There are evolutionary priors for what to be afraid of but some of it is learned. I’ve heard children don’t start out fearing snakes but will easily learn to if they see other people afraid of them, whereas the same is not true for flowers (sorry, can’t find a ref, but this article discusses the general topic). Fear of heights might be innate but toddlers seem pretty bad at not falling down stairs. Mountain climbers have to be using mainly mechanical reasoning to figure out which heights are actually dangerous. It seems not hard to learn the way in which heights are dangerous if you understand the mechanics required to walk and traverse stairs and so on.
Instincts like curiosity are more helpful at the beginning of life, over time they can be learned as instrumental goals. If an AI learns advanced metacognitive strategies instead of innate curiosity that’s not obviously a big problem from a human values perspective but it’s unclear.
Some of this is my opinion rather than consensus, but in case you’re interested:
I believe that the human brainstem (superior colliculus) has an innate detector of certain specific visual things including slithering-like-a-snake and scuttling-like-a-spider, and when it detects those things, it executes an “orienting reaction” which involves not only eye-motion and head-turns but also conscious attention, and it also induces physiological arousal (elevated heart-rate etc.). That physiological arousal is not itself fear—obviously we experience physiological arousal in lots of situations that are not fear, like excitement, anger, etc.—but the arousal and attention does set up a situation in which a fear-response can be very easily learned. (Various brain learning algorithms are also doing various other things in the meantime, such that adults can wind up with that innate response getting routinely suppressed.)
My experience is that stairs don’t trigger fear-of-heights too much because you’re not looking straight down off a precipice. Also, I think sufficiently young babies don’t have fear-of-heights? I forget.
I’m not making any grand point here, just chatting.
There are evolutionary priors for what to be afraid of but some of it is learned. I’ve heard children don’t start out fearing snakes but will easily learn to if they see other people afraid of them, whereas the same is not true for flowers (sorry, can’t find a ref, but this article discusses the general topic). Fear of heights might be innate but toddlers seem pretty bad at not falling down stairs. Mountain climbers have to be using mainly mechanical reasoning to figure out which heights are actually dangerous. It seems not hard to learn the way in which heights are dangerous if you understand the mechanics required to walk and traverse stairs and so on.
Instincts like curiosity are more helpful at the beginning of life, over time they can be learned as instrumental goals. If an AI learns advanced metacognitive strategies instead of innate curiosity that’s not obviously a big problem from a human values perspective but it’s unclear.
Some of this is my opinion rather than consensus, but in case you’re interested:
I believe that the human brainstem (superior colliculus) has an innate detector of certain specific visual things including slithering-like-a-snake and scuttling-like-a-spider, and when it detects those things, it executes an “orienting reaction” which involves not only eye-motion and head-turns but also conscious attention, and it also induces physiological arousal (elevated heart-rate etc.). That physiological arousal is not itself fear—obviously we experience physiological arousal in lots of situations that are not fear, like excitement, anger, etc.—but the arousal and attention does set up a situation in which a fear-response can be very easily learned. (Various brain learning algorithms are also doing various other things in the meantime, such that adults can wind up with that innate response getting routinely suppressed.)
My experience is that stairs don’t trigger fear-of-heights too much because you’re not looking straight down off a precipice. Also, I think sufficiently young babies don’t have fear-of-heights? I forget.
I’m not making any grand point here, just chatting.