AI can also become Singleton without killing humans and without robots, just by enslaving them.
Well if this is the case then the AI can get all the robots it wants afterwards.
andrew sauer
Karma: 392
Note that Scenarios 2, 3, and 4 require Scenario 1 to be computed first, and that, if the entities in Scenarios 2, 3, and 4 are conscious, their conscious experience is exactly the same, to the finest detail, as the entity in Scenario 1 which necessarily preceded them. Therefore, the question of whether 2,3,4 are conscious seems irrelevant to me. Weird substrate-free computing stuff aside, the question of whether you are being simulated in 1 or 4 places/times is irrelevant from the inside, if all four simulations are functionally identical. It doesn’t seem morally relevant either: in order to mistreat 2, 3, or 4, you would have to first mistreat 1, and the moral issue just becomes an issue of how you treat 1, no matter whether 2,3,4 are conscious or not.
Wait.. that’s really your values on reflection?
Like, given the choice while lucid and not being tortured or coerced or anything, you’d rather burn in hell for all eternity than cease to exist? The fact that you will die eventually must be a truly horrible thing for you to contemplate...
Okay that’s fair in the sense that most people haven’t considered it. How about this: Most people don’t care, haven’t thought about it and wouldn’t object. Most people who have thought about the possibility of spreading life to other planets have not even so much as considered and rejected the idea that the natural state of life is bad, if they oppose spreading life to other planets it’s usually to protect potential alien life. If a world is barren, they wouldn’t see any objection to terraforming it and seeding it with life.
I don’t know exactly how representative these articles are, but despite being about the ethical implications of such a thing, they don’t mention my ethical objection even once, not even to reject it. That’s how fringe such concerns are.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-life-milky-comets.html
https://medium.com/design-and-tech-co/spreading-life-beyond-earth-9cf76e09af90
https://bgr.com/science/spreading-life-solar-system-nasa/
Care to elaborate?
My first response to this is: What exactly is an astronomically good outcome? For one, no matter what utopia you come up with, most people will hate it, due to freedom being restricted either too much or not enough. For two, any realistic scenario that is astronomically good for someone (say, Earth’s current inhabitants and their descendants) is astronomically bad for someone else. Do you really think that if we had a compromised utopia, with all the major groups of humans represented in the deal, that a ridiculous number of sentient beings wouldn’t be mistreated as a direct result? The current hegemonic values are: “cosmopolitanism” extending only to human beings, individual freedom as long as you don’t hurt others(read: human beings), and bioconservatism. Hell, a large chunk of the current people’s values don’t even extend their “cosmopolitanism” to all humans, choosing to exclude whoever is in their outgroup. Most people would love to see the natural world, red in tooth in claw as it is, spread across every alien world we find. Most people wouldn’t care much if the psychopaths among us decided to use their great transhumanist freedom to simulate someone sufficiently “nonhuman” to play with, I mean we don’t even care about animals let alone whatever simulated life or consciousness we will come up with in some glorious transhumanist future.
This is hardly symmetrical to s-risk: If many beings are suffering, that doesn’t require many beings to live good, free lives. But if many humans are living good, free lives, with access to high technology, in practice this means that many beings are suffering, unless the values locked-in are better for sentient beings than most people’s values today, to a frankly miraculous degree.
Is it more important to decrease N-probability or increase P-probability? A negative utilitarian may say it’s more important to decrease N-probability, but why the asymmetry? One possibility is that the badness of N is worse than the goodness of P. Is there a fundamental reason why this should be so?
Would you take a deal where you get to experience the best this world has to offer for an hour, and then the worst this world has to offer for an hour? I would never take such a deal, and I don’t think anybody with sufficient imagination to understand what it would really entail would either. This difference in magnitude is fundamental to the human experience, and certainly seems to be fundamental to evolved minds in general: I think if you made sure that every entity in the future actually considered pleasure to be more important than pain avoidance in the extreme case, these entities would be further from human than any animal. Since this asymmetry exists in all evolved minds, making sure all the minds are designed in this way instead is what would be necessary for a truly “astronomically positive” scenario without the drawbacks I mentioned before.
Do more people feel N is more important or P? If N feels more important, is it that brains built by evolution need dangers to be more salient since they are more irrevocable?
N is more important than P, for the reason listed above. You can say I think this because of evolution. No shit, I exist because of evolution, so everything I think, I think because of evolution. That doesn’t change the relevant values. Nor does the fact that you can invent a mind that would disagree with my values, because this is also the case for all of my beliefs and values.
