Lets assume that AI doubling time is fairly slow (eg 20 years) and very widely distributed. Huge numbers of people throw together AI systems in garages. If the basic problems of FAI haven’t been solved, you are going to get millions of paperclip maximizers. (Well, most of them will be optimising different things) 100 years later, humanity, if it still exists at this point are pawns on a gameboard that contains many superintelligences. What happens depends on how different the superintelligences goals are, and how hard it is for superintelligences to cooperate. Either they fight, killing humanity in the crossfire, or they work together to fill the universe with a mixture of all the things they value. The latter looks like 1% paperclips, 1% staples, 1%… .
Alternately, many people could understand friendlyness and make various FAI’s. The FAI’s work together to make the world a nice place. In this scenario the FAI’s aren’t identical, but they are close enough that any one of them would make the world nice. I also agree that a world with FAI’s and paperclip maximisers could be nice if the FAI’s have a significant portion of total power.
Society continues as-is, but with posthuman capabilities.
Exactly like ancient Egypt except that like electromagnetic charges attract and unlike charges repel. I posit that this sentence doesn’t make sense. If matter behaved that way, then atoms couldn’t exist. When we say like X but with change Y, we are considering the set of all possible worlds that meet criteria Y, and finding the one nearest to X. But here there is no world where like charges attract that looks anything like ancient Egypt. We can say, like ancient Egypt but gold is 10x more abundant. That ends up as a bronze age society that makes pyramids and makes a lot more gold jewelry than the real Egyptians. I think that “society as is, but with posthuman capabilities” is the first kind of sentence. There is no way of making a change like that and getting anything resembling society as is.
I don’t understand why you keep humans and AI as ontologically separate entities in your prediction model. Increasing AI capabilities support the humans that operate them. This is the case today, and will be for the foreseeable future. Right now the human-computer interface is little mobile devices we interact with using our voice and hands, so AI assistance more resembles a personal super-secretary. But in the coming decades we will develop and deploy direct neural human-computer interfaces that will allow advances in AI to advance ourselves, directly. I don’t see that pathway as resembling your “thousands of paperclip maximizers” scenario.
I really don’t understand your Egypt analogy, sorry.
At the moment, human brains are a cohesive whole, that optimizes for human values. We haven’t yet succeeded in making the machines share our values, and the human brain is not designed for upgrading. The human brain can take knowledge from an external source and use it. External tools follow the calculator model. The human thinks about the big picture world, and realizes that as a mental subgoal of designing a bridge, they need to do some arithmetic. Instead of doing the arithmetic themselves, they pass the task on to the machine. In this circumstance, the human controls the big picture, the human understands what cognitive labor has been externalized and knows that it will help the humans goals.
If we have a system that a human can say “go and do whatever is most moral”, that’s FAI. If we have a calculator style system where humans specify the power output, weight, material use, radiation output ect of a fusion plant, and the AI tries to design a fusion plant meeting those specs, that’s useful but not nearly as powerful as full ASI. Humans with calculator style AI could invent molecular nanotech without working out all the details, but they still need an Eric Drexler to spot the possibility.
In my model you can make a relativistic rocket, but you can’t take a sparrow, and upgrade it into something that flies through space at 10% light speed and is still a sparrow. If your worried that relativistic rockets might spew dangerous levels of radiation, you can’t make a safe spacecraft by taking a sparrow and upgrading it to fly at 10% c. (Well with enough R&D you could make a rocket that superficially resembles a sparrow. Deciding to upgrade a sparrow doesn’t make the safety engineering any easier.)
Making something vastly smarter than a human is like making something far faster than a sparrow. Trying to strap really powerful turbojets to the sparrow and it crashes and burns. Try to attach a human brain to 100X human brain gradient decent and you get an out of control AI system with nonhuman goals. Human values are delicate. I agree that it is possible to carefully unravel what a human mind is thinking and what its goals are, and then upgrade it in a way that preserves those goals, but this requires a deep understanding of how the human mind works. Even granted mind uploading, it would still be easier to create a new mind largely from first principles. You might look at the human brain to figure out what those principles are, in the same way a plane designer looks at birds.
I see a vast space of all possible minds, some friendly, most not. Humans are a small dot in this space. We know that humans are usually friendly. We have no guarantees about what happens as you move away from humans. In fact we know that one small error can sometimes send a human totally mad. If we want to make something that we know is safe, we either need to copy that dot exactly, (ie normal biological reproduction, mind uploading) or we need something we can show to be safe for some other reason.
My point with the Ejypt metafor was that the sentence
Society continues as-is, but with posthuman capabilities.
is incoherent.
Try “the stock market continues as is, except with all life extinct”
Describing the modern world as “like a tribe of monkeys, except with post monkey capabilities” is either wrong or so vague to not tell you much.
At the point when the system (upgraded human, AI whatever you want to call it) is 99% silicon, a stray meteor hits the biological part. If the remaining 99% stays friendly, somewhere in this process you have solved FAI. I see no reason why aligning a 99% silicon being is easier that a 100% silicon being.
