither of which tend to be omnicidal in pursuit of maximizing some function. And if there are "mental laws" about how intelligence tends to work, we don't yet know them. So I think you're too confident that you know the form an ASI would take.

Now, true, one of those two examples (humans) does indeed have the inherent "want" to not die. But that's not because we're optimized for some other random goal and we've reasoned that not dying helps accomplish it. Not dying in a competitive environment just happens to be a requirement for what evolution optimizes for (propagating genes), so it got baked in. If our best AIs were coming from an evolutionary process, then I'd worry more about corrigibility.

In a similar vein, preservation of the own utility function and power-seeking seem to be useful instrumental goals for any utility function which is not trivially maximizable. Most utility functions are not trivially maximizable.

Sure, it is true that an agent that doesn't "want" to die would ultimately be more effective at fulfilling its objective than one that doesn't care. But that's not the same as saying that we're likely to produce such an AI. (And it's definitely not the same as saying that the latter kind of AI basically doesn't exist, which is the "instrumental convergence" viewpoint.) Intelligence can be spiky. An AI could be competent - even superintelligent - in many ways without being maximized on every possible fitness axis (which I think LLMs handily demonstrate).

Now, it is possible that an ASI or alien is so far beyond our understanding of the world that it does not have anything we might map to our concept of "utility function"? Sure. In a way, the doomers believe that ASI will appear in a Goldilocks zone -- too different from us to be satisfied with watching TikTok feeds, but similar enough to us that we can still crudely model it as a rational agent, instead of something completely beyond our comprehension.

I think we're agreed here.

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