[SEQ RERUN] The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
Today’s post, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes was originally published on 24 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
There are a lot of things that humans care about. Therefore, the wishes that we make (as if to a genie) are enormously more complicated than we would intuitively suspect. In order to safely ask a powerful, intelligent being to do something for you, that being must share your entire decision criterion, or else the outcome will likely be horrible.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Leaky Generalizations, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I guess you can always make the first wish be “Share my entire decision criterion for all following wishes I ask”.
To translate that to the development of an AI, you could teach the AI psychology before asking anything of it that could be misunderstood if you use nonhuman decision criteria.