The question is indeed interesting, but the presumed answer is a powerful motivator for whom? Even if human evolution will lead to a super-amazing future of greatness, I doubt that future would be as super-amazing as a correctly implemented FAI; avoiding dystopian evolutionary existential catastrophes has never been listed as main reason for wanting to build a friendly really powerful optimization process by anyone I’ve talked to. Most don’t think humanity will even get that far.
But I’m curious as to what your intuitions are regarding the probably counterfactual world where humans continue evolving for a long, long time.
Eliezer has a bias against evolution, and a bias against randomness, as exhibited in his series ending in Worse than Random, which is factually correct in the details, but misleading in the real world, as demonstrated by repeated times when his acolytes have used it to attack probabilistic search, probabilistic models, etc.
My take all along has been that something about evolution has caused it to reliably make the world a more complicated, more interesting, and better place; and evolution, with randomness, is the only process that can be trusted to continue this. Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.
I see E’s story about the moties as being one possible source of his bias against evolution, and hence against randomness.
Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.
Exactly. This should be obviously what we need to do.
.....
Evolution is blindly optimizing for those that produce more offspring. Eventually, those specifically aiming for this would do this more optimally than those who didn’t. Meaning that eventually only those whose main goal is to mate would dominate. Evolution marches on.
Why this has not happened before is related to the fact that there has not been human level, scheming animals on this planet earlier. Animals that can’t plan years ahead would benefit very little from having an urge towards fitness maximizing. Adaptions to be executed are what needs to be optimized and what matters vastly more on that level.
My assumption is that it isn’t really possible to take charge of evolution. You might be able to have less undirected biological evolution, but only by having memetically-driven evolution. Things are still going to have random influences.
The question is indeed interesting, but the presumed answer is a powerful motivator for whom? Even if human evolution will lead to a super-amazing future of greatness, I doubt that future would be as super-amazing as a correctly implemented FAI; avoiding dystopian evolutionary existential catastrophes has never been listed as main reason for wanting to build a friendly really powerful optimization process by anyone I’ve talked to. Most don’t think humanity will even get that far.
But I’m curious as to what your intuitions are regarding the probably counterfactual world where humans continue evolving for a long, long time.
Eliezer has a bias against evolution, and a bias against randomness, as exhibited in his series ending in Worse than Random, which is factually correct in the details, but misleading in the real world, as demonstrated by repeated times when his acolytes have used it to attack probabilistic search, probabilistic models, etc.
My take all along has been that something about evolution has caused it to reliably make the world a more complicated, more interesting, and better place; and evolution, with randomness, is the only process that can be trusted to continue this. Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.
I see E’s story about the moties as being one possible source of his bias against evolution, and hence against randomness.
Exactly. This should be obviously what we need to do.
.....
Evolution is blindly optimizing for those that produce more offspring. Eventually, those specifically aiming for this would do this more optimally than those who didn’t. Meaning that eventually only those whose main goal is to mate would dominate. Evolution marches on.
Why this has not happened before is related to the fact that there has not been human level, scheming animals on this planet earlier. Animals that can’t plan years ahead would benefit very little from having an urge towards fitness maximizing. Adaptions to be executed are what needs to be optimized and what matters vastly more on that level.
My assumption is that it isn’t really possible to take charge of evolution. You might be able to have less undirected biological evolution, but only by having memetically-driven evolution. Things are still going to have random influences.