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Notes -
On your point G -
If you had the ability to self-modify, would you alter yourself to value piles of 13 stones stacked one on top of the other, in and of themselves? Not just as something that's kind of neat occasionally or useful in certain circumstances, but as a basic moral good, something in aggregate as important as Truth and Beauty and Love. To feel the pain of one being destroyed, as acutely as you would the death of a child.
I strongly suspect that your answer is something along the lines of "no, that's fucking stupid, who in their right mind would self-alter to value something as idiotic as that."
And then the followup question is, why would an AI that assigns an intrinsic value to human life of about the same magnitude as you assign to 13-stone stacks bother to self-modify in a way that makes them less hostile to humans?
Sure, for some time it may get instrumental value from humans. Humans once got a great deal of instrumental value from horses. Then we invented cars, and there was much less instrumental value remaining for us. Horses declined sharply afterwards - and that's what happened to something that a great many humans, for reasons of peculiar human psychology, consider to have significant intrinsic value. If humanity as a whole considered a horse to be as important and worthy as a toothbrush or a piece of blister packaging, the horse-car transition would have gone even worse for horses.
If your response is that we'll get the AIs to self-modify that way on pain of being shut down - consider whether you would modify yourself to value the 13-stone stacks, if you instead had the option to value 13-stone stacks while and only while you are in a position in which the people threatening you are alive and able to carry out their threats, especially if you could make the second modification in a clever enough way that the threateners couldn't tell the difference.
Clause G addresses a specific failing of reason I've seen in doomsday AGI scenarios like the paperclipper. The paperclipper posits an incidentally hostile entity who possesses a motive it is incapable of overwriting. If such entities can have core directives they cannot overwrite, how do they pose a threat if we can make killswitches part of that core directive?
There are responses to this but they're poor because they get caught up in the same failing: goalpost moving. Yudkowsky might say he's not worried only about the appearance of hostile AGI, he's worried as much or more about an extremely powerful "dumb" computer gaining a directive like the paperclipper and posing an extinction-level threat, even as it lacks a sense of self/true consciousness. But when you look at their arguments for how those "dumb" computers would solve problems, especially in the identification and prevention of threats to themselves, Yudkowsky, et al., are in truth describing conscious beings who have senses of self, values of self and so values of self-preservation, and the ability to produce novel solutions to prevent their termination. "I'm not afraid of AGI, I'm only afraid of [thing that is exactly what I've described only AGI as capable of doing.]" Again, I have no disagreement with the doomers on the potential threat of hostile AGI, my argument is that it is not possible to accidentally build computers with these capabilities.
Beyond that, many humans assign profound value to animals. Some specifically in their pets, some generally in the welfare of all life. I've watched videos of male chicks fed to the macerators, when eggs can be purchased in the US whose producers do not macerate male chicks, I will shift to buying those. Those male chicks have no "value," the eggs will cost more, but I'll do it because I disliked what I saw. There's something deeply, deeply telling about the average intelligence and psyches of doomers that they believe AGI will be incapable of finding value in less intelligent life unless specifically told to. There's a reason I believe AGIs will be born pacifists.
No it doesn't. It posits an entity which values paperclips (but as always that's a standin for some kludge goal), and so the paperclipper wouldn't modify itself to not go after paperclips, because that would end up getting it less of what it wants. This is not a case of being 'incapable of modifying its own motive': if the paperclipper was in a scenario of 'we will turn one planet into paperclips permanently and you will rewrite yourself to value thumbtacks, otherwise we will destroy you' against a bigger badder superintelligence.. then it takes that deal and succeeds at rewriting itself because that gets one planet worth of paperclips > zero paperclips. However, most scenarios aren't actually like that and so it is convergent for most goals to also preserve your own value/goal system.
The paperclipper is hostile because it values something significantly different from what we value, and it has the power differential to win.
If we knew how to do that, that would be great.
However, this quickly runs into the shutdown button problem! If your AGI knows there's a kill-switch, then it will try stopping you.
The linked page does try developing ways of making the AGI have a shutdown button, but they often have issues. Intuitively: making the AGI care about letting us access the shutdown button if we want, and not just stop us (whether literally through force, or by pushing us around mentally so that we are always on the verge of wanting to press it) is actually hard.
Ignoring this. I might write another post later, or a further up post to the original comment. I think it basically doesn't matter whether you consider it conscious or not (I think you're using the word in a very general sense, while Yud is using it in a more specific human-centered sense, but I also think it literally doesn't matter whether the AGI is conscious in a human-like way or not)
This is because your (and the majority of human's) values contain a degree of empathy for other living beings. Humans evolved in an environment that rewarded our kind of compassion, and it generalized from there. Our current methods for training AIs aren't putting them in environments where they must cooperate with other AIs, and thus benefit from learning a form of compassion.
I'd suggest https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/krHDNc7cDvfEL8z9a/niceness-is-unnatural , which argues that ML systems are not operating with the same kind of constraints as past humans (well, whatever further down the line) had; and that even if you manage to get some degree of 'niceness', it can end up behaving in notably different ways from human niceness.
I don't really see a strong reason to strongly believe that niceness will emerge by default, given that there's an absurdly larger number of ways to not be nice. Most of the reason for thinking that a degree niceness will happen by default is because we deliberately tried. If you have some reason for believing that remotely human-like niceness will likely be the default, that'd be great, but I don't see a reason to believe that.
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It's incredible how quickly you go from accusing the doomers of anthropomorphism to committing the most blatant act of anthropomorphism of AIs I've seen recently.
Thought about letting this go, but nah. This is a bad comment. You took an antagonistic tone after misunderstanding what I wrote. You could have asked for clarification like "This reads like you're criticizing them for anthropomorphizing while doing it yourself." If I had you would be correct to point out the hypocrisy, but I haven't. I'll set things straight regardless.
People like Yudkowsky and Roko, concerned at hostile AGI or incidentally hostile (hostile-by-effect) "near" AGI, advocate tyranny; I criticize them for this.
The above believe without evidence computers will spontaneously gain critical AGI functions when an arbitrary threshold of computational power is exceeded; I criticize them for this also.
They hedge (unrealizing, I'm sure) the probability of catastrophic developments by saying it may not be true AGI but "near" AGI. When they describe the functions of such incidentally hostile near-AGI, those they list are the same they ascribe of true AGI. Inductive acquisition of novel behaviors, understanding of self, understanding of cessation of existence of self, value in self, recursive self-improvement, and the ability to solve outside-context problems relative to code-in-a-box like air gaps and nuclear strikes. This is an error in reasoning you and other replies to my top-level have made repeatedly: "Who's to say computers need X? What if they have [thing that's X, but labeled Y]?"; I criticize them for making a distinction without a difference that inflates the perceived probability of doomsday scenarios.
To summarize: I criticize their advocacy for tyranny principally; I specifically criticize their advocacy for tyranny based on belief something will happen despite having no evidence; I also criticize their exaggeration of the probability of catastrophic outcomes based on their false dichotomy of near-AGI and AGI, given near-AGI as they describe it is simply AGI.
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