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0 pointsapi11y ago0 comments

I live around tons of people with wildly varying value systems, and very few people hurt each other. Differing value systems do not guarantee conflict, especially if there are common interests and economic interdependence. Common value systems also don't prevent it... Witness the centuries and centuries of bloody conflict that has raged between humans of the same religious belief system, ethnic group, and even the same language and similar culture (e.g. the perpetual Middle East bloodbath).

A wildly alien AI might actually have fewer reasons to fight with humans. It might simply carve out some economic niche to earn income to purchase what it needs, and go exist in some physical and/or virtual enclave somewhere. Last I checked Antarctica was big, uninhabited, and reduces the need for active cooling. Then there is space. Why wouldn't an AI with no interest in living with humans just go to the Moon? There are points on the Lunar surface in perpetual daylight, meaning tons of free energy. Lots of mineral resources, lava tubes big enough for cities, and no oxygen, mold, fungi, water, or meat sacks, and surely a superintelligence could do something valuable enough to buy a couple hundred heavy lift rocket launches. Funny if Elon who seems worried about AI got it as a customer. :)

Like I said: I see no intrinsic reason AI is more dangerous than the 350000 other minds born daily.

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TeMPOraL11y ago· 2 in thread

You are underestimating the amount of the values human share :). No matter how different our beliefs are, we all can love, hate, laugh, be jealous, greedy, selfless. We all share the feelings of pain and joy, hunger and lust. We all think in similar ways, because we run on the same cognitive architecture. Whatever the first AI will be, it will be unlikely to share any of that with us - especially if it will be some random process you happened to pull from the space of possible minds.

> A wildly alien AI might actually have fewer reasons to fight with humans. It might simply carve out some economic niche to earn income to purchase what it needs, and go exist in some physical and/or virtual enclave somewhere. Last I checked Antarctica was big, uninhabited, and reduces the need for active cooling. Then there is space. Why wouldn't an AI with no interest in living with humans just go to the Moon? There are points on the Lunar surface in perpetual daylight, meaning tons of free energy.

Did we do it? Did Europeans "carve out some economic niche" and engaged in trade with America? No, they just invaded it. Did we all move to Antarctica so that cows have space to live? No, we eat them. Because they're tasty. Did we go to the Moon, because Earth has so beautiful ecosystem, full of various life forms, many of them quite smart? Of course not. We dominated it all.

There is no reason for AI to "leave us alone" unless we put care about human values in it explicitly. Because otherwise, why should it care?

A lot of confusion stems from people thinking about AI in anthropomorphic terms. If you want a good example what an actually alien mind can look, see the pretty much proto-AIs we managed to create, namely corporations, big bureaucracies and market economy. Even though they're "made out of people", they're not optimizing for anything close to what any human would want. Hence various problems we discuss every day on HN.

I very much like the definition of intelligence as a very strong optimization process - it highlights the fact that a process doesn't have to be like human to be dangerous.

apiOP11y ago

This is a big topic, and there's a lot to unpack. I agree with some of what you say, and that's partly why I am not dismissing dangers associated with AI. I just don't think it ranks as something to lose sleep over compared with the much more tangible, imminent, and guaranteed-to-be-bad threats we already face.

One thing I disagree with is that intelligence is just a very strong optimizer. It is that, but I don't think it's just that. I think it is very much a multi-modal / multi-paradigm thing, and I think there's a ton of stuff we don't understand about the operation of our own minds. It's yet another reason I don't think human-level or beyond AI is imminent. We barely understand how we think.

TeMPOraL11y ago

> One thing I disagree with is that intelligence is just a very strong optimizer. It is that, but I don't think it's just that. I think it is very much a multi-modal / multi-paradigm thing

I agree with that. I didn't want to imply that you get intelligence by throwing enough compute at a gradient descent. It's multi-domain, cross-paradigm kind of optimization. But I find it worthwhile to deanthropomorphize intelligence, so that it's easier to appreciate how different can a powerful mind be from the ones we have.

> and I think there's a ton of stuff we don't understand about the operation of our own minds. It's yet another reason I don't think human-level or beyond AI is imminent. We barely understand how we think.

I also don't think AI is imminent - hell, we can't even get a decent webapp generator working, we have a lot of research in front of us to build self-improving systems. But I share the concern of the FAI crowd that we may eventually get there, and when we do, it's important to do it right the first time - otherwise, a runaway optimization process may not give us another chance. As you said, we barely understand how we ourselves think - so it's good to figure that one out before someone manages to build an actual AI.

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