Why treat them as alternatives? Prove friendliness and then take precautions.
Suppose you’re not convinced by the scariest arguments about the dangers of AI. You might go ahead and try to make one without anything like the mathematical safety proofs MIRI would want. But you might still do well to adopt some of Unnamed’s suggestions.
Why treat them as alternatives? Prove friendliness and then take precautions.
Indeed, that is what we should do. But the danger with biased human thinking is that once people know there are precautions, most of them will start thinking the friendliness proof is not extremely important. The outcome of such thinking may be less safety.
We should make the friendliness proof as seriously as if no other precautions were possible. (And then, we should take the precautions as an extra layer of safety.) In other words, until we have the friendliness proof ready, we probably shouldn’t use the precautions in our debates; only exceptionally, like now.
Why treat keeping a bear in the house as an alternative to a garbage disposal? Build a garbage disposal and then chain it up!
suppose you’re not convinced keeping a bear in the house to eat food waste is a bad idea? you might go ahead and try it, and then you’d be really glad you kept it chained up!
It seems to me that my examples are more like these:
Why not drive safely and wear a seatbelt? Why not prove your hash-table code correct and write some unit tests? Why not simulate your amplifier circuit and build one and see what it actually does?
Some people might think it’s OK to build a nuclear power station or a spacecraft without formal correctness proofs for all the software in it, on the grounds that formal correctness proofs of large complicated systems are almost impossible to make and difficult to trust. If there are things those people can do to improve their conventional not-mathematically-rigorous testing, it might be worth recommending that they do them.
But by all means feel free to choose mockery and ridicule over reasoned debate, if that’s what you prefer.
the entire POINT of the mockery is that you are treating this as a technical issue that’s worth solving rather than a tangent path that is both dangerous and foolish. I don’t really care how much you’ve thought about what material to make the chains out of and which feeding schedule will keep the bear most docile. Those are questions that, sure, you CAN have reasoned debate about, but shouldn’t.
Why treat them as alternatives? Prove friendliness and then take precautions.
Suppose you’re not convinced by the scariest arguments about the dangers of AI. You might go ahead and try to make one without anything like the mathematical safety proofs MIRI would want. But you might still do well to adopt some of Unnamed’s suggestions.
Indeed, that is what we should do. But the danger with biased human thinking is that once people know there are precautions, most of them will start thinking the friendliness proof is not extremely important. The outcome of such thinking may be less safety.
We should make the friendliness proof as seriously as if no other precautions were possible. (And then, we should take the precautions as an extra layer of safety.) In other words, until we have the friendliness proof ready, we probably shouldn’t use the precautions in our debates; only exceptionally, like now.
Why treat keeping a bear in the house as an alternative to a garbage disposal? Build a garbage disposal and then chain it up!
suppose you’re not convinced keeping a bear in the house to eat food waste is a bad idea? you might go ahead and try it, and then you’d be really glad you kept it chained up!
It seems to me that my examples are more like these:
Why not drive safely and wear a seatbelt? Why not prove your hash-table code correct and write some unit tests? Why not simulate your amplifier circuit and build one and see what it actually does?
Some people might think it’s OK to build a nuclear power station or a spacecraft without formal correctness proofs for all the software in it, on the grounds that formal correctness proofs of large complicated systems are almost impossible to make and difficult to trust. If there are things those people can do to improve their conventional not-mathematically-rigorous testing, it might be worth recommending that they do them.
But by all means feel free to choose mockery and ridicule over reasoned debate, if that’s what you prefer.
the entire POINT of the mockery is that you are treating this as a technical issue that’s worth solving rather than a tangent path that is both dangerous and foolish. I don’t really care how much you’ve thought about what material to make the chains out of and which feeding schedule will keep the bear most docile. Those are questions that, sure, you CAN have reasoned debate about, but shouldn’t.
You shouldn’t talk about whether it’s possible because it’s not possible? That’s a very rational argument. How exactly did you arrive at that prior?