One thing that confuses me about the evolution metaphors is this:
Humans managed to evolve a sense of morality from what seems like fairly weak evolutionary pressure. Ie, it generally helps form larger groups to survive better, which is good, but also theres a constant advantage to being selfish and defecting. Amoral people can still accrue power and wealth and reproduce. Compare this to something like the pressure not to touch fire, which is much more acute.
The pressure to be “moral” of an AI seems significantly more powerful than that applied to humanity: If it is too out of line with it’s programmers, it is killed on the spot. Imagine if when humans evolved, a god murdered any human that stole.
It seems to me that evolutionary metaphors would imply that AI would evolve to be friendly, not evil. Of course, you can’t rely too much on these metaphors anyway.
I wouldn’t ascribe human morality to the process of evolution. Morality is a bunch of if..., then statements. Morality seems to be more of a cultural thing and helps coordination. Morality is obviously influenced by our emotions such as disgust, love etc but these can be influenced heavily by culture, upbringing and just genes.
Now let’s assume the AI is getting killed if it behaves “unmoral”, how can you be sure that it does not evolve to be deceptive ?
Evolutionary metaphors is about huge differences between evolutionary pressure in ancestral environment and what we have now: ice cream, transgenders, lesswrong, LLMs, condoms and other contraceptives. What kind of “ice cream” AGI and ASI will make for itself? May be it can be made out of humans, put them in vats and let them dream inputs for GPT10?
Mimicry is product of evolution too. Also—social mimicry.
I have thoughts about reasons for AI to evolve human-like morality too. But i also have thoughts like “this coin turned up heads 3 times in a row, so it must turn tails next”.
One thing that confuses me about the evolution metaphors is this:
Humans managed to evolve a sense of morality from what seems like fairly weak evolutionary pressure. Ie, it generally helps form larger groups to survive better, which is good, but also theres a constant advantage to being selfish and defecting. Amoral people can still accrue power and wealth and reproduce. Compare this to something like the pressure not to touch fire, which is much more acute.
The pressure to be “moral” of an AI seems significantly more powerful than that applied to humanity: If it is too out of line with it’s programmers, it is killed on the spot. Imagine if when humans evolved, a god murdered any human that stole.
It seems to me that evolutionary metaphors would imply that AI would evolve to be friendly, not evil. Of course, you can’t rely too much on these metaphors anyway.
I wouldn’t ascribe human morality to the process of evolution. Morality is a bunch of if..., then statements. Morality seems to be more of a cultural thing and helps coordination. Morality is obviously influenced by our emotions such as disgust, love etc but these can be influenced heavily by culture, upbringing and just genes. Now let’s assume the AI is getting killed if it behaves “unmoral”, how can you be sure that it does not evolve to be deceptive ?
Evolutionary metaphors is about huge differences between evolutionary pressure in ancestral environment and what we have now: ice cream, transgenders, lesswrong, LLMs, condoms and other contraceptives. What kind of “ice cream” AGI and ASI will make for itself? May be it can be made out of humans, put them in vats and let them dream inputs for GPT10?
Mimicry is product of evolution too. Also—social mimicry.
I have thoughts about reasons for AI to evolve human-like morality too. But i also have thoughts like “this coin turned up heads 3 times in a row, so it must turn tails next”.
Even if the AI is conditioned to care to not be terminated, it may still know how to get away with doing something ‘evil’ though.