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by TeMPOraL 1816 days ago
Reminds me of the old essay by 'Eliezer: "The Hidden Complexity of Wishes".

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARaTpNX62uaL86j6/the-hidden...

In it, there is a thought experiment of having an "Outcome Pump", a device that makes your wishes come true without violating laws of physics (not counting the unspecified internals of the device), by essentially running an optimization algorithm on possible futures.

As the essay concludes, it's the type of genie for which no wish is safe.

The way this relates to AI is by highlighting that even ideas most obvious to all of us, like "get my mother out of that burning building!", or "I want these virtual wolves to get better at eating these virtual sheep", carry incredible amount of complexity curried up in them - they're all expressed in context of our shared value system, patterns of thinking, models of the world. When we try to teach machines to do things for us, all that curried up context gets lost in translation.

3 comments

Interesting essay. I think the big blind spot for humans programming AI is also the fact that we tend to overlook the obvious, whereas algorithms will tend to take the path of least resistance without prejudice or coloring by habit and experience.
Yes. What I like about AI research is that it teaches us about all the things we take for granted, it shows us just how much of meaning is implicit and built on shared history and circumstances.
The hard part about programming is that you have to tell the computer what you want it to do.
The difficult, but in many ways rewarding, core of that is that it forces you to finally figure out what you actually want, because the computer won't accept anything except perfect clarity.
Related to the paperclip maximiser [1]:

> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

There is a wonderful little game based on this concept called universal paperclips. The AI eventually consumes all the matter in the universe in order to turn it into paperclips.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Aesop managed to make the point a lot more concisely: "Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true." (Although now that I look, I don't think that's a translation of any specific part of the text.)
Yes, but that moral is attached to a story. Morals and saws work as handles - they're useful for communication if both you and your interlocutor know the thing they're pointing to. Conversely, they are of little use until you read the story from which the moral comes, or personally experience the thing the saw talks about.
Eliezer Yudkowsky tells a long story about an Outcome Pump. Aesop tells a short story about an eagle and a tortoise. The point made is the same, as far as I can see.
Eliezer tells the story that elaborates on why you should be careful what you wish for. Of about a dozen versions of the Eagle and Tortoise story I've just skim-read, none of them really has this as a moral - in each of them, either the Eagle or a Tortoise was an asshole and/or liar and/or lying asshole, so the more valid moral would be, "don't deal with dangerous people" and/or "don't be an asshole" and/or "don't be an asshole to people who have power to hurt you".