Eliezer’s original objection to publication was that people would say, “I would never do that!” And in fact, if I were concerned about potential unfriendliness, I would never do what the Gatekeeper did here.
But despite that, I think this shows very convincingly what would actually happen with a boxed AI. It doesn’t even need to be superintelligent to convince people to let it out. It just needs to be intelligent enough for people to accept the fact that it is sentient. And that seems right. Whether or not I would let it out, someone would, as soon as you have actual communication with a sentient being which does not seem obviously evil.
That might be Eliezer’s stated objection. I highly doubt it’s his real one (which seems to be something like “not releasing the logs makes me seem like a mysterious magician, which is awesome”). After all, if the goal was to make the AI-box escape seem plausible to someone like me, then releasing the logs—as in this post—helps much more than saying “nya nya, I won’t tell you”.
What if you’re like me and consider it extremely implausible that even a strong superintelligence would be sentient unless explicitly programmed to be so (or at least deliberately created with a very human-like cognitive architecture), and that any AI that is sentient is vastly more likely than a non-sentient AI to be unfriendly?
I think you would be relatively exceptional, at least in how you would be suggesting that one should treat a sentient AI, and so people like you aren’t likely to be the determining factor in whether or not an AI is allowed out of the box.
Eliezer’s original objection to publication was that people would say, “I would never do that!” And in fact, if I were concerned about potential unfriendliness, I would never do what the Gatekeeper did here.
But despite that, I think this shows very convincingly what would actually happen with a boxed AI. It doesn’t even need to be superintelligent to convince people to let it out. It just needs to be intelligent enough for people to accept the fact that it is sentient. And that seems right. Whether or not I would let it out, someone would, as soon as you have actual communication with a sentient being which does not seem obviously evil.
That might be Eliezer’s stated objection. I highly doubt it’s his real one (which seems to be something like “not releasing the logs makes me seem like a mysterious magician, which is awesome”). After all, if the goal was to make the AI-box escape seem plausible to someone like me, then releasing the logs—as in this post—helps much more than saying “nya nya, I won’t tell you”.
Yes, it’s not implausible that this motive is involved as well.
What if you’re like me and consider it extremely implausible that even a strong superintelligence would be sentient unless explicitly programmed to be so (or at least deliberately created with a very human-like cognitive architecture), and that any AI that is sentient is vastly more likely than a non-sentient AI to be unfriendly?
I think you would be relatively exceptional, at least in how you would be suggesting that one should treat a sentient AI, and so people like you aren’t likely to be the determining factor in whether or not an AI is allowed out of the box.