Lets assume that AI doubling time is fairly slow (eg 20 years) and very widely distributed. Huge numbers of people throw together AI systems in garages. If the basic problems of FAI haven’t been solved, you are going to get millions of paperclip maximizers. (Well, most of them will be optimising different things) 100 years later, humanity, if it still exists at this point are pawns on a gameboard that contains many superintelligences. What happens depends on how different the superintelligences goals are, and how hard it is for superintelligences to cooperate. Either they fight, killing humanity in the crossfire, or they work together to fill the universe with a mixture of all the things they value. The latter looks like 1% paperclips, 1% staples, 1%… .
Alternately, many people could understand friendlyness and make various FAI’s. The FAI’s work together to make the world a nice place. In this scenario the FAI’s aren’t identical, but they are close enough that any one of them would make the world nice. I also agree that a world with FAI’s and paperclip maximisers could be nice if the FAI’s have a significant portion of total power.
Exactly like ancient Egypt except that like electromagnetic charges attract and unlike charges repel. I posit that this sentence doesn’t make sense. If matter behaved that way, then atoms couldn’t exist. When we say like X but with change Y, we are considering the set of all possible worlds that meet criteria Y, and finding the one nearest to X. But here there is no world where like charges attract that looks anything like ancient Egypt. We can say, like ancient Egypt but gold is 10x more abundant. That ends up as a bronze age society that makes pyramids and makes a lot more gold jewelry than the real Egyptians. I think that “society as is, but with posthuman capabilities” is the first kind of sentence. There is no way of making a change like that and getting anything resembling society as is.
I don’t understand why you keep humans and AI as ontologically separate entities in your prediction model. Increasing AI capabilities support the humans that operate them. This is the case today, and will be for the foreseeable future. Right now the human-computer interface is little mobile devices we interact with using our voice and hands, so AI assistance more resembles a personal super-secretary. But in the coming decades we will develop and deploy direct neural human-computer interfaces that will allow advances in AI to advance ourselves, directly. I don’t see that pathway as resembling your “thousands of paperclip maximizers” scenario.
I really don’t understand your Egypt analogy, sorry.
At the moment, human brains are a cohesive whole, that optimizes for human values. We haven’t yet succeeded in making the machines share our values, and the human brain is not designed for upgrading. The human brain can take knowledge from an external source and use it. External tools follow the calculator model. The human thinks about the big picture world, and realizes that as a mental subgoal of designing a bridge, they need to do some arithmetic. Instead of doing the arithmetic themselves, they pass the task on to the machine. In this circumstance, the human controls the big picture, the human understands what cognitive labor has been externalized and knows that it will help the humans goals.
If we have a system that a human can say “go and do whatever is most moral”, that’s FAI. If we have a calculator style system where humans specify the power output, weight, material use, radiation output ect of a fusion plant, and the AI tries to design a fusion plant meeting those specs, that’s useful but not nearly as powerful as full ASI. Humans with calculator style AI could invent molecular nanotech without working out all the details, but they still need an Eric Drexler to spot the possibility.
In my model you can make a relativistic rocket, but you can’t take a sparrow, and upgrade it into something that flies through space at 10% light speed and is still a sparrow. If your worried that relativistic rockets might spew dangerous levels of radiation, you can’t make a safe spacecraft by taking a sparrow and upgrading it to fly at 10% c. (Well with enough R&D you could make a rocket that superficially resembles a sparrow. Deciding to upgrade a sparrow doesn’t make the safety engineering any easier.)
Making something vastly smarter than a human is like making something far faster than a sparrow. Trying to strap really powerful turbojets to the sparrow and it crashes and burns. Try to attach a human brain to 100X human brain gradient decent and you get an out of control AI system with nonhuman goals. Human values are delicate. I agree that it is possible to carefully unravel what a human mind is thinking and what its goals are, and then upgrade it in a way that preserves those goals, but this requires a deep understanding of how the human mind works. Even granted mind uploading, it would still be easier to create a new mind largely from first principles. You might look at the human brain to figure out what those principles are, in the same way a plane designer looks at birds.
I see a vast space of all possible minds, some friendly, most not. Humans are a small dot in this space. We know that humans are usually friendly. We have no guarantees about what happens as you move away from humans. In fact we know that one small error can sometimes send a human totally mad. If we want to make something that we know is safe, we either need to copy that dot exactly, (ie normal biological reproduction, mind uploading) or we need something we can show to be safe for some other reason.
My point with the Ejypt metafor was that the sentence
is incoherent.
Try “the stock market continues as is, except with all life extinct”
Describing the modern world as “like a tribe of monkeys, except with post monkey capabilities” is either wrong or so vague to not tell you much.
At the point when the system (upgraded human, AI whatever you want to call it) is 99% silicon, a stray meteor hits the biological part. If the remaining 99% stays friendly, somewhere in this process you have solved FAI. I see no reason why aligning a 99% silicon being is easier that a 100% silicon being.