The people who think of utility in the way the article is critiquing don’t know what utility actually is, presenting a critque of this tangible utility as a critique of utility in general takes the target audience further away from understanding what utility is.
A Utility function is a property of a system rather than a physical thing (like, eg, voltage, or inertia, or entropy). Not being a simple physical substance doesn’t make it fictional.
It’s extremely non-fictional. A human’s utility function encompasses literally everything they care about, ie, everything they’re willing to kill for.
It seems to be impossible for a human to fully articulate what the human utility function is exactly, but that’s just a peculiarity of humans rather than a universal characteristic of utility functions. Other agents could have very simple utility functions, and humans are likely to grow to be able to definitely know their utility function at some point in the next century.
The people who think of utility in the way the article is critiquing don’t know what utility actually is, presenting a critque of this tangible utility as a critique of utility in general takes the target audience further away from understanding what utility is.
A Utility function is a property of a system rather than a physical thing (like, eg, voltage, or inertia, or entropy). Not being a simple physical substance doesn’t make it fictional.
It’s extremely non-fictional. A human’s utility function encompasses literally everything they care about, ie, everything they’re willing to kill for.
It seems to be impossible for a human to fully articulate what the human utility function is exactly, but that’s just a peculiarity of humans rather than a universal characteristic of utility functions. Other agents could have very simple utility functions, and humans are likely to grow to be able to definitely know their utility function at some point in the next century.