It’s fun to muse about designing a “Friendly AI” a la Yudkowsky, that is guaranteed (or near-guaranteed) to maintain a friendly ethical system as it self-modifies and self-improves itself to massively superhuman intelligence. Such an AI system, if it existed, could bring about a full-on Singularity in a way that would respect human values – i.e. the best of both worlds, satisfying all but the most extreme of both the Cosmists and the Terrans. But the catch is, nobody has any idea how to do such a thing, and it seems well beyond the scope of current or near-future science and engineering.
Gradually and reluctantly, I’ve been moving toward the opinion that the best solution may be to create a mildly superhuman supertechnology, whose job it is to protect us from ourselves and our technology – not forever, but just for a while, while we work on the hard problem of creating a Friendly Singularity.
In other words, some sort of AI Nanny….
The AI Nanny
Imagine an advanced Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) software program with
General intelligence somewhat above the human level, but not too dramatically so – maybe, qualitatively speaking, as far above humans as humans are above apes
Interconnection to powerful worldwide surveillance systems, online and in the physical world
Control of a massive contingent of robots (e.g. service robots, teacher robots, etc.) and connectivity to the world’s home and building automation systems, robot factories, self-driving cars, and so on and so forth
A cognitive architecture featuring an explicit set of goals, and an action selection system that causes it to choose those actions that it rationally calculates will best help it achieve those goals
A set of preprogrammed goals including the following aspects:
A strong inhibition against modifying its preprogrammed goals
A strong inhibition against rapidly modifying its general intelligence
A mandate to cede control of the world to a more intelligent AI within 200 years
A mandate to help abolish human disease, involuntary human death, and the practical scarcity of common humanly-useful resources like food, water, housing, computers, etc.
A mandate to prevent the development of technologies that would threaten its ability to carry out its other goals
A strong inhibition against carrying out actions with a result that a strong majority of humans would oppose, if they knew about the action in advance
A mandate to be open-minded toward suggestions by intelligent, thoughtful humans about the possibility that it may be misinterpreting its initial, preprogrammed goals
Apparently Goertzel doesn’t think that building a Nanny-AI with the above mentioned qualities is almost as difficult as creating a FAI a la Yudkowsky.
But SIAI believes that once you can create an AI-Nanny you can (probably) create a full-blown FAI as well.
LINK: Ben Goertzel; Does Humanity Need an “AI-Nanny”?
Link: Ben Goertzel dismisses Yudkowsky’s FAI and proposes his own solution: Nanny-AI
Some relevant quotes:
Apparently Goertzel doesn’t think that building a Nanny-AI with the above mentioned qualities is almost as difficult as creating a FAI a la Yudkowsky.
But SIAI believes that once you can create an AI-Nanny you can (probably) create a full-blown FAI as well.
Or am I mistaken?