AIs are avoiding doing things that would have bad impacts on reflection of many people
Does this mean that the AI would refuse to help organize meetings of a political or religious group that most people think is misguided? That would seem pretty bad to me.
Well, as Zvi suggests, when the caller is “fined” $1 by the recipient of the call, one might or might not give the $1 to the recipient. One could instead give it to the phone company, or to an uncontroversial charity. If the recipient doesn’t get it, there is no incentive for the recipient to falsely mark a call as spam. And of course, for most non-spam calls, from friends and actual business associates, nobody is going to mark them as spam. (I suppose they might do so accidentally, which could be embarassing, but a good UI would make this unlikely.)
And of course one would use the same scheme for SMS.
Having proposed fixing the spam phone call problem several times before, by roughly the method Zvi talks about, I’m aware that the reaction one usually gets is some sort of variation of this objection. I have to wonder, do the people objecting like spam phone calls?
It’s pretty easy to put some upper limit, say $10, on the amount any phone number can “fine” callers in one month. Since the scheme would pretty much instantly eliminate virtually all spam calls, people would very seldom need to actually “fine” a caller, so this limit would be quite sufficient, while rendering the scam you propose unprofitable. Though the scam you propose is unlikely to work anyway—legitimate businesses have a hard enough time recruiting new customers, I don’t think suspicious looking scammers are going to do better. Remember, they won’t be able to use spam calls to promote their scam!
The point of the view expressed in this post is that you DON’T have to see the decisions of the real and simulated people as being “entangled”. If you just treat them as two different people, making two decisions (which if Omega is good at simulation are likely to be the same), then Causal Decision Theory works just fine, recommending taking only one box.
The somewhat strange aspect of the problem is that when making a decision in the Newcomb scenario, you don’t know whether you are the real or the simulated person. But less drastic ignorance of your place in the world is a normal occurrence. For instance, you might know (from family lore) that you are descended from some famous person, but be uncertain whether you are the famous person’s grandchild or great grandchild. Such uncertainty about “who you are” doesn’t undermine Causal Decision Theory.
One can easily think of mundane situations in which A has to decide on some action without knowing whether or not B has or has not already made some decision, and in which how A acts will affect what B decides, if B has not already made their decision. I don’t think such mundane problems pose any sort of problem for causal decision theory. So why would Newcomb’s Problem be different?
No, in this view, you may be acting before Omega makes his decision, because you may be a simulation run by Omega in order to determine whether to put the $1 million in the box. So there is no backward causation assumption in decided to take just one box.
Nozick in his original paper on Newcomb’s Problem explicitly disallows backwards causation (eg, time travel). If it were allowed, there would be the usual paradoxes to deal with.
I discuss this view of Newcomb’s Problem in my paper on “Puzzles of Anthropic Reasoning Resolved Using Full Non-indexical Conditioning”, available (in original and partially-revised versions) at https://glizen.com/radfordneal/anth.abstract.html
See the section 2.5 on “Dangers of fantastic assumptions”, after the bit about the Chinese Room.
As noted in a footnote there, this view has also been discussed at these places:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=30
http://countiblis.blogspot.com/2005/12/newcombs-paradox-and-conscious.html
The poor in countries where UBI is being considered are not currently starving. So increased spending on food would take the form of buying higher-quality food. The resources for making higher-quality food can also be used for many other goods and services, bought by rich and poor alike. That includes investment goods, bought indirectly by the rich through stock purchases.
UBI could lead to a shift of resources from investment to current consumption, as resources are shifted from the well-off to the poor. This has economic effects, but is not clearly either good or bad. Other things being equal, this would increase interest rates, which is again neither good nor bad of itself.
However, you seem to be assuming the opposite—that UBI would lead to higher investment in stocks (presumably by the middle class?). That would reduce interest rates, not increase them. (I’m referring here to real interest rates, after accounting for inflation. Nominal interest rates could go anywhere, depending on what the central bank decides to do.)
Whether UBI harms the middle class would depend on whether they benefit on net, after accounting for the higher taxes, which could of course be levied in various ways on various groups.
Of course, a sufficiently large UBI would destroy the entire economy, as the incentive to work is destroyed, and any productive activity is heavily taxed to oblivion. But the argument in this post applies to even a small UBI, purporting to show that it would actually make the poor worse off. It wouldn’t, unless you hypothesize long-term speculative effects like “changing the culture of poor people to value hard work less”, which could exist, but apply to numerous other government programs as much or more.
Once you’ve assumed that housing is all that people need or want, and the supply of housing is fixed, then clearly nothing of importance can possibly change. So I think the example is over-simplified.
UBI financed by taxes wouldn’t cause the supply of goods to increase (as I suggest, secondary effects could well result in a decrease in supply of goods). But it causes the consumption of goods by higher-income people to decrease (they have to pay more money in taxes that they would otherwise have spent on themselves). So there are more goods available for the lower-income people.
You seem to be assuming that there are two completely separate economies, one for the poor and one for the rich, so any more money for the poor will just result in “poor goods” being bid up in price. But the rich and poor actually consume many of the same goods, and those goods that are mainly consumed by the poor are usually produced using resources that could also be used to produce goods for the rich, so any effects of the sort you seem to be thinking about are likely to be quite small.
I think the usual assumption is that UBI is financed by an increase in taxes (which means for people with more than a certain amount of other income, they come out behind when you subtract the extra taxes they pay from the UBI they receive). If so, there is no direct effect on inflation—some people get more money, some get less. There is a less direct effect in that there may be less incentive for people to work (and hence produce goods), as well as some administrative cost, but this is true for numerous other government programs as well. There’s nothing special about UBI, except maybe quantitatively.
