there are no processes where superintelligence is present and the chances of “bad” things with “badness” exceeding some large threshold are small
Do you think a team of sufficiently wise humans is capable of producing a world where the chances of “bad” things with “badness” exceeding some large threshold are small? Yes or no?
(I am not talking about my viewpoint, but about a logical possibility.)
In particular, humans might be able to refrain from screwing the world too badly, if they avoid certain paths.
(No, personally I don’t think so. If people crack down hard enough, they probably screw up the world pretty badly due to the crackdown, and if they don’t crack down hard enough, then people will explore various paths leading to bad trajectories, via superintelligence or via other more mundane means. I personally don’t see a safe path, and I don’t know how to estimate probabilities. But it is not a logical impossibility. E.g. if someone makes all humans dumb by putting a magic irreversible stupidifier in the air and water, perhaps those things can be avoided, hence it is logically possible. Do I want “safety” at this price? No, I think it’s better to take risks...)
humans might be able to refrain from screwing the world too badly
But then, if a team of humans is capable of producing a world where the chances of “bad” things with “badness” exceeding some large threshold are small, by exactly the argument given in this post there must be a Lookup Table which simply contains the same boolean function.
So, your claim is provably false. It is not possible for something (anything) to be generically achievable by humans but not by AI, and you’re just hitting a special case of that.
Superintelligence is capable of almost unlimited self-improvement.
(Even our miserable recursive self-improvement AI experiments show rather impressive results before saturating. Well, they will not keep saturating forever. Currently, this self-improvement typically happens via rather awkward and semi-competent generation of novel Python code. Soon it will be done by better means (which we probably should not discuss here).)
By your own definition of “superintelligence”, it must be better at “being impotent” than any group of humans less than 10 billion. So it must be super-good at being impotent and doing very little, if that is required.
If it is disabling, then one has a self-contradictory situation (if ASI fundamentally disables itself, then it stops being more capable, and stops being an ASI, and can’t keep exercising its superiority; it’s the same as if it self-destructs).
If a superintelligence is worse than a human at permanently disabling itself—given that as the only required task—then there is a task that it is subhuman at and therefore not a superintelligence.
I suppose you could make some modifications to your definition to take account of this. But in any case, I think it’s not a great definition as it make an implicit assumption about the structure of problems (that basically problems have a single “scalar” difficulty)
Do you think a team of sufficiently wise humans is capable of producing a world where the chances of “bad” things with “badness” exceeding some large threshold are small? Yes or no?
In particular, humans might be able to refrain from screwing the world too badly, if they avoid certain paths.
(No, personally I don’t think so. If people crack down hard enough, they probably screw up the world pretty badly due to the crackdown, and if they don’t crack down hard enough, then people will explore various paths leading to bad trajectories, via superintelligence or via other more mundane means. I personally don’t see a safe path, and I don’t know how to estimate probabilities. But it is not a logical impossibility. E.g. if someone makes all humans dumb by putting a magic irreversible stupidifier in the air and water, perhaps those things can be avoided, hence it is logically possible. Do I want “safety” at this price? No, I think it’s better to take risks...)
But then, if a team of humans is capable of producing a world where the chances of “bad” things with “badness” exceeding some large threshold are small, by exactly the argument given in this post there must be a Lookup Table which simply contains the same boolean function.
So, your claim is provably false. It is not possible for something (anything) to be generically achievable by humans but not by AI, and you’re just hitting a special case of that.
No, they are not “producing”. They are just being impotent enough. Things are happening on their own...
And I don’t believe a Lookup Table is a good model.
An AI can also be impotent. Surely this is obvious to you? Have you not thought this through properly?
It can. Then it is not “superintelligence”.
Superintelligence is capable of almost unlimited self-improvement.
(Even our miserable recursive self-improvement AI experiments show rather impressive results before saturating. Well, they will not keep saturating forever. Currently, this self-improvement typically happens via rather awkward and semi-competent generation of novel Python code. Soon it will be done by better means (which we probably should not discuss here).)
By your own definition of “superintelligence”, it must be better at “being impotent” than any group of humans less than 10 billion. So it must be super-good at being impotent and doing very little, if that is required.
Being impotent is not a property of “being good”. One is not aiming for that.
It’s just a limitation. One usually does not self-impose it (with rare exceptions), although one might want to impose it on adversaries.
“Being impotent” is always worse. One can’t be “better at it”.
One can be better at refraining from exercising the capability (we have a different branch in this discussion for that).
If that is what is needed then it must (by definition) be better at it
Not if it is disabling.
If it is disabling, then one has a self-contradictory situation (if ASI fundamentally disables itself, then it stops being more capable, and stops being an ASI, and can’t keep exercising its superiority; it’s the same as if it self-destructs).
If a superintelligence is worse than a human at permanently disabling itself—given that as the only required task—then there is a task that it is subhuman at and therefore not a superintelligence.
I suppose you could make some modifications to your definition to take account of this. But in any case, I think it’s not a great definition as it make an implicit assumption about the structure of problems (that basically problems have a single “scalar” difficulty)
No, it can disable itself.
But it is not a solution, it is a counterproductive action. It makes things worse.
(In some sense, it has an obligation not to irreversibly disable itself.)