The idea of using the core vocab as a measure of hypothesis complexity is a really interesting one. Like many potentially good ideas it is obvious in hindsight. But, I’m not sure that using such a vocab to communicate with an AI is necessarily a good idea. Many words on the Swadesh list are extremely concrete and thus don’t touch much on the really tricky part of communicating with an AI (or at least are less of a problem.) However, others on the list are so complicated that defining them would almost be equivalent to solving FAI and other problems besides. That is, “good”, “bad”, “because”, and “name” are going to be really difficult.
The idea of using the core vocab as a measure of hypothesis complexity is a really interesting one. Like many potentially good ideas it is obvious in hindsight. But, I’m not sure that using such a vocab to communicate with an AI is necessarily a good idea. Many words on the Swadesh list are extremely concrete and thus don’t touch much on the really tricky part of communicating with an AI (or at least are less of a problem.) However, others on the list are so complicated that defining them would almost be equivalent to solving FAI and other problems besides. That is, “good”, “bad”, “because”, and “name” are going to be really difficult.