I suspect a self-modifying AI that’s cobbled together enough to be willing to mess with its goals will tend towards certain goals. Specifically, I think it would be likely to end up trying to maximize some combination of happiness (probably just its own), knowledge, power, and several other things.
I’d still consider this an argument to work on FAI. Motivation and intelligence don’t have to be orthogonal; they just have to not be parallel.
Motivation and intelligence don’t have to be orthogonal; they just have to not be parallel.
Exactly. The orthogonality thesis is far stronger than what is needed. And that’s important, because orthogonality looks quite simply false. Intelligence is fostered by specific motivations: curiosity, truth-seeking, a search for simple and elegant explanations, and so on. Of course you could redefine “motivation” so that these “don’t count”, and make orthogonality a tautology, but that doesn’t seem productive.
In Tim Tyler’s reply he quotes someone, I know not who, saying
Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal axes along which possible agents can freely vary. In other words, more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.
But the “other words” could be interpreted to state a new thesis. It is a weaker and more general hypothesis that is actually relevant to FAI. If we read “any final goal” as indicating perhaps one of many goals, then an intelligent agent can have multiple final goals. And although the goals that are partly constitutive of intelligence must be among its goals, it can combine these with any others. Furthermore, the intelligence-related goals need not even be final (“terminal value”) goals.
I suspect a self-modifying AI that’s cobbled together enough to be willing to mess with its goals will tend towards certain goals. Specifically, I think it would be likely to end up trying to maximize some combination of happiness (probably just its own), knowledge, power, and several other things.
I’d still consider this an argument to work on FAI. Motivation and intelligence don’t have to be orthogonal; they just have to not be parallel.
Exactly. The orthogonality thesis is far stronger than what is needed. And that’s important, because orthogonality looks quite simply false. Intelligence is fostered by specific motivations: curiosity, truth-seeking, a search for simple and elegant explanations, and so on. Of course you could redefine “motivation” so that these “don’t count”, and make orthogonality a tautology, but that doesn’t seem productive.
In Tim Tyler’s reply he quotes someone, I know not who, saying
But the “other words” could be interpreted to state a new thesis. It is a weaker and more general hypothesis that is actually relevant to FAI. If we read “any final goal” as indicating perhaps one of many goals, then an intelligent agent can have multiple final goals. And although the goals that are partly constitutive of intelligence must be among its goals, it can combine these with any others. Furthermore, the intelligence-related goals need not even be final (“terminal value”) goals.