Do you think this is a loophole allowing arbitrary actions? Or do you think that an AI would simply say, “I don’t know what it means for energy to be consumed, so I’m not going to do anything.”
I don’t know much about physics, but do you think that some sort of measure of entropy might work better?
As far as I know, every simple rule either leaves trivial loopholes, or puts the AI on the hook for a large portion of all the energy (or entropy) in its future light cone, a huge amount which wouldn’t be meaningfully related to how much harm it can do.
If there is a way around this problem, I don’t claim to be knowledgeable or clever enough to find it, but this idea has been brought up before on LW and no one has come up with anything so far.
It seems that many questions could be answered using only computing power (or computing power and network access to more-or-less static resources), and this doesn’t seem like a difficult limitation to put into place. We’re already assuming a system that understands English at an extremely high level. I’m convinced that ethics is hard for machines because it’s hard for humans too. But I don’t see why, given an AI worthy of the name, following instructions is hard, especially given the additional instructions, “be conservative and don’t break the law”.
Do you think this is a loophole allowing arbitrary actions? Or do you think that an AI would simply say, “I don’t know what it means for energy to be consumed, so I’m not going to do anything.”
I don’t know much about physics, but do you think that some sort of measure of entropy might work better?
As far as I know, every simple rule either leaves trivial loopholes, or puts the AI on the hook for a large portion of all the energy (or entropy) in its future light cone, a huge amount which wouldn’t be meaningfully related to how much harm it can do.
If there is a way around this problem, I don’t claim to be knowledgeable or clever enough to find it, but this idea has been brought up before on LW and no one has come up with anything so far.
Link to previous discussions?
It seems that many questions could be answered using only computing power (or computing power and network access to more-or-less static resources), and this doesn’t seem like a difficult limitation to put into place. We’re already assuming a system that understands English at an extremely high level. I’m convinced that ethics is hard for machines because it’s hard for humans too. But I don’t see why, given an AI worthy of the name, following instructions is hard, especially given the additional instructions, “be conservative and don’t break the law”.
Dreams of Friendliness