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by ben_w 238 days ago
Alignment researchers have heard all these things before.

> The control paradigm fails because it creates exactly what we fear—intelligent systems with every incentive to deceive and escape.

Everything does this, deception is one of many convergent instrumental goal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Stuff along the lines of "We're gambling civilization" and what you seem to mean by autopoietic autonomy is precicely why alignment researchers care in the first place.

> Engineer genuine mutualism where neither human nor AI can succeed without the other.

Nobody knows how to do that forever.

Right now is easy, but also right now they're still quite limited; there's no obvious reason why it should be impossible for them to learn new things from as few examples as we ourselves require, and the hardware is already faster than our biochemistry to a degree that a jogger is faster than continental drift. And they can go further, because life support for a computer is much easier than for us: Already are robots on Mars.

If and when AI gets to be sufficiently capable and sufficiently general, there's nothing humans could offer in any negotiation.

1 comments

Thanks a lot for your comment, these are indeed very strong counterarguments.

My strongest hope is that the human brain and mind are such powerful computing and reasoning substrates that a tight coupling of biological and synthetic "minds" will outcompete pure synthetic minds for quite a while. Giving us time to build a form of mutual dependency in which humans can keep offering a benefit in the long run. Be it just aesthetics and novelty after a while, like the human crews on the Culture spaceships in Ian M. Banks' novels.

> My strongest hope is that the human brain and mind are such powerful computing and reasoning substrates that a tight coupling of biological and synthetic "minds" will outcompete pure synthetic minds for quite a while.

