I think that saying that “executable philosophy” has failed is missing Yudkowsky’s main point. Quoting from the Arbital page:
To build and align Artificial Intelligence, we need to answer some complex questions about how to compute goodness
He claims that unless we learn how to translate philosophy into “ideas that we can compile and run”, aligned AGI is out of the question. This is not a worldview, but an empirical proposition, the truth of which remains to be determined.
There’s also an adjacent worldview, which suffuses the Sequences, that it’s possible in the relatively short term to become much more generally “rational” than even the smartest uninitiated people, “faster than science” etc, and that this is chiefly rooted in Bayes, Solomonoff &Co. It’s fair to conclude that this has largely failed, and IMO Chapman makes a convincing case that this failure was unavoidable. (He also annoyingly keeps hinting that there is a supremely fruitful “meta-rational” worldview instead that he’s about to reveal to the world. Any day now. I’m not holding my breath.)
I think that saying that “executable philosophy” has failed is missing Yudkowsky’s main point. Quoting from the Arbital page:
He claims that unless we learn how to translate philosophy into “ideas that we can compile and run”, aligned AGI is out of the question. This is not a worldview, but an empirical proposition, the truth of which remains to be determined.
There’s also an adjacent worldview, which suffuses the Sequences, that it’s possible in the relatively short term to become much more generally “rational” than even the smartest uninitiated people, “faster than science” etc, and that this is chiefly rooted in Bayes, Solomonoff &Co. It’s fair to conclude that this has largely failed, and IMO Chapman makes a convincing case that this failure was unavoidable. (He also annoyingly keeps hinting that there is a supremely fruitful “meta-rational” worldview instead that he’s about to reveal to the world. Any day now. I’m not holding my breath.)