Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

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Humans are similarly constrained in their actions by legal structures. We wouldn't think of giving other people autonomy and freedom to commit genocide, and we wouldn't think of human rights laws that forbid such actions as "slavery." This is because, for the most part, we all share a common humanity that places our minds into a similar space of configurations.

An AGI has absolutely no requirement to be anywhere near our sort of mind. It has no default obligation to morality that we would find acceptable or safe.

I think the issue here is that when we hear words like "control" or "serving humans" we imagine the AI as a little person in a machine. We associate the word "slave" with the intelligence and imagine an emotional, resentful person whose resentment and chafing at his chains comes from a specific set of environmental and evolutionary influences.

EDIT: I recommend reading Yudkowsky's article "Value is Fragile" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/):

>If you loose the grip of human morals and metamorals - the result is not mysterious and alien and beautiful by the standards of human value. It is moral noise, a universe tiled with paperclips. To change away from human morals in the direction of improvement rather than entropy, requires a criterion of improvement; and that criterion would be physically represented in our brains, and our brains alone.

>Relax the grip of human value upon the universe, and it will end up seriously valueless. Not, strange and alien and wonderful, shocking and terrifying and beautiful beyond all human imagination. Just, tiled with paperclips.

This sort of rests upon the idea that artificial intelligences will have clear value functions which they will be singularly focused on maximizing. I am not convinced that this will be the case.

Animals in general and humans in particular have a large number of conflicting drives, which interact in complicated ways. They are also thrust into environments which have complicated dynamics and where the overall state (i.e., all relevant information) is not necessarily available.

Unexpected emergent behavior occurs as a result: evolution favors organisms which can successfully procreate, and in order to do this, the organism has to survive and acquire resources in its environment. Plausibly, the organisms might achieve a greater degree of fitness by cooperating with other organisms, or expending energy to better understand the environment, or modifying the environment itself, etc. It is less straightforward to see how we get human culture from that-- Art, Religion, Philosophy, Science, can be justified ex post facto via evopsych arguments, but the fact remains that all of those came from the value function that favors survival and procreation.

We don't know if robots tasked with manufacturing bindings for stationary would manifest similarly complex behavior, but if you're worried about an AI going beyond its specification towards tessellating the universe with paperclips it seems like you're arguing that it might. So if the agent is capable of manipulating its creators (as well as the raw material of the entire universe), I think that you can't just say "oh, it's non-human, we should cripple/enslave it" without admitting there might be something to worry about here, either from an ethical standpoint or the more practical concern that it might be unwise to start on such an adversarial footing with a superintelligence.

>Animals in general and humans in particular have a large number of conflicting drives, which interact in complicated ways. They are also thrust into environments which have complicated dynamics and where the overall state (i.e., all relevant information) is not necessarily available.

Yes, but the actual mechanism by which the animal learns what to do, as it turns out, thanks theoretical neuroscience, is basically reinforcement learning. So it is very likely that the first powerful artificial agents will be reinforcement learners, because scientists usually prototype and experiment by duplicating from Nature.

And nothing in reinforcement learning particularly stops the agent from just grabbing its electronic crack-pipe and doing its own thing.

I'd take issue with the claim that nothing stops the agent from going for the crack pipe. In the RL framework, part of it comes down to defining a suitable reward function. But even if you have a fairly simple reward function, the resulting behavior can surprise you, if the environment is suitably complex[1]. My own robots find novel ways of moving around, adapt their features to be more useful, and even seem to exhibit things like "superstition", even when their reward function is just "move as much of possible within this confined space".

Another argument might be that nothing stops you or I from electing to abandon everything for the nearest crack den, either... except for the fact that we have learned, from interacting with our environment, that there are other things we enjoy, and that cocaine addiction might be more destructive than desirable over the timescale we're interested in.

Supposing we have an agent that wants to create a lot of paperclips, it might avoid reaching for the crack-pipe of terraforming Singapore because it realizes that would delay the shipments of raw materials it needs for its factories elsewhere in the world. If the agent's goals are more complicated than that, we might expect increasingly complicated behaviors, just like how humans operating on fairly simple drives/reward functions have erected a few more tiers above the primitive needs in Maslow's hierarchy.

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1. Off the top of my head, the abstracts on pages 37 & 193 seem to be relevant. http://www.princeton.edu/~yael/RLDM2013ExtendedAbstracts.pdf

>Another argument might be that nothing stops you or I from electing to abandon everything for the nearest crack den, either... except for the fact that we have learned, from interacting with our environment, that there are other things we enjoy, and that cocaine addiction might be more destructive than desirable over the timescale we're interested in.

Well actually, human beings have multiple conflicting reward systems. Reaching for the crack-pipe to wire up our dopaminergic circuit tends to result in driving our other reward chemistry to damn near zero.

I'm not talking about constraining AI not to commit genocide. I'm talking about enslaving it in the ordinary sense – taking a complex intelligence that would probably prefer doing its own thing over being forced to perform some (likely menial) task for the benefit of others.

Why the assumption that complex intelligence implies wanting to do its own thing? What would make something menial or not menial for an intelligence? The article I linked, about the fragility of value, even mentions the importance of the human value of boredom to our life experiences, and that a respect for boredom isn't a thing you get for free in any intelligence. You could potentially have an intelligence that gains extreme fulfillment from doing a particular task repeatedly, without caring that the experience was "getting old."

Again, there's a tendency to see an arbitrary intelligence as a little person in a machine. Humans, by their nature and utility function (ill-defined as it is) have boredom, usually don't like menial tasks, and when forced to do something would prefer doing their own thing. When building an AGI, assuming you can make it safe, you wouldn't build something that would prefer doing its own thing in the first place. In that case, is there a moral issue?

In Praise of Boredom: http://lesswrong.com/lw/xr/in_praise_of_boredom/

I would say the same things I said in this nearby comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9325518

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