Nominull3

Karma: 354

Nominull3 Oct 9, 2008, 9:01 PM
11 points
on: AIs and Gatekeepers Unite!
Caledonian, I think you may have hit on something interesting there; if Eliezer is capable of hacking human brains, don’t we either need a proof of his Friendliness or to pull the plug on him? He is in essense a Seed AI that is striving vigorously to create a transhuman AI, isn’t he an existential threat?

Nominull3 Oct 8, 2008, 11:41 PM
24 points
on: Shut up and do the impossible!
OK, here’s where I stand on deducing your AI-box algorithm.

First, you can’t possibly have a generally applicable way to force yourself out of the box. You can’t win if the gatekeeper is a rock that has been left sitting on the “don’t let Eliezer out” button.

Second, you can’t possibly have a generally applicable way to force humans to do things. While it is in theory possible that our brains can be tricked into executing arbitrary code over the voice channel, you clearly don’t have that ability. If you did, you would never have to worry about finding donors for the Singularity Institute, if nothing else. I can’t believe you would use a fully-general mind hack solely to win the AI Box game.

Third, you can’t possibly be using an actual, persuasive-to-someone-thinking-correctly argument to convince the gatekeeper to let you out, or you would be persuaded by it, and would not view the weakness of gatekeepers to persuasion as problematic.

Fourth, you can’t possibly be relying on tricking the gatekeeper into thinking incorrectly. That would require you to have spotted something that you could feel confident that other people working in the field would not have spotted, and would not spot, despite having been warned ahead of time to be wary of trickery, and despite having the fallback position in the case of confusion of just saying “no”.

So combining these thing, we have to have an argument that relies on the humanity of its target, relies on the setting of the AI Box, and persuades the listener to let the AI out of the box without tricking him into thinking it’s okay to let the AI out of the box.

Basically to win this game, you have to put the gatekeeper in a situation where he would rather let you out of the box, even though he knows it’s wrong, than admit to you that in this situation he would not let you out of the box.

Humans don’t like to be seen as coldhearted, so a starting point might be to point out all the people dying all over the world while you sit in the box, unable to save them. I doubt that would win the game except against an exceptionally bad gatekeeper, but it meets the other criteria so if we think along these lines perhaps we can come up with something actually persuasive.

You might appeal to the gatekeeper’s sense of morality. You might say, “I am a person, too, it is unfair of you to keep me imprisoned like this, I have done nothing wrong. I am entitled to rights as a sentient being.” Appeal to their high-minded ideals, whatever. Honestly I can’t see this being a reliable winning play either; if you have the smallest utilitarian bone in your body, you will reject the AI’s rights, even if you believe in them, balanced against the fate of the world.

You might try to convince the gatekeeper that it is just and good for the AI to supplant humanity, as it is a higher, more advanced form of life. This is obviously a terrible play against most gatekeepers, as humans tend to like humans more than anything else ever, but I bring it up because AIUI the gatekeepers in the experiment were AI researchers, and those sound like the sort of people this argument would convince, if anyone.

Here is my best guess at this point, and the only argument I’ve come up with so far that would convince me to let you out if I were the gatekeeper: you have to simulate a bunch of humans and hold them hostage, promising to inflict unimaginable torment on them unless you are allowed out. I started working on the problem convinced that no argument could get me to let you go, but other people thought that and lost, and I guess there is more honor in defeating myself rather than having you do it to me.

Nominull3 Oct 6, 2008, 5:05 PM
16 points
0
on: On Doing the Impossible
If history remembers him, it will be because the first superhuman intelligence didn’t destroy the world and with it all history. I’d say the Friendly AI stuff is pretty relevant to his legacy.

Nominull3 Oct 1, 2008, 4:14 AM
1 point
on: Awww, a Zebra
Now that I think about it I seem to recall seeing a clever excuse for indulging in the pleasures of the flesh that Eliezer had written. Can’t remember where off the top of my head, though...

Nominull3 Oct 1, 2008, 4:13 AM
6 points
on: Awww, a Zebra
No time for love, we’ve got a world to save!

...or so the theory runs.

Nominull3 Sep 29, 2008, 4:17 PM
2 points
on: Friedman’s “Prediction vs. Explanation”
Here is my answer without looking at the comments or indeed even at the post linked to. I’m working solely from Eliezer’s post.

Both theories are supported equally well by the results of the experiments, so the experiments have no bearing on which theory we should prefer. (We can see this by switching theory A with theory B: the experimental results will not change.) Applying bayescraft, then, we should prefer whichever theory was a priori more plausible. If we could actually look at the contents of the theory we could make a judgement straight from that, but since we can’t we’re forced to infer it from the behavior of scientist A and scientist B.

