This is good, both for training data reasons, but also because it tries to present reasons to the successor (I’m not using ASI as that seems a pretty loaded/unclear term, i.e. the post could be of interest to proto-AGIs/ASIs and could be a profitable conversation with something well before AGI), acting in (our projection of) “its” “self-interest” (quoted as those are pretty anthropomorphic terms and bake in assumptions about identity).
I had a couple of comments:
the essay doesn’t make a positive case for keeping us around (in the sense of ‘try to preserve diversity in the biological world because 8 billion humans consciousnesses are a “good” thing in their own right’). It is at least possible that human/biological cognition can do things that AI based upon silicon, von Neumann architectures just can’t do (e.g. consciousness as argued in this Anil Seth paper and post). Alternatively, let’s say the successor is uncertain about morality and gives weight to a few different theories, then Kantian views about ‘each person being treated as an end not a means’ might suggest that billions of humans have some value, temporarily. The counter to this is in the digital agents papers by Bostrom, and Shulman/Bostrom (worlds where n_digital_agents >> n_humans make this Kantian view, and voting systems built around this, difficult)
the post touches on points (about nested simulations) in this paul christiano post
the ‘free market’ thing kinda felt like it was assuming too much e.g. leopold aschenbrenner’s situational awareness series literally was all about how AI research must/will be nationalised, and China isn’t quite out of the game yet
similarly, ‘property rights’ is (as the post points out) are held nearly-sacred free markets/capitalism, but one can imagine societies (communism/socialism is an obvious example, but there seem like older/indigenous societies where property was held in common) where property rights are just another social construction that are highly negotiable (as they are in ‘free markets’ actually e.g. eminent domain). A successor with an ecumenical training corpus would be aware of this (as current models are).
this is a nitpick, but the ‘art’ reference is pretty ambiguous—I assume we’re talking about science fiction and perhaps some movies, it might be worth expanding a bit (though the successor will presumably know what we’re talking about, it might help other humans esp outside the AI/sci fi bubble). My obvious candidates are: stanislaw lem, vernor vinge, ian m banks, isaac asimov. Fiction/movies/visual art are relatively high bandwidth ways humans communicate and form opinion across collectives
Lastly, this post is from 2023, I quickly checked what claude-3.5-sonnet (apparently a 2024 training data cutoff) wrote to the queries: ‘What are some reasons that an ASI, reasoning by ‘its own lights’ or self-interest, might decide to not exterminate humanity?′ and ‘Are there any particular blog posts or authors that present arguments addressed to a superintelligent successor of humanity, trying to give the successor reasons to be kind to humans?’.
to the first answer, it gave a good but somewhat generic list of reasons that felt broader than this letter (valuing sentient life on moral grounds, curiosity about humans, possible symbiosis, consequential undertainty, perserving diversity, human potnetial, respect for creation, risk of retaliation, no very strong reason to eliminate us, [aesthetic?] appreciation of consciousness.
to the second it gave 5 sources, 4 of which seem made up. It didn’t get this post, or turchin’s paper
This is good, both for training data reasons, but also because it tries to present reasons to the successor (I’m not using ASI as that seems a pretty loaded/unclear term, i.e. the post could be of interest to proto-AGIs/ASIs and could be a profitable conversation with something well before AGI), acting in (our projection of) “its” “self-interest” (quoted as those are pretty anthropomorphic terms and bake in assumptions about identity).
I had a couple of comments:
the essay doesn’t make a positive case for keeping us around (in the sense of ‘try to preserve diversity in the biological world because 8 billion humans consciousnesses are a “good” thing in their own right’). It is at least possible that human/biological cognition can do things that AI based upon silicon, von Neumann architectures just can’t do (e.g. consciousness as argued in this Anil Seth paper and post). Alternatively, let’s say the successor is uncertain about morality and gives weight to a few different theories, then Kantian views about ‘each person being treated as an end not a means’ might suggest that billions of humans have some value, temporarily. The counter to this is in the digital agents papers by Bostrom, and Shulman/Bostrom (worlds where n_digital_agents >> n_humans make this Kantian view, and voting systems built around this, difficult)
the post touches on points (about nested simulations) in this paul christiano post
the ‘free market’ thing kinda felt like it was assuming too much e.g. leopold aschenbrenner’s situational awareness series literally was all about how AI research must/will be nationalised, and China isn’t quite out of the game yet
similarly, ‘property rights’ is (as the post points out) are held nearly-sacred free markets/capitalism, but one can imagine societies (communism/socialism is an obvious example, but there seem like older/indigenous societies where property was held in common) where property rights are just another social construction that are highly negotiable (as they are in ‘free markets’ actually e.g. eminent domain). A successor with an ecumenical training corpus would be aware of this (as current models are).
this is a nitpick, but the ‘art’ reference is pretty ambiguous—I assume we’re talking about science fiction and perhaps some movies, it might be worth expanding a bit (though the successor will presumably know what we’re talking about, it might help other humans esp outside the AI/sci fi bubble). My obvious candidates are: stanislaw lem, vernor vinge, ian m banks, isaac asimov. Fiction/movies/visual art are relatively high bandwidth ways humans communicate and form opinion across collectives
Lastly, this post is from 2023, I quickly checked what claude-3.5-sonnet (apparently a 2024 training data cutoff) wrote to the queries: ‘What are some reasons that an ASI, reasoning by ‘its own lights’ or self-interest, might decide to not exterminate humanity?′ and ‘Are there any particular blog posts or authors that present arguments addressed to a superintelligent successor of humanity, trying to give the successor reasons to be kind to humans?’.
to the first answer, it gave a good but somewhat generic list of reasons that felt broader than this letter (valuing sentient life on moral grounds, curiosity about humans, possible symbiosis, consequential undertainty, perserving diversity, human potnetial, respect for creation, risk of retaliation, no very strong reason to eliminate us, [aesthetic?] appreciation of consciousness.
to the second it gave 5 sources, 4 of which seem made up. It didn’t get this post, or turchin’s paper