At the London meetup I tried out the idea of an AI which only cared about a small geographical area to limit risk: someone pointed out that it would happily eat the rest of the universe to help its patch. Oh well.
You’ve to understand that the basic argument is the mere possibility that AI might be dangerous and the high-risk associated with it. Even if it would be unlikely to happen, the vast amount of negative utility associated with it does outweigh its low probability.
I got that! The problem was more that I was thinking as if the world could be divided up into sealable boxes. In practice, we can do a lot focusing on one area with ‘no effect’ on anything else. But this is because the sorts of actions we do are limited, we can’t detect the low-level impact on things outside those boxes and we have certain unspoken understandings about what sort of thing might constitute an unacceptable effect elsewhere (if I only care about looking at pictures of LOLcats, I might be ‘neutral to the rest of the internet’ except for taking a little bandwidth. A superpowerful AI might realise that it would slightly increase the upload speed and thus maximise the utility function if vast swathes of other internet users were dead).
(if I only care about looking at pictures of LOLcats, I might be ‘neutral to the rest of the internet’ except for taking a little bandwidth. A superpowerful AI might realise that it would slightly increase the upload speed and thus maximise the utility function if vast swathes of other internet users were dead).
Dead and hilariously captioned, possibly.
I bet such an AI could latch onto a meme in which the absence of cats in such pictures was “lulz”.
You’ve to understand that the basic argument is the mere possibility that AI might be dangerous and the high-risk associated with it. Even if it would be unlikely to happen, the vast amount of negative utility associated with it does outweigh its low probability.
I got that! The problem was more that I was thinking as if the world could be divided up into sealable boxes. In practice, we can do a lot focusing on one area with ‘no effect’ on anything else. But this is because the sorts of actions we do are limited, we can’t detect the low-level impact on things outside those boxes and we have certain unspoken understandings about what sort of thing might constitute an unacceptable effect elsewhere (if I only care about looking at pictures of LOLcats, I might be ‘neutral to the rest of the internet’ except for taking a little bandwidth. A superpowerful AI might realise that it would slightly increase the upload speed and thus maximise the utility function if vast swathes of other internet users were dead).
Dead and hilariously captioned, possibly.
I bet such an AI could latch onto a meme in which the absence of cats in such pictures was “lulz”.