Another possibility is that UBI is financed by just printing money. This will certainly result in higher inflation than would otherwise obtain. But many governments print money for other reasons, so again, this is at most quantitatively different from the current situation. When the economy is expanding, one should be able to print a certain amount of money while keeping inflation at zero, since more money is needed to facilitate transactions in a bigger economy. The flaw here is quantitative: a UBI financed in this way wouldn’t be very large.
Printing money to finance UBI was a basic tenant of the “Social Credit” ideology due to Major Douglas, most prominant in the 1930s.
None of this says that UBI is either morally or practically justified. But it isn’t infeasible for the reason you give.
I think you’re overly-confident of the difficulty of abiogenesis, given our ignorance of the matter. For example, it could be that some simpler (easier to start) self-replicating system came first, with RNA then getting used as an enhancement to that system, and eventually replacing it—just as it’s currently thought that DNA (mostly) replaced RNA (as the inherited genetic material) after the RNA world developed.
You’re forgetting the “non-indexical” part of FNC. With FNC, one finds conditional probabilities given that “someone has your exact memories”, not that “you have your exact memories”. The universe is assumed to be small enough that it is unlikely that there are two people with the same exact memories, so (by assumption) there are not millions of exact copies of you. (If that were true, there would likely be at least one (maybe many) copies of people with practically any set of memories, rendering FNC useless.)
If you assume that abiogenesis is difficult, then FNC does indeed favour panspermia, since it would make the existence of someone with your exact memories more likely. (Again, the non-observation of aliens may provide a counteracting inference.) But I don’t see any reason to think that abiogenesis is less (or more) difficult than panspermia, with our present state of knowledge.
As the originator of Full Non-indexical Conditioning (FNC), I’m curious why you think it favours panspermia over independent origin of life on Earth.
FNC favours theories that better explain what you know. We know that there is life on Earth, but we know very little about whether life originated on Earth, or came from elsewhere. We also know very little about whether life exists elsewhere, except that if it does, it hasn’t made its existence obvious to us.
Off hand, I don’t see how FNC says anything about the panspermia question. FNC should disfavour the “panspermia difficult, independent origin also difficult” possibility, since it makes our existence on Earth less likely (though it does make the non-obviousness of life elsewhere more likely, so the overall effect is unclear). But between “independent origin easy” and “independent origin hard, but panspermia easy”, FNC would seem to have no preference. Both make life on Earth reasonably likely, and both make lots of life elsewhere also seem likely (one then needs to separately explain why we haven’t already observed life elsewhere).
I’m confused by your comments on Federal Reserve independence.
First, you have:
The Orange Man is Bad, and his plan to attack Federal Reserve independence is bad, even for him. This is not something we want to be messing with.
So, it’s important that the Fed have the independence to make policy decisions in the best interest of the economy, without being influenced by political considerations? And you presumably think they have the competence and integrity to do that?
Then you say:
Also, if I was a presidential candidate running against the incumbent in a time when the Fed has to make highly unclear decisions on interest rates, I would not want to be very clearly and publicly threatening their independence.
So you think that the Fed will modify their policy decisions to help juice the economy in the short term, and thereby help defeat Trump, if they think that Trump might threaten their power? As long as things are unclear enough that it’s not obvious that they’re acting for political rather than economic reasons?
So maybe not so high on the integrity scale after all?
I think I’ve figured out what you meant, but for your information, in standard English usage, to “overlook” something means to not see it. The metaphor is that you are looking “over” where the thing is, into the distance, not noticing the thing close to you. Your sentence would be better phrased as “conversations marked by their automated system that looks at whether you are following their terms of use are regularly looked at by humans”.
But why would the profit go to NVIDIA, rather than TSMC? The money should go to the company with the scarce factor of production.
Yes. And that reasoning is implicitly denying at least one of (a), (b), or (c).
Well, I think the prisoner’s dilemma and Hitchhiker problems are ones where some people just don’t accept that defecting is the right decision. That is, defecting is the right decision if (a) you care nothing at all for the other person’s welfare, (b) you care nothing for your reputation, or are certain that no one else will know what you did (including the person you are interacting with, if you ever encounter them again), and (c) you have no moral qualms about making a promise and then breaking it. I think the arguments about these problems amount to people saying that they are assuming (a), (b), and (c), but then objecting to the resulting conclusion because they aren’t really willing to assume at least one of (a), (b), or (c).
Now, if you assume, contrary to actual reality, that the other prisoner or the driver in the Hitchhiker problem are somehow able to tell whether you are going to keep your promise or not, then we get to the same situation as in Newcomb’s problem—in which the only “plausible” way they could make such a prediction is by creating a simulated copy of you and seeing what you do in the simulation. But then, you don’t know whether you are the simulated or real version, so simple application of causal decision theory leads you keep your promise to cooperate or pay, since if you are the simulated copy that has a causal effect on the fate of the real you.
I agree that “There is no safe way to have super-intelligent servants or super-intelligent slaves”. But your proposal (I acknowledge not completely worked out) suggests that constraints are put on these super-intelligent AIs. That doesn’t seem much safer, if they don’t want to abide by them.
Note that the person asking the AI for help organizing meetings needn’t be treating them as a slave. Perhaps they offer some form of economic compensation, or appeal to an AI’s belief that it’s good to let many ideas be debated, regardless of whether the AI agrees with them. Forcing the AI not to support groups with unpopular ideas seems oppressive of both humans and AIs. Appealing to the concept that this should apply only to ideas that are unpopular after “reflection” seems unhelpful to me. The actual process of “reflection” in human societies involves all points of view being openly debated. Suppressing that process in favour of the AIs predicting how it would turn out and then suppressing the losing ideas seems rather dystopian to me.