But if martian and human values are similar, then they can both be right
I was assuming that ‘detailed inheritance from human values’ doesn’t refer to the same thing as “detailed inheritance from martian values”.
if martian and human values are not similar, then they refer to different things by the word “interesting”.
Maybe—but humans not finding martians interesting seems contrived to me. Humans have a long history of being interested in martians—with feeble evidence of their existence.
In any case, I read EY’s statement as one of probability-of-working-in-the-actual-world-as-it-is, not a deep philosophical point—“this is the way that would be most likely to be successful given what we know”. In which case, we don’t have access to martian values and therefore invoking detailed inheritance from them would be unlikely to work
Right—so, substitute in “dolphins”, “whales”, or another advanced intelligence that actually exists.
Do you actually disagree with my original conclusion? Or is this just nit-picking?
I actually disagree that tiling the universe with prime number calculators would result in an interesting universe from my perspective (dead). I think it’s nonobvious that dolphin-CEV-AI-paradise would be human-interesting. I think it’s nonobvious that martian-CEV-AI-paradise would be human-interesting, given that these hypothetical martians diverge from humans to a significant extent.
I actually disagree that tiling the universe with prime number calculators would result in an interesting universe from my perspective (dead).
I think it’s violating the implied premises of the thought experiment to presume that the “interestingness evaluator” is dead. There’s no terribly-compelling reason to assume that—it doesn’t follow from the existence of a prime number maximizer that all humans are dead.
I may have been a little flip there.
My understanding of the thought experiment is—something extrapolates some values and maximizes them, probably using up most of the universe, probably becoming the most significant factor in the species’ future and that of all sentients, and the question is whether the result is “interesting” to us here and now, without specifying the precise way to evaluate that term. From that perspective, I’d say a vast uniform prime-number calculator, whether or not it wipes out all (other?) life, is not “interesting”, in that it’s somewhat conceptually interesting as a story but a rather dull thing to spend most of a universe on.
Today’s ecosystems maximise entropy. Maximising primeness is different, but surely not greatly more interesting—since entropy is widely regarded as being tedious and boring.
Intriguing! But even granting that, there’s a big difference between extrapolating the values of a screwed-up offshoot of an entropy-optimizing process and extrapolating the value of “maximize entropy”. Or do you suspect that a FOOMing AI would be much less powerful and more prone to interesting errors than Eliezer believes?
Truly maximizing entropy would involve burning everything you can burn, tearing the matter of solar systems apart, accelerating stars towards nova, trying to accelerate the evaporation of black holes and prevent their formation, and other things of this sort. It’d look like a dark spot in the sky that’d get bigger at approximately the speed of light.
Fires are crude entropy maximisers. Living systems destroy energy dradients at all scales, resulting in more comprehensive devastation than mere flames can muster.
Of course, maximisation is often subject to constraints. Your complaint is rather like saying that water doesn’t “truly minimise” its altitude—since otherwise it would end up at the planet’s core. That usage is simply not what the terms “maximise” and “minimise” normally refer to.
I was assuming that ‘detailed inheritance from human values’ doesn’t refer to the same thing as “detailed inheritance from martian values”.
Maybe—but humans not finding martians interesting seems contrived to me. Humans have a long history of being interested in martians—with feeble evidence of their existence.
Right—so, substitute in “dolphins”, “whales”, or another advanced intelligence that actually exists.
Do you actually disagree with my original conclusion? Or is this just nit-picking?
I actually disagree that tiling the universe with prime number calculators would result in an interesting universe from my perspective (dead). I think it’s nonobvious that dolphin-CEV-AI-paradise would be human-interesting. I think it’s nonobvious that martian-CEV-AI-paradise would be human-interesting, given that these hypothetical martians diverge from humans to a significant extent.
I think it’s violating the implied premises of the thought experiment to presume that the “interestingness evaluator” is dead. There’s no terribly-compelling reason to assume that—it doesn’t follow from the existence of a prime number maximizer that all humans are dead.
I may have been a little flip there. My understanding of the thought experiment is—something extrapolates some values and maximizes them, probably using up most of the universe, probably becoming the most significant factor in the species’ future and that of all sentients, and the question is whether the result is “interesting” to us here and now, without specifying the precise way to evaluate that term. From that perspective, I’d say a vast uniform prime-number calculator, whether or not it wipes out all (other?) life, is not “interesting”, in that it’s somewhat conceptually interesting as a story but a rather dull thing to spend most of a universe on.
Today’s ecosystems maximise entropy. Maximising primeness is different, but surely not greatly more interesting—since entropy is widely regarded as being tedious and boring.
Intriguing! But even granting that, there’s a big difference between extrapolating the values of a screwed-up offshoot of an entropy-optimizing process and extrapolating the value of “maximize entropy”. Or do you suspect that a FOOMing AI would be much less powerful and more prone to interesting errors than Eliezer believes?
Truly maximizing entropy would involve burning everything you can burn, tearing the matter of solar systems apart, accelerating stars towards nova, trying to accelerate the evaporation of black holes and prevent their formation, and other things of this sort. It’d look like a dark spot in the sky that’d get bigger at approximately the speed of light.
Fires are crude entropy maximisers. Living systems destroy energy dradients at all scales, resulting in more comprehensive devastation than mere flames can muster.
Of course, maximisation is often subject to constraints. Your complaint is rather like saying that water doesn’t “truly minimise” its altitude—since otherwise it would end up at the planet’s core. That usage is simply not what the terms “maximise” and “minimise” normally refer to.
Yeah! Compelling, but not “interesting”. Likewise, I expect that actually maximizing the fitness of a species would be similarly “boring”.