These are my thoughts in response. I don’t claim to know that what I say here is the truth, but it’s a paradigm that makes sense to me.
Strategic global cooperation to stop AI is effectively impossible, and hoping to do it by turning all the world powers into western-style democracies first is really impossible. Any successful diplomacy will have to work with the existing realities of power within and among countries, but even then, I only see tactical successes at best. Even stopping AI within the West looks very unlikely. Nationalization is conceivable, but I think it would have to partly come as an initiative from a cartel of leading companies; there is neither the will nor the understanding in the non-tech world of politics to simply impose nationalization of AI on big tech.
For these reasons, I think the only hope of arriving at a human-friendly future by design rather than by accident, is to solve the scientific, philosophical, and design issues involved, in the creation of benevolent superhuman AI. Your idea to focus on the creation of “digital people” has a lot in common with this; more precisely, I would say that many of the questions that would have to be answered, in order to know what you’re doing when creating digital people, are also questions that have to be answered, in order to know how to create benevolent superhuman AI.
Still, in the end I expect that the pursuit of AI leads to superintelligence, and an adequately benevolent superintelligence would not necessarily be a person. It would, however, need to know what a person is, in a way that isn’t tied to humanity or even to biology, because it would be governing a world in which that “unprecedented diversity of minds” can exist.
Eliezer has argued that it is unrealistic to think that all the scientific, philosophical, and design issues can be solved in time. He also argues that in the absence of a truly effective global pause or ban, the almost inevitable upshot is a superintelligence that reorganizes the world in a way that is unfriendly to human beings, because human values are complex, and so human-friendliness requires a highly specific formulation of what human values are, and of the AI architecture that will preserve and extrapolate them.
The argument that the design issues can’t be resolved in time is strong. They involve a mix of perennial philosophical questions like the nature of the good, scientific questions like the nature of human cognition and consciousness, and avantgarde computer-science issues like the dynamics of superintelligent deep learning systems. One might reasonably expect it to take decades to resolve all these.
Perhaps the best reason for hope here, is the use of AI as a partner in solving the problems. Of course this is a common idea, e.g. “weak-to-strong generalization” would be a form of this. It is at least conceivable that the acceleration of discovery made possible by AI, could be used to solve all the issues pertaining to friendly superintelligence, in years or months, rather than requiring decades. But there is also a significant risk that some AI-empowered group will be getting things wrong, while thinking that they are getting it right. It is also likely that even if a way is found to walk the path to a successful outcome (however narrow that path may be), that all the way to the end, there will be rival factions who have different beliefs about what the correct path is.
As for the second proposition I have attributed to Eliezer—that if we don’t know what we’re doing when we cross the threshold to superintelligence, doom is almost inevitable—that’s less clear to me. Perhaps there are a few rough principles which, if followed, greatly increase the odds in favor of a world that has a human-friendly niche somewhere in it.
These are my thoughts in response. I don’t claim to know that what I say here is the truth, but it’s a paradigm that makes sense to me.
Strategic global cooperation to stop AI is effectively impossible, and hoping to do it by turning all the world powers into western-style democracies first is really impossible. Any successful diplomacy will have to work with the existing realities of power within and among countries, but even then, I only see tactical successes at best. Even stopping AI within the West looks very unlikely. Nationalization is conceivable, but I think it would have to partly come as an initiative from a cartel of leading companies; there is neither the will nor the understanding in the non-tech world of politics to simply impose nationalization of AI on big tech.
For these reasons, I think the only hope of arriving at a human-friendly future by design rather than by accident, is to solve the scientific, philosophical, and design issues involved, in the creation of benevolent superhuman AI. Your idea to focus on the creation of “digital people” has a lot in common with this; more precisely, I would say that many of the questions that would have to be answered, in order to know what you’re doing when creating digital people, are also questions that have to be answered, in order to know how to create benevolent superhuman AI.
Still, in the end I expect that the pursuit of AI leads to superintelligence, and an adequately benevolent superintelligence would not necessarily be a person. It would, however, need to know what a person is, in a way that isn’t tied to humanity or even to biology, because it would be governing a world in which that “unprecedented diversity of minds” can exist.
Eliezer has argued that it is unrealistic to think that all the scientific, philosophical, and design issues can be solved in time. He also argues that in the absence of a truly effective global pause or ban, the almost inevitable upshot is a superintelligence that reorganizes the world in a way that is unfriendly to human beings, because human values are complex, and so human-friendliness requires a highly specific formulation of what human values are, and of the AI architecture that will preserve and extrapolate them.
The argument that the design issues can’t be resolved in time is strong. They involve a mix of perennial philosophical questions like the nature of the good, scientific questions like the nature of human cognition and consciousness, and avantgarde computer-science issues like the dynamics of superintelligent deep learning systems. One might reasonably expect it to take decades to resolve all these.
Perhaps the best reason for hope here, is the use of AI as a partner in solving the problems. Of course this is a common idea, e.g. “weak-to-strong generalization” would be a form of this. It is at least conceivable that the acceleration of discovery made possible by AI, could be used to solve all the issues pertaining to friendly superintelligence, in years or months, rather than requiring decades. But there is also a significant risk that some AI-empowered group will be getting things wrong, while thinking that they are getting it right. It is also likely that even if a way is found to walk the path to a successful outcome (however narrow that path may be), that all the way to the end, there will be rival factions who have different beliefs about what the correct path is.
As for the second proposition I have attributed to Eliezer—that if we don’t know what we’re doing when we cross the threshold to superintelligence, doom is almost inevitable—that’s less clear to me. Perhaps there are a few rough principles which, if followed, greatly increase the odds in favor of a world that has a human-friendly niche somewhere in it.