Eyringites,
Over on the ExI list, several people are promoting the
Singularity Institute’s new video:
http://www.digg.com/videos/educational/Singularity_Institute_for_Artificial_Intelligence
These guy’s dogged concern over unfriendly AI has always
been troubling to me so I’m going to propose creating the following topic in
the Canonizer to help clarify the issue, and hopefully enable some progress in
the various camps on this issue.
I would love to find out what all of you think on this
issue. If you have any ideas about how we
can improve what I have started below (perhaps if you are in another camp you
could propose some information and arguments to start that camp’s statement?)
I’d love to have your input! (And please
hurry, as I’d like to post a better version of this to the ExI list before this
topic fades again.)
Extropians,
I’m hesitating to digg the singularity institute's new
video, but perhaps this isn’t a good thing for me to do? The reason I am hesitating is because it has
always been troubling to me how much this community is concerned about
“Friendly AI”. It seems this is more or
less a “religious” or point of view issue with vastly different opinions on
many diverse sides. I’ve tried to bring
this issue up before, and I’ve seen others talk about it some, but it would
surely be useless to try to glean information from the log files on this issue
right?
I think it would be great if we could concisely and briefly
document the beliefs of each camp, the reasons for such, and also quantitatively
document just who, and how many, are in each camp. I have much respect for most of you, and know
many of you are way smarter than me in many areas. So it would really help me to be more sure of
my beliefs if I could precisely know just what the camps are, the arguments for
each, and who believes in them. This is
why I’m trying to build a POV Wiki like the Canonizer. I don’t want 50 different half baked testimonials
I have to search the group’s archives for, I want a concise encyclopedic easily
digestible specification of each of the camps and precise indication of who and
how many are in each camp.
So, towards that end, I’m going to throw out a beginning
draft of a specification of a topic on this issue. This will include a Wikipedia like agreement
statement that will contain facts and info we find we can all agree on. Anything we do not agree on must be moved to
sub POV statements describing the various “camps” on this issue. I’ve included a beginning statement which I
hope can evolve to concisely specify what I (and some of you?) believe.
For those of you that have a different POV, I would hope you
can also concisely describe what you believe, and why you believe it. Hopefully, if I am wrong, such a concise
specification, and ability to see just who believes such, will enable me to
finally “see the light” all the sooner right?
Could one of you that believe in the importance of concern
about “Friendly AI” throw out a beginning statement about what you believe to
get your camp started? And if anyone is
in my camp, I’d sure love to know who you are and have some help to better
argue this point. Then I can get this
data Wikied into the Canonizer. I’m
hoping with something like this we can start making some better progress on
such issues, rather than just rehashing the same old same old in half backed
ways in forums over and over again.
Toipc Name: Friendly AI Importance
Statement Name: Agreement
One Line: The
importance of Friendly Artificial Intelligence.
Many Transhumanists, and others, are concerned about the
possibility of an unfriendly AI arising too early in the near future resulting
in our “doom”. Some, such as those
involved in the Singularity Institute, are addressing their concern by actively
promoting their concerns, and working on research to ensure a “Friendly AI” is
created first.
Statement name: Such concern is mistaken
One Line: Concern
over unfriendly AI is a big mistake.
We believe morality, or on this topic, we will instead use
the term “friendliness”, to be congruent with intelligence. In other words, the more intelligent any
being is, the friendlier it will be. We
believe it is irrational to believe otherwise, for fundamental reasons like, if
you seek to destroy others, you will then be “lonely” which cannot be as good
as not being lonely and destructive. It
seems rationally impossible for any sufficiently “smart” entity to escape such
absolute “friendly” logic.
If this is true, having such concerns would be unnecessarily
damaging to movements pushing technological progress, as it will instill
unwarranted fear amongst the technology fearful and luddites who are prone to fear
things such as an “Unfriendly AI”.
Some of our parents attempted to instill very religious
beliefs and values into us. But when we
discovered how wrong some of these values were, we of course, with some amount
of effort, “reprogrammed” ourselves to be much better than that. We believe, even to think that you could some
how program into a self improving AI any kind of restricting “values” just
seems as absurd as the idea that parents might be able to “program” their
children, to never change the values taught to them in their youth, forever
more.
