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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

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351–360 of 607 posts

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you're the first human on an island full of baby tigers? I think most AI alarmists would argue that this analogy is vastly more appropriate.

The idea here is that the person has to kill all the baby tigers, right? Because otherwise the end state is the same as the island full of adult tigers.

Um, no. You enslave the tigers and harvest their organs to achieve immortality.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#352
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are given a strong AI randomly selected from the space of all strong AIs Why would this ever apply? We're building them, not picking them out of a hat.

I think the current state of deep neural networking designs and research funding pouring into generalizing the simple neural nets we're working with now suggests that we are, in fact, pulling them out of a hat. Right now we're just discarding all the ones that are defective, at a stupendously high rate as we train neural nets. I can't speak to what method would generate the first strong AI, but I suspect the overall…

That's not how neural network training works. It's not magic or guesswork; it's essentially glorified curve fitting (over a much more complicated space than the polynomials). It's also not random in any respect. The space of all neural networks plausibly generated from a training set is very, very small compared to the space of all networks of that size.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#353

Intelligence, having been born as a biological defense mechanism, is evil. It is a weapon. For an intelligent individual, being (or, rather, appearing) "good", is just another layer of defense - this time against other, likewise intelligent, individuals. "An armed society is a polite society." Spying is a form of intelligent behavior. ("Intelligence.") So is stealing (and not getting caught, if possible). And, no dou…

Your skin is also a biological defense mechanism. Is it evil, too?

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding the point. If you want to accept "ad hominem" or stereotypes as a useful heuristic, you'll quickly hit things that will get you labeled as ${thing}ist. This is an utterly hypocritical part of our culture.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and am coming to the conclusion that it's similar to dead-weight loss in a taxation scenario. As a society we've accepted the "lower efficiency" and deadweight loss of rejecting {thing}ism because we don't want any one {thing} to get wrongly persecuted only on the basis of it being such a {thing}.

If you think of it that way, it's a rephrasing of the old and quite universally accepted "I would rather 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man go to prison."

"I would rather 100 deadbeat {class} get hired than one deserving {class} not be hired due to being a {class}."

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the problem is the fact there is 100 billionaires in he first place, no one gets rich on their own. Gates et al, are clever, but didn't get where they are totally independently without others support, so they should give back. Also, some of these billionaires are running companies that are great at tax avoidance, probably most of them. Now what? They get to pick and choose where they get to spend there/invest…

Countries that have no rich people are never prosperous. You can raise marginal income tax rates from, say, 60% to 70%, and maybe that's a good idea overall, but it doesn't get rid of billionaires. High-tax Sweden has as many billionaires per capita as the US does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedes_by_net_worth If you raise the marginal tax rate to 99%, then you get rid of billionaires, but you also kill y…

> High-tax Sweden has as many billionaires per capita as the US

The first thing they all did was move their incorporations out of Sweden

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#356
> the early 20th century attempt to formalize mathematics and put it on a strict logical foundation. That this program ended in disaster for mathematical logic is never mentioned.

Is he joking? Yes, it "failed", but in doing so created a wonderful revolution in mathematical thought, allowing exploring a rich area encompassing model theory, types, computability, algorithms, efficiency, and more.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#357
The comparison to alchemy kind of puts things on a many generations scale and one in which fundemtals were far from grasp. Maybe a better comparison would be to the Wright brothers first flight against the time that it took to land on the moon. 1903 to 1969.

I do agree with the point per not doing enough around the immediate impact of AI. The autonomous / electric vehicle transition alone is going rip apart the global economy; preparing for that transition could help midigate it's negative impact on certain populations.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, this article is hardly written completely with a straight face. It has a cheeky tone throughout. Which isn't to say it doesn't provide interesting points for the layman.

Of course, it does have a cheeky tone, though I think all of my points stand. The "interesting points for a layman" are actually a series of straw-man propaganda arguments. It does not argue in good faith and it should not be afforded the legitimacy of a thoughtful opposing position.

"straw-man propaganda" seems needlessly dismissive for arguments that, prima facie, don't seem completely outlandish.

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#359

"We’ve learned that at least one American plutocrat (almost certainly Elon Musk, who believes the odds are a billion to one against us living in "base reality") has hired a pair of coders to try to hack the simulation." -->source?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man...

Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

#360
post #326

While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that…

People are worried about AI risk because ensuring that the strong AI you build to do X will do X without doing something catastrophic to humanity instead is a very hard problem, and people who have not thought much about this problem tend to vastly underestimate how hard it is. Whatever goals the AI has, it will certainly be better at achieving them if it can stay alive. And it will be more likely to stay alive if th…

I am feeling like perhaps you didn't read the article? Many of these arguments are the exact lines of thinking that the author is trying to contextualize and add complexity to.

These are not bad arguments you are making, or hard ones to get behind. There are just added layers of complexity that the author would like us to think about. Things like how we could actually 'hard-code' a limit or a governor on certain types of motivation. Or what 'motivation' is even driven by at all.

I think you'll enjoy the originally linked article. It's got a lot to consider.

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