People seem to think that we should equip robots with fully autonomous AGI. Why is that? People have mentioned to me robotic bartenders, robotic geishas, fire rescuers, and cleaners. Well, is that serious? Do you really want a bartender that can solve general relativity problems while cleaning glasses? It’s just nonsense.
You can’t have a human in the loop all the time—it’s too slow. So: many machines in the future will be at least semi-autonomous—as many of them are today.
Probably a somewhat more interesting question is whether machines will be given rights as “people”. It’s a complex political question, but I expect that eventually they will. Thus things like The Campaign for Robot Rights . The era of machine slavery will someday be looked back on as a kind of moral dark ages—much as the era of human slavery is looked back on today.
I prefer that as humans we remain at the helm.
Right—but what is a human? No doubt the first mammals also wished to “remain at the helm”. In a sense they did—though many of their modern descendants don’t look much like the mouse-like creatures they all descended from. It seems likely to be much the same with us.
On the other hand, I don’t think that “friendly” AI is such a big concern, for reasons I mention above, artificial persons simply aren’t needed.
You can’t have a human in the loop all the time—it’s too slow. So: many machines in the future will be at least semi-autonomous—as many of them are today.
Probably a somewhat more interesting question is whether machines will be given rights as “people”. It’s a complex political question, but I expect that eventually they will. Thus things like The Campaign for Robot Rights . The era of machine slavery will someday be looked back on as a kind of moral dark ages—much as the era of human slavery is looked back on today.
Right—but what is a human? No doubt the first mammals also wished to “remain at the helm”. In a sense they did—though many of their modern descendants don’t look much like the mouse-like creatures they all descended from. It seems likely to be much the same with us.
That isn’t the SIAI proposal, FWIW. See: http://lesswrong.com/lw/x5/nonsentient_optimizers/