While Eliezer’s critique of Oracle AI is valid, I tend to think that it’s a lot easier to get people to grasp my objection to it:
Q Couldn’t AIs be built as pure advisors, so they wouldn’t do anything themselves? That way, we wouldn’t need to worry about Friendly AI.
A: The problem with this argument is the inherent slowness in all human activity—things are much more efficient if you can cut humans out of the loop, and the system can carry out decisions and formulate objectives on its own. Consider, for instance, two competing corporations (or nations), each with their own advisor AI that only carries out the missions it is given. Even if the advisor was the one collecting all the information for the humans (a dangerous situation in itself), the humans would have to spend time making the actual decisions of how to have the AI act in response to that information. If the competitor had turned over all the control to their own, independently acting AI, it could react much faster than the one that relied on the humans to give all the assignments. Therefore the temptation would be immense to build an AI that could act without human intervention.
Also, there are numerous people who would want an independently acting AI, for the simple reason that an AI built only to carry out goals given to it by humans could be used for vast harm—while an AI built to actually care for humanity could act in humanity’s best interests, in a neutral and bias-free fashion. Therefore, in either case, the motivation to build independently-acting AIs is there, and the cheaper computing power becomes, the easier it will be for even small groups to build AIs.
It doesn’t matter if an AI’s Friendliness could trivially be guaranteed by giving it a piece of electronic cheese, if nobody cares about Friendliness enough to think about giving it some cheese, or if giving the cheese costs too much in terms of what you could achieve otherwise. Any procedures which rely on handicapping an AI enough to make it powerless also handicap it enough to severly restrict its usefulness to most potential funders. Eventually there will be somebody who chooses not to handicap their own AI, and then the guaranteed-to-be-harmless AI will end up dominated by the more powerful AI.
Therefore the temptation would be immense to build an AI that could act without human intervention.
Also, there are numerous people who would want an independently acting AI, for the simple reason that an AI built only to carry out goals given to it by humans could be used for vast harm—while an AI built to actually care for humanity could act in humanity’s best interests, in a neutral and bias-free fashion. Therefore, in either case, the motivation to build independently-acting AIs is there, and the cheaper computing power becomes, the easier it will be for even small groups to build AIs.
There’s a contrary set of motivations in people, at least people outside the LW/AI world:
The idea of AI as “benevolent” dictator is not appealing to democratically minded types, who tend to suspect a slippery slope from benevolence to malevolence, and it is not appealing to dictator to have a superhuman rival...so who is motivated to build one?
While Eliezer’s critique of Oracle AI is valid, I tend to think that it’s a lot easier to get people to grasp my objection to it:
There’s a contrary set of motivations in people, at least people outside the LW/AI world:
The idea of AI as “benevolent” dictator is not appealing to democratically minded types, who tend to suspect a slippery slope from benevolence to malevolence, and it is not appealing to dictator to have a superhuman rival...so who is motivated to build one?