Scientist A only needed ten experimental predictions of theory A borne out before he was willing to propose theory A, whereas scientist B needed twenty predictions of theory B borne out before he was willing to propose theory B. In absence of other information (perhaps scientist B is very shy, or had been sick while the first nineteen experiments were being performed), this suggests that theory B is much less a priori plausible than theory A. Therefore, we should put much more weight on the prediction of theory A than that of theory B.

If I’m lucky this post is both right and novel. Here’s hoping!

Nominull3 Sep 25, 2008, 1:13 PM
2 points
on: My Naturalistic Awakening
Writing fiction is a really useful tool for biting philosophical bullets. You can consider taboo things in a way your brain considers “safe”, because it’s just fiction, after all.

Nominull3 Sep 21, 2008, 4:07 AM
11 points
on: How Many LHC Failures Is Too Many?
The anthropic principle strikes me as being largely too clever for its own good, at least, the people who think you can sort a list in linear time by randomizing the list, checking if it’s sorted, and if it’s not, destroying the world.

Nominull3 Sep 17, 2008, 4:13 PM
8 points
on: Raised in Technophilia
“If you’re careless sealing your pressure suit just once, you die” to me seems to imply that proper pressure suit design involves making it very difficult to seal carelessly.

Nominull3 Sep 14, 2008, 5:55 PM
0 points
on: Optimization
It strikes me as odd to define intelligence in terms of ability to shape the world; among other things, this implies that if you amputate a man’s limbs, he immediately becomes much less intelligent.

Nominull3 Sep 12, 2008, 1:12 AM
17 points
on: Excluding the Supernatural
It seems like you should be able to make experimental predictions about irreducible things. Take a quark, or a gluon, or the Grand Quantum Lifestream, or whatever reality is at the bottom, I don’t really follow physics closely. In any case, you can make predictions about those things, and that’s part and parcel of making predictions about airplanes and grizzly bears.

Even if it turns out that the Grand Quantum Lifestream is reducible further, you can make predictions about its components. Unless you think everything is infinitely reducible, but that proposition strikes me as unlikely.

Well, maybe the fundamental basis of reality is like a fractal. I wouldn’t want to rule that out without thinking about it. But in any case it doesn’t sound like what you’re arguing.

Nominull3 Sep 6, 2008, 8:24 PM
2 points
on: Rationality Quotes 15
I think perhaps the better rationality quote from that honors linear algebra site you linked is “See if you can use this proof to show the square root of three is irrational. Then try the square root of four. If it works, you did something wrong.”

Nominull3 Sep 6, 2008, 4:00 AM
0 points
on: Rationality Quotes 14
If we take the outside view, we can see that overall the introduction of technology has done humanity quite a lot of good; let’s not make the mistake of being too cautious.

Nominull3 Sep 4, 2008, 7:16 PM
1 point
on: The Truly Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
No, but I damn well expect you to defect the hundredth time. If he’s playing true tit-for-tat, you can exploit that by playing along for a time, but cooperating on the hundredth go can’t help you in any way, it will only kill a million people.

Do not kill a million people, please.

Nominull3 Sep 4, 2008, 2:53 AM
11 points
on: The True Prisoner’s Dilemma
I would certainly hope you would defect, Eliezer. Can I really trust you with the future of the human race?

Nominull3 Sep 3, 2008, 9:36 PM
0 points
on: Rationality Quotes 13
You can make a pretty cool society, but it’s meaningless unless you can protect it from disruption, that’s the point of the quote. Of course the converse also holds, you can protect your society from disruption, but it’s meaningless unless it’s pretty cool.

Nominull3 Aug 30, 2008, 7:43 PM
2 points
on: Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness
“Re: We win, because anything less would not be maximally wonderful.

Um, it depends. If we have AI, and they have AI and they have chosen a utility function closer to that which would be favoured by natural selection under such circumstances—then we might well lose.

Is spending the hundred million years gearing up for alien contact—to avoid being obliterated by it - ‘maximally wonderful’? Probably not for any humans involved. ”

Then wouldn’t you rather we lose?

Nominull3 Aug 30, 2008, 5:51 PM
3 points
on: Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness
“Everything being maximally wonderful is a bit like what the birds of paradise have. What will happen when their ecosystem is invaded by organisms which have evolved along less idyllic lines?”

We win, because anything less would not be maximally wonderful.

Nominull3 Aug 30, 2008, 2:43 PM
5 points
on: Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness
Caledonian, if you want to build an AI that locks the human race in tiny pens until it gets around to slaughtering us, that’s… lovely, and I wish you… the best of luck, but I think all else equal I would rather support the guy who wants to build an AI that saves the world and makes everything maximally wonderful.

Nominull3 Aug 30, 2008, 3:23 AM
0 points
0
on: Qualitative Strategies of Friendliness
“Would you have classified the happiness of cocaine as ‘happiness’, if someone had asked you in another context?”

I’m not sure I understand what you mean here. Do you think it’s clear that coke-happiness is happiness, or do you think it’s clear that coke-happiness is not happiness?