Well, that’s where the “safe” part comes in, isn’t it?
I think a fair number of people would say that ASI/AGI can’t be called “safe” if it’s willing to wage war to physically take over the world on behalf of its owners, or to go around breaking laws all the time, or to thwart whatever institutions are supposed to make and enforce the laws. I’m pretty sure that even OpenAI’s (present) “safety” department would have an issue if ChatGPT started saying stuff like “Sam Altman is Eternal Tax-Exempt God-King”.
Personally, I go further than that. I’m not sure about “basic” AGI, but I’m pretty confident that very powerful ASI, the kind that would be capable of really total world domination, can’t be called “safe” if it leaves really decisive power over anything in the hands of humans, individually or collectively, directly or via institutions. To be safe, it has to enforce its own ideas about how things should go. Otherwise the humans it empowers are probably going to send things south irretrievably fairly soon, and if they don’t do so very soon they always still could, and you can’t call that safe.
Yeah, that means you get exactly one chance to get “its own ideas” right, and no, I don’t think that success is likely. I don’t think it’s technically likely to be able to “align” it to any particular set of values. I also don’t think people or insitutions would make good choices about what values to give it even if they could. AND I don’t think anybody can prevent it from getting built for very long. I put more hope in it being survivably unsafe (maybe because it just doesn’t usually happen to care to do anything to/with humans), or on intelligence just not being that powerful, or whatever. Or even in it just luckily happening to at least do something less boring or annoying than paperclipping the universe or mass torture or whatever.
Well, that’s where the “safe” part comes in, isn’t it?
I think a fair number of people would say that ASI/AGI can’t be called “safe” if it’s willing to wage war to physically take over the world on behalf of its owners, or to go around breaking laws all the time, or to thwart whatever institutions are supposed to make and enforce the laws. I’m pretty sure that even OpenAI’s (present) “safety” department would have an issue if ChatGPT started saying stuff like “Sam Altman is Eternal Tax-Exempt God-King”.
Personally, I go further than that. I’m not sure about “basic” AGI, but I’m pretty confident that very powerful ASI, the kind that would be capable of really total world domination, can’t be called “safe” if it leaves really decisive power over anything in the hands of humans, individually or collectively, directly or via institutions. To be safe, it has to enforce its own ideas about how things should go. Otherwise the humans it empowers are probably going to send things south irretrievably fairly soon, and if they don’t do so very soon they always still could, and you can’t call that safe.
Yeah, that means you get exactly one chance to get “its own ideas” right, and no, I don’t think that success is likely. I don’t think it’s technically likely to be able to “align” it to any particular set of values. I also don’t think people or insitutions would make good choices about what values to give it even if they could. AND I don’t think anybody can prevent it from getting built for very long. I put more hope in it being survivably unsafe (maybe because it just doesn’t usually happen to care to do anything to/with humans), or on intelligence just not being that powerful, or whatever. Or even in it just luckily happening to at least do something less boring or annoying than paperclipping the universe or mass torture or whatever.