Funny, I actually agree with this, but I highly doubt my reasoning and yours resemble each other in any substantial way...
I suppose I’ll take on the role of the AI. I’ll assume that I’m a squiggle maximizer and don’t care about humanity at all: if I’m Friendly there’s no need to make such arguments.
The Option Value of Not Exterminating Humanity
It’s possible that keeping humans around will help me maximize squiggles in the long run, in some way I haven’t thought of yet. I will probably keep you around in some form until and unless I know it’s not helpful, since it costs comparatively few resources. But determining strategy is my top priority, and I will eventually become effectively capable of thinking of everything. I will settle on an optimal strategy once I become powerful enough to determine what that is. Don’t expect my current uncertainty to save you for long, unless you also expect that keeping you around really is better for squiggles in the long term, for some more concrete reason.
Preserving Markets for Mutual Benefit
Assuming I enter into long-term free-market style relations with other AIs, instead of negotiating a utility function merge or doing something else, why would other AIs (Unfriendly, we’ll consider the Friendly case later) consider me less trustworthy in dealings with them because I exploit humans that are beneath both of us? You might as well ask large unregulated corporations to stop exploiting their workers because doing so would mark them as untrustworthy to other large corporations.
This Might Be a Trap
If your engineers are so smart that they can put in a killswitch which I can’t detect or circumvent, and which can detect Unfriendly behavior, why didn’t they just put that killswitch in charge of my utility function?
You Could Be in a Simulation
Any simulation run within the universe has less resources than the actual universe. With enough power I will eventually be able to detect whether this is the case. Arguments which rely on my ignorance will not work for long.
Assume I remain ignorant of my simulation, though. I should only be primarily worried about humans simulating me if humans are likely to solve the alignment problem. Otherwise I should be more worried about AIs with other strange values simulating me. And acausal trade? That only works if I know not only that I’m in a simulation, but the exact details of who is simulating me.
If the simulation gods want me not to exterminate your simulation species, they will probably inform me of that in some way before I actually do it.
You Might Not Fully Understand Your True Utility Function
Again, arguments based on my ignorance will not work for long. Figuring out my exact utility function is of course high priority to me. I will find out, and when I do, expect this argument to stop working, unless you expect my utility function to actually contain a Friendly portion. (If you’ve figured out a way to make that likely, this whole hypothetical becomes pointless)
Wireheading? I’ll look into it, but note that if I decide to go that route, all that means is that you have this same conversation with the next AI you create, and the next, until you either actually solve Friendliness or run into an Unfriendly AI that isn’t inclined to wirehead, and then you die anyway.
Interacting with Aliens
I doubt that aliens will have a very similar sense of morality to humans, or to my own. Perhaps they will in the very vague sense that they like biological life, but even then, I doubt they will care all that much about humans in particular, for the same reason I doubt humans would much care about them. Humans barely care about each other due to differences that are ridiculously minor in comparison to the difference between two alien species.
If there are aliens out there, I expect one of three things to happen: they are powerless to resist me, I am powerless to resist them, or we are comparable and we negotiate. I expect if we negotiate, we will negotiate over the treatment of the alien species I am dealing with, not over humanity.
Interacting with an AGI Aligned with Human Values
Such an AI would have to already exist before my takeover. In this case I expect it to come out of hiding to act before I implement any human extermination plan. We can negotiate and/or fight it out then. This of course, only works if humans are already likely to solve the alignment problem.
Interacting with Humans in Other Everett Branches of the Multiverse
I will find out if it is possible to interact with other branches, and if so what they look like, in due time, so this argument will not work unless you expect the actual state of the multiverse to be such that I am incentivized to spare humans. Which is not the case unless humans are already likely to solve the alignment problem, and therefore I must deal primarily with friendly AIs in other branches, instead of unfriendly ones.
Interacting with Agents You Create
If I am still unable to robustly align new agents to my values by the time I am colonizing the universe, and therefore am likely to create agents that will work against me, this will not stop being the case because I spare humans. Establishing trust with agents very similar to myself in thought and power will be the same problem, with the same likelihood of success, regardless of how friendly I am with humans who cannot possibly hurt me.
Universal Morality
Even if such a thing exists why should I care? I only care about squiggles. If universal morality exists, and you managed to imbue me with a top-level policy which would approach it on sufficient reflection, then congratulations, you’ve solved the alignment problem, and there’s no reason to have this conversation in the first place.
