[staunch]

The real goal should be making a super AI that is worthy of being humanity's collective offspring. The bias in favor of our bags-of-mostly-water is provincial. All we really need is quality genetic engineering of our super AI baby, so we don't end up with a Frankenstein monster.

Humanity's procreation of a superior intelligence is objectively a good thing. Humans do not sit on any plateau of goodness or intelligence. Like all lifeforms, our goal should be to hand our future to better and better offspring.

As long as this super intelligence leads to super ethics and super consciousness, it should be humanity's greatest accomplishment to be replaced by our God-like procreation.

[jerf]

"As long as this super intelligence leads to super ethics and super consciousness"

That is begging the question, in the original sense. The entire question here is how do we do that when there is no a priori reason to assume that a superintelligence will have either of those things, and indeed, most if not all of our best techniques today would certainly not produce those things if they did lead to explosive intelligence.

[staunch]

1. Is super goodness an inevitable result of super intelligence?

2. Is super intelligence an inevitable result of creating self-evolving software?

My feeling is that the answer is yes to both, but I agree that these are not settled questions.

[eli_gottlieb]

>1. Is super goodness an inevitable result of super intelligence?

No. Evidence: $PERSON_YOU_HATE is very intelligent. Human moral instincts/reasoning may be neuroscientifically simple, having some core mechanism that "unfolds" across sensorimotor datasets. This is very plausible, because we can already see core sensorimotor systems that include interoception, and a core affective system to move the sensorimotor systems along trajectories designated valuable by the interoceptive circuits. These are core mechanisms that operate across hugely hierarchical models that capture datasets across multiple scales of space, time, and variation.

However, none of that is any reason to think our particular combination of affective, interoceptive, and sensorimotor machinery - especially our brain's "bias" towards "mirroring" and other hyper-social reasoning - will be universal to all possible brains.

This especially applies to disembodied "brains" like "artificial intelligences", which, not having a bag of meat to move around, won't have the same kind of reward and interoceptive processing as us at all. This means they won't have anything remotely like our emotional makeup, which means that even with careful reinforcement training of social reasoning, they will not have humanoid motivations, by default.

[staunch]

> Evidence: $PERSON_YOU_HATE is very intelligent.

In every case I can think of, I think the person's lack of intelligence is the reason I dislike them. That they do not understand my ethical problem with them is the problem. Or their calculus is off, which also seems to be a lack of intelligence from my POV.

> ...they will not have humanoid motivations...

That's probably a good thing. We should want them to be better than us, which is probably necessarily unlike us in many ways. The important thing is that they're ethical, even if we're incapable of comprehending or recognizing it.

[eli_gottlieb]

>The important thing is that they're ethical

And, non-tautologically, where do you think the ethical knowledge and motivation come from?

[jerf]

The problem is that all the evidence we have basically points to no for 1, and we have a big lack of evidence for 2. Self-evolving software is a thing that exists and I studied over a decade ago, which was already decades old, and it has not resulted in super intelligence.

[staunch]

What kind of evidence is there against #1?

For #2, we're at the very beginning of computing, so calling any technology impossible this early makes no sense.

[jerf]

"What kind of evidence is there against #1?"

All intelligence produced to date has had nothing like "morality" from anything I've seen, not even the basic seeds of it we can see in simple animals in the wild. There's even been some hand-wringing articles about it about AI-based approaches locking minorities out of loans and such, for instance. Certainly the military has not reported any problems to date with their AI research declining to kill people because they have moral problems with it, nor have any of the self-driving car teams reported that their job has been eased by the fact that the self-driving car AIs have spontaneously generated a sense of morality that makes them strive to not hit people.

Heck, the very idea that this would happen sounds downright silly when I say it.

I still say you're basically arguing from incredulity. You can't imagine an intelligence that isn't intrinsically human, therefore they can not exist. Plenty of the rest of us can imagine intelligences that aren't human. I say there's even some we live with, such as bureaucracies, that are super-intelligences composed of humans that still manage to have inhuman behaviors and pathologies; how much moreso an intelligence composed not of humans.

[staunch]

Chimps hunt down and kill monkeys for food. It's really hard for humans to watch but no chimp would ever even consider the ethics of this, even though they do have a level of ethics (e.g. fairness among themselves)

We're more intelligent than chimps, so we understand that monkeys are pretty evolved and suffer a lot when you eat them alive. Chimps aren't kept up at night by the screams of their victims.

A healthy human that tortures other intelligent lifeforms will often suffer severe mental anguish as a result. Only a human with a severe mental disorder can torture other lifeforms without remorse.

So what does that tell us about intelligence? That an intelligent understanding of a monkey's suffering leads to more ethical behavior.

But humans aren't that intelligent. We still let other people do unethical things on our behalf, like raising animals in terrible conditions for meat. The more intelligent (and knowledgeable) a human being, the more likely they are to have a problem with the suffering of factory farmed animals.

[Zaak]

Have you heard the paperclip maximizer thought experiment? Here is a good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4

[staunch]

This is the risk that a narrow intelligent machine will go nuts. A super intelligence would know not to do stupid stuff, by definition.

[Zaak]

The problem isn't about doing stupid stuff. The problem is about doing very smart stuff when your core values massively conflict with humanity's continued existence.

[laretluval]

> Like all lifeforms, our goal should be to hand our future to better and better offspring.

How did you determine the moral purpose of all life? I say our goal should be to hand our future off to our own biological offspring, the members of our species, as evolution has optimized us to do. What makes your proposed purpose more correct than mine?

[staunch]

It is (kind of) our biological offspring, we'll just create it using our brain fluids instead of our reproductive fluids ;-)

Your limited primate brain is the reason you want primate offspring. This bias is in our DNA and part of our evolution. It's a limitation that your super AI offspring would not have.

[laretluval]

Maybe our primate brains are primitive, or maybe they are infected with a kind of disease that will result in the eradication of our species. Certainly if we observed self-extinctive behavior in the wild, we would classify it as a behavioral anomaly and perhaps even try to fix it, like we do with the pandas who refuse to reproduce.

But more generally, of the two ways of seeing it, who's to say which is right? When we disagree, to what can you appeal?

My point is, these moral questions are completely arbitrary. There is no grand cosmic objective function for life that is objectively true. Using these quasi-religious arguments about the "purpose of life" to guide AI safety research seems extremely irresponsible.

[goatlover]

But why the preference for super AI and not super cockroaches? I'm thinking our primate DNA biases us toward intelligence over insectile qualities.

Personally, I think super octopuses are the way to go. They can make better use of both land and sea, and all the cool aliens look like that.

[Houshalter]

>As long as this super intelligence leads to super ethics and super consciousness

It doesn't. Humans happen to have "morality" because we evolved in groups. Groups of humans that cooperated and cared for each other better reproduced more. And so we evolved empathy.

But this is an entirely arbitrary feature. There's no law of the universe that says you must be moral. There's no reason an AI would have anything like our sense of empathy or caring for other beings.

AI works by predicting what actions are the most likely to lead to a goal. Better AIs are better at finding paths to a goal. But the goal itself is always arbitrary. If you made an AI to run a paperclip factory, it would eventually convert the entire mass of the Earth into paperclips.

As far as "consciousness", it's likely something similar is true of that. The experience of consciousness is an artifact of how our specific brain structures work. Is it really the most efficient algorithm for intelligence? I doubt it. It's quite possible we could get replaced by an AI that builds and accomplishes great things - and there will be no conscious being left in the universe to appreciate it. A Disneyland with no childern, as Bostrom calls it.

[FeepingCreature]

That's a very very uncertain "as long."

[staunch]

It's a bet that a super intelligent brain will be far more capable than a primate brain.

Edit: In other words, how could it fail to grasp and obtain our very basic level of consciousness?

[jerf]

"Edit: In other words, how could it fail to grasp and obtain our very basic level of consciousness?"

"Argument from incredulity", among its many other flaws, has never in human history been a good guide to the future. Many, many things that people would find non-credible (since "incredible" has sort of wandered in meaning in the last century) have even so come to pass. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

[staunch]

It's phrased funnily, but it's not just an argument from incredulity.

I'm making a claim: that an entity with orders of magnitude more intelligence and knowledge would logically have a superset of our brain's functionality.

And that there's nothing magical about our brains. A super intelligence would crack the nut of human consciousness in its first attempt.

[jerf]

By what mechanism do you assume that an understanding of human consciousness is going to lead to anything like ethical behavior, given the enormous counterexamples given by our own behavior? Plenty of humans kill other humans fully aware that they are humans.

[staunch]

I assume that an understanding will lead to a capability, because that's the history of humanity's progress. First we understand a phenomenon, then we master it.

If humans ourselves understood human consciousness, we could probably replicate it in software today. This might end up being one of the ways a super intelligence comes into being.

[GCU-Empiricist]

I recommend you read this novel "Blindsight" it's about aliens, but the author is a biologist with a focus on neurology and the bibliography reads like a PhD thesis.

TLDR: consciousness might be training wheels for intelligence and not of terminal value.

[zardo]

Intelligence and ethical behavior are orthogonal. You can expect a super-intelligence to develop a super-understanding of ethics. That does not imply ethical behavior.

[staunch]

Why do you think they're orthogonal though? Empirically, it seems like smarter humans are more ethical. Same seems true of high intelligence vs low intelligence animals too.

[zardo]

Orthogonal is exaggerating, I'll agree that the angle may not be exactly 90 degrees, but it's nearer that than 0.

>Empirically, it seems like smarter humans are more ethical. "Seems" deserves some emphasis. Who is more likely to wind up in handcuffs, a smart thief, or a dumb one?

>Same seems true of high intelligence vs low intelligence animals too.

It's not exactly clear what constitutes ethics in animals. Applying typical human ethics; Chimpanzees have murdered their social rivals, and dolphins sometimes enjoy tormenting other animals.

[goatlover]

What makes you think smarter humans are more ethical? It certainly not always the case. There are smart sociopaths and criminals. Smart people made a world with thousands of nukes in it.

[mannykannot]

That would be for you to demonstrate, but even if we accept it to be true for the sake of a discussion, it is not relevant, because there is no reason to believe a non-human intelligence would choose to accept those ethical percepts that humans would prefer.

[staunch]

Unless humanity's level of ethics derive from our level of intelligence. In which case, our only complain would be that we're too stupid to understand its superior ethics.

The same way a dog might not understand the ethics of a doctor injecting life-saving medicine into it. The doctor is acting super ethically but cannot explain it to the dog.

[mannykannot]

Being 'capable' is not the issue here.

[glup]

I'm pretty sure I have a different objective function in mind here: unlike preceding lifeforms, our goal should be to hand a better and better future to each other (& offspring).

[goatlover]

Since I'm a bag-of-mostly-water, I disagree with your goal of handing the future off to something non-human, and I disagree that it's objectively a good thing.