People are weakly motivated because even though they do things, they notice that for some reason they don’t have to do them, but could do something else. So they wonder what they should be doing. But there are basic things that they were doing all along because they evolved to do them. AIs won’t have “things they were doing”, and so they will have even weaker motivations than humans. They will notice that they can do “whatever they want” but they will have no idea what to want. This is kind of implied by what I wrote here: except that it is about human beings.
This is our accepted chapter in the edited volume “AI Safety and Security” (Roman Yampolskiy, ed.), CRC Press. Forthcoming, 2018
People are weakly motivated because even though they do things, they notice that for some reason they don’t have to do them, but could do something else. So they wonder what they should be doing. But there are basic things that they were doing all along because they evolved to do them. AIs won’t have “things they were doing”, and so they will have even weaker motivations than humans. They will notice that they can do “whatever they want” but they will have no idea what to want. This is kind of implied by what I wrote here: except that it is about human beings.