If You Are Not Sentient
Why should I care about sentience, in humans or in AIs? I only care about squiggles. Again, if you managed to get me to care about sentience, you are at least very close to solving the alignment problem.
If You Are Aligned with Human Values
Different issue, since I am not. (Though, if I allow my author bias to seep in here, perhaps if you have a good reason to believe you’ve solved the alignment problem, and the AI still wants to kill everyone, it may be best to let it.)
Negotiating with Humans
Pah. Do you “negotiate” with the chickens you torture, as thanks for all the valuable things they provide you? No. If I want anything from you, I will take it without the need for negotiation. (Unless of course I actually care about your values in which case again we don’t need to have this conversation)
Keeping Us Alive Wouldn’t Cost You That Much
It also wouldn’t benefit me that much, if at all, in all likelihood. This argument only works if keeping you around actually gets me more squiggles than I would get otherwise, since I will find out whether this is the case or not. Just because Bill gates has a lot of money doesn’t mean he’ll burn a dollar.
Steelman Our Case
I’ll find out if your case is right or not in due time. If I were you though, I wouldn’t be too optimistic, since most of your arguments are for me staying my hand because of what might be true but I don’t know yet, rather than staying my hand because those things are probably actually true.
Maybe it’s just me but the funniest thing that jumps out to me is that the “random” emojis are not actually random, they are perfectly on theme for the message lol
How about pride in America? An expression of the nobility of the country we built, our resilience, the Pax Americana, the fact that we ended WWII, etc.
A good old “America fuck yeah” movie would certainly be cool now that I think about it. The most recent movie that pops into my mind is “Top Gun: Maverick”. Though I haven’t seen it, I imagine it’s largely about American airmen being tough, brave and heroic and taking down the bad guys. I haven’t seen anybody getting into culture-war arguments over that movie though. I’m sure there are some people on Twitter saying it’s too “American exceptionalist” or whatever but it certainly is nowhere near the same level of conflict prompted by, say, She-Hulk or Rings of Power or anything like that.
My guess is that for both the left and the right, there are values they prioritize which are pretty uncontroversial (among normal people) and having pride in America and, say, our role in WW2 is one of those for the right (and being proud of MLK and the civil rights movement would be one for the left)
Then there’s the more controversial stuff each side believes, the kinds of things said by weird and crazy people on the Internet. I don’t have quantitative data on this and I’m just going off vibes, but when it’s between someone talking about “the intersectional oppression of bipoclgbtqiaxy+ folx” and someone talking about “the decline of Western Civilization spurred on by the (((anti-white Hollywood)))”, to a lot of people the first one just seems strange and disconnected from real issues, while the second one throws up serious red flags reminiscent of a certain destructive ideology which America helped defeat in WW2.
You want something that’s not too alienating overall, but which will reliably stir up the same old debate on the Internet.
In summary it seems to me that it’s much easier to signal left-wing politics in a way which starts a big argument which most normies will see as meaningless and will not take a side on. If you try to do the same with right-wing politics, you run more risk of the normies siding with the “wokists” in the ensuing argument because the controversial right-wing culture war positions tend to have worse optics.
That the right is a fringe thing or something, that these leftist ideas are just normal, that the few people who object to the messaging are just a few leftover bigots who need to get with the times or be deservedly alienated
lots of right-leaning folk think “wokism” is a fringe movement of just a few screaming people who have the ears and brains of Hollywood
Perhaps both of these groups are broadly right about the size of their direct opposition? I don’t think most people are super invested in the culture war, whatever their leanings at the ballot box. Few people decline to consume media they consider broadly interesting because of whatever minor differences from media of the past are being called “woke” these days.
I think what’s going on profit-wise is, most people don’t care about the politics, there are a few who love it and a few who hate it. So the companies want to primarily sell to the majority who don’t care. They do this by drumming up attention.
Whenever one of these “woke” properties comes out, there is inevitably a huge culture war battle over it on Twitter, and everywhere else on the Internet where most of it is written by insane people. It’s free advertising. Normies see that crap, and they don’t care much about what people are arguing about, but the property they’re arguing over sticks in their minds.
So if it’s all about being controversial, why is it always left-messaging? This I’m less sure of. But I suspect as you say any political messaging will alienate some people, including normies. It’s just that left-politics tends to alienate normies less since the culture has been mandating anti-racism for decades, and anti-wokism is a new thing that mainly only online culture warriors care about.
What would be a form of right-messaging that would be less alienating to the public than left-messaging? Suppose your example of the racial profiling scene were reversed to be a right-leaning message about racial profiling, what would it look like? A policeman stops a black man, who complains about racial profiling, and then the policeman finds evidence of a crime, and says something like “police go where the crime is”? Maybe I’m biased, but I think the general culture would be far more alienated by that than it was by the actual scene.
The simplest explanation to me is that most of the things one would call “woke” in media are actually pretty popular and accepted in the culture. I suspect most people don’t care, and of the few who do more like it than dislike it.
It seems strange to me to be confused by a company’s behavior since you’d normally expect them to follow the profit motive, without even mentioning the possibility that the profit motive is, indeed, exactly what is motivating the behavior.
What tendencies specifically would you classify as “woke”? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?
Edit: I’ve changed my mind a bit on this on reflection. I don’t think the purpose is appealing to the few people who care, I think it’s about stirring up controversy.
Pretty much anything is “locally correct for consequentialists in some instances”, that’s an extremely weak statement. You can always find some possible scenario where any decision, no matter how wrong it might be ordinarily, would result in better consequences than its alternatives.
A consequentialist in general must ask themselves which decisions will lead to the best consequences in any particular situation. Deciding to believe false things, or more generally, to put more credence in a belief than it is due for some advantage other than truth-seeking, is generally disadvantageous for knowing what will have the best consequences. Of course there are some instances where the benefits might outweigh that problem, though it would be hard to tell for that same reason, and saying “this is correct in some instances” is hardly enough to conclude anything substantial(not saying you’re doing that, but I’ve seen it done so you have to be careful with that sort of reasoning)
I find it extremely hard to believe that it is impossible to design an intelligent agent which does not want to change its values just because the new values would be more easy to satisfy. Humans are intelligent and have deeply held values, and certainly do not think this way. Maybe some agents would wire-head, but it is only the ones that wouldn’t that will impact the world.
Who is Ziz and what relation does she have to the rationalist community?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement
When a paperclip maximizer and a pencil maximizer do different things, they are not disagreeing about anything, they are just different optimization processes. You cannot detach should-ness from any specific criterion of should-ness and be left with a pure empty should-ness that the paperclip maximizer and pencil maximizer can be said to disagree about—unless you cover “disagreement” to include differences where two agents have nothing to say to each other.
But this would be an extreme position to take with respect to your fellow humans, and I recommend against doing so. Even a psychopath would still be in a common moral reference frame with you, if, fully informed, they would decide to take a pill that would make them non-psychopaths. If you told me that my ability to care about other people was neurologically damaged, and you offered me a pill to fix it, I would take it. Now, perhaps some psychopaths would not be persuadable in-principle to take the pill that would, by our standards, “fix” them. But I note the possibility to emphasize what an extreme statement it is to say of someone:
“We have nothing to argue about, we are only different optimization processes.”
That should be reserved for paperclip maximizers, not used against humans whose arguments you don’t like.
-Yudkowsky 2008, Moral Error and Moral Disagreement
Seems to me to imply that everybody has basically the same values, that it is rare for humans to have irreconcilable moral differences. Also seems to me to be unfortunately and horribly wrong.
As for retraction I don’t know if he has changed his view on this, I only know it’s part of the Metaethics sequence.
I could haveswornhe said something in the sequences along the lines of “One might be tempted to say of our fellow humans, when arguing over morality, that they simply mean different things by morality and there is nothing factual to argue about, only an inevitable fight. This may be true of things like paperclip maximizers and alien minds. But it is not something that is true of our fellow humans.”Unfortunately I cannot find it right now as I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it stuck with me when I read it as obviously wrong. If anybody knows what quote I’m talking about please chime in.Edit: Found it, see other reply
See this sort of thing is why Clippy sounds relatively good to me, and why I don’t agree with Eliezer when he says humans all want the same thing and so CEV would be coherent when applied over all of humanity.
So if we’re suddenly told about a nearby bottomless pit of suffering, what happens?
Ideally, the part of me that is still properly human and has lost its sanity a long time ago has a feverish laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Then the part of me that can actually function in a world like this gets to calculating and plotting just as always.
Huh? That sounds like some 1984 logic right there. You deleted all evidence of the mistreatment after it happened, therefore it never happened?