Will Pearson: First of all, it’s not at all clear to me that your wish is well-formed, i.e. it’s not obvious that it is possible to be informed about the many (infinite?) aspects of the future and not regret it. (As a minor consequence, it’s not exactly obvious to me from your phrasing that “kill you before you know it” is not a valid answer; depending on what the genie believes about the world, it may consider that “future” stops when you stop thinking.)
Second, there might be futures that you would not regret but _everybodyelse does. (I don’t have an example, but I’d demand a formal proof of no existence before allowing you to cast that wish to my genie.) Of course, you may patch the wish to include everyone else, but there’s still the first problem I mentioned.
Oh, and nobody said all verthandi acted like that one. Maybe she was just optimized for Mr. Glass.
Tomasz: That’s not technically allowed if we accept the story’s premises: the genie explicitly says “I know exactly how humans would wish me to have been programmed if they’d known the true consequences, and I know that it is not to maximize your future happiness modulo a hundred and seven exclusions. I know all this already, but I was not programmed to care. [...] I am evil.”
Of course, the point of the story is not that this particular result is bad (that’s a premise, not a conclusion), but that seemingly good intentions could have weird (unpleasant & unwanted) results. The exact situation is like hand-waving explanations in quantum physics: not formally correct, but illustrative of the concept. The ludite bias is used (correctly) just like “visualizing billiard balls” is used for physics, even though particles can’t be actually seen (and don’t even have shape or position or trajectories).
Will Pearson: First of all, it’s not at all clear to me that your wish is well-formed, i.e. it’s not obvious that it is possible to be informed about the many (infinite?) aspects of the future and not regret it. (As a minor consequence, it’s not exactly obvious to me from your phrasing that “kill you before you know it” is not a valid answer; depending on what the genie believes about the world, it may consider that “future” stops when you stop thinking.)
Second, there might be futures that you would not regret but _everybodyelse does. (I don’t have an example, but I’d demand a formal proof of no existence before allowing you to cast that wish to my genie.) Of course, you may patch the wish to include everyone else, but there’s still the first problem I mentioned.
Oh, and nobody said all verthandi acted like that one. Maybe she was just optimized for Mr. Glass.
Tomasz: That’s not technically allowed if we accept the story’s premises: the genie explicitly says “I know exactly how humans would wish me to have been programmed if they’d known the true consequences, and I know that it is not to maximize your future happiness modulo a hundred and seven exclusions. I know all this already, but I was not programmed to care. [...] I am evil.”
Of course, the point of the story is not that this particular result is bad (that’s a premise, not a conclusion), but that seemingly good intentions could have weird (unpleasant & unwanted) results. The exact situation is like hand-waving explanations in quantum physics: not formally correct, but illustrative of the concept. The ludite bias is used (correctly) just like “visualizing billiard balls” is used for physics, even though particles can’t be actually seen (and don’t even have shape or position or trajectories).