Robin argues that few are prepared to invest now to prevent future destruction of the planet. The conclusion there seems to be that humans are not utilitarian agents.
Robin seems to claim that humans do not invest in order to pass things on to future generations—whereas in fact they do just that whenever they invest in their own offspring.
Obviously you don’t invest in your great-grandchildren directly. You invest in your offspring—they can manage your funds better than you can do so from your wheelchair or grave.
Temporal discounting make sense. Organisms do it becasue they can’t see or control the far future as well as their direct descendants can. In those rare cases where that is not true, direct descendants can sometimes be bypassed.
However, you wouldn’t want to build temporal discounting into the utility function of a machine intelligence. It knows better than you do its prediction capablities—and can figure out such things for itself.
Since that exact point was made in the Eliezer essay Robin’s post was a reply to, it isn’t clear that Robin understands that.
Robin argues that few are prepared to invest now to prevent future destruction of the planet. The conclusion there seems to be that humans are not utilitarian agents.
Robin seems to claim that humans do not invest in order to pass things on to future generations—whereas in fact they do just that whenever they invest in their own offspring.
Obviously you don’t invest in your great-grandchildren directly. You invest in your offspring—they can manage your funds better than you can do so from your wheelchair or grave.
Temporal discounting make sense. Organisms do it becasue they can’t see or control the far future as well as their direct descendants can. In those rare cases where that is not true, direct descendants can sometimes be bypassed.
However, you wouldn’t want to build temporal discounting into the utility function of a machine intelligence. It knows better than you do its prediction capablities—and can figure out such things for itself.
Since that exact point was made in the Eliezer essay Robin’s post was a reply to, it isn’t clear that Robin understands that.