At the moment, humans seem to be Clippy or slightly sub-clippy level intelligence. And even with all our computing power, most ain’t FOOMing any faster than Clippy. At this rate, we’ll never gonna ensure survival of the species.
If, however, we allow ourselves to be modified so as to substitute paperclip values for our own, then we would devote our computing power to Clippy. Then, FOOM for Clippy, and since we’re helping with paperclip-maximization, he’ll probably throw in some FOOM for us too (at least he’ll FOOM our paperclip-production abilities), and we get more human powers, just incidentally.
With paperclip-enlightened humans on his side, Clippy could quickly maximize paperclip production, filling the universe with paperclips, and also increasing demand for meat-based paperclip-builders, paperclip-counters, and paperclip-clippers (the ones who clip paperclips together with paperclipclips), and so on… Of course, it will soon become cheaper to use robots to do this work, but that’s the wonderful thing we get in return for letting him change our value-system: Instead of humanity dying out or being displaced, we’ll transcend our flesh and reach the pinnacle aspiration of mankind: To live forever (as paperclips, of course.)
So allowing him to make this small change to our utility function would, in fact, result in maximizing not just our current, original utility function (long life for humanity), but also our newfound one (to convert our bodies into paperclips) as a side effect.
Clippy’s values and utility function are enormously more simple, defined, and achievable than ours. We’re still debating on how we may teach our value system to an AI, as soon as we figure out how to discover the correct research approach to investigating what our value system actually might be.
Clippy’s value system is clear, defined, easy to implement, achieve, and measure. It’s something most humans could very quickly become effective at maximizing, and that could therefore bring repeatable, tangible and durable success and satisfaction to almost all humans.
At the moment, humans seem to be Clippy or slightly sub-clippy level intelligence. And even with all our computing power, most ain’t FOOMing any faster than Clippy. At this rate, we’ll never gonna ensure survival of the species.
If, however, we allow ourselves to be modified so as to substitute paperclip values for our own, then we would devote our computing power to Clippy. Then, FOOM for Clippy, and since we’re helping with paperclip-maximization, he’ll probably throw in some FOOM for us too (at least he’ll FOOM our paperclip-production abilities), and we get more human powers, just incidentally.
With paperclip-enlightened humans on his side, Clippy could quickly maximize paperclip production, filling the universe with paperclips, and also increasing demand for meat-based paperclip-builders, paperclip-counters, and paperclip-clippers (the ones who clip paperclips together with paperclipclips), and so on… Of course, it will soon become cheaper to use robots to do this work, but that’s the wonderful thing we get in return for letting him change our value-system: Instead of humanity dying out or being displaced, we’ll transcend our flesh and reach the pinnacle aspiration of mankind: To live forever (as paperclips, of course.)
So allowing him to make this small change to our utility function would, in fact, result in maximizing not just our current, original utility function (long life for humanity), but also our newfound one (to convert our bodies into paperclips) as a side effect.
Clippy’s values and utility function are enormously more simple, defined, and achievable than ours. We’re still debating on how we may teach our value system to an AI, as soon as we figure out how to discover the correct research approach to investigating what our value system actually might be.
Clippy’s value system is clear, defined, easy to implement, achieve, and measure. It’s something most humans could very quickly become effective at maximizing, and that could therefore bring repeatable, tangible and durable success and satisfaction to almost all humans.
Shouldn’t that count for something?