Well, alternative if you like. I will post an elaboration as a full article.
aberglas
Karma: 2
Natural selection defeats the orthogonality thesis
If you’d like to come up the coast I’d be most interested. Would probably go down to Brisbane as well.
Anthony
Reviewers wanted for New Book—When Computers Can Really Think.
The book aims at a general audience, and does not simply assume that an AGI can be built. It differs from others by considering how natural selection would ultimately shape a AGI’s motivations. It argues against the Orthogonality Principal, suggesting instead that there is ultimately only one super goal, namely the need to exist. It also contains a semi-technical overview of artificial intelligent technologies for the non-expert/student.
An overview can be found at
Please let me know if you would be interested in reviewing a late draft. Any feedback would be most welcome. Anthony@berglas.org
What is amazing is that computers have not already reduced the workforce to run bureaucracies.
In my upcoming book I analyze the Australian Tax Office in 1955 (when Parkinson wrote is great paper) and 2008. At both times it took about 1.5% of GDP to do essentially the same function. (Normalizing for GDP takes into account inflation and population size.)
Back in 1955 tax returns were largely processed by hand, by rows of clerks with fountain pens. Just one ancient mainframe could do the work of thousands of people. Today few returns are even touched by a human hand.
The steam tractor and the combine harvester have reduced the agricultural work force from 80% of the population to less than 20%, depending how you count. But the huge increase in the power of bureaucratic tools has produced no reduction in the proportion of the population that work in bureaucracies, quite the opposite.
I think that you are right and Lander is wrong.
However, it is curious that most mammals such as dogs and horses die much younger than we do, despite being made of essentially the same stuff. Certainly we could not exist if we died under twenty years because it takes us that long to mature our minds and breed. But what advantage for a dog to die young? If it lived twice as long it would (presumably) produce twice as many grandchildren.
I suspect that it is simply that dogs and horses can breed after a couple of years. So once they live more than 6 or so times their breeding age their is not that much advantage in them living any longer. But there would still be some advantage. Is there some cost to living longer, such as needing to have a slower metabolism, or is it just that natural selection does not produce unneeded features?
Not quite. Counting AIs is much harder than counting people. An AI is neither discrete nor homogenous.
I think that it is most unlikely that the world could be controlled by one uniform, homogenous, intelligence. It would need to be at least physically distributed over multiple computers. It will not be a giant von-Neuman machine doing one thing at a time. There will be lots of subprocesses working somewhat independently. It would seem almost certain that they would eventually fragment to some extent.
People are not that homogenous either. We have competing internal thoughts.
Further, an AI will be composed of many components, and those components will compete with each other. Suppose one part of the AI develops a new and better theorem prover. Pretty soon the rest of the AI will start to use that new component and the old one will die. Over time the AI will consist of the components that are best at promoting themselves.
It will be a complex environment. And there will never be enough hardware to run all the programs that could be written, so there will be competition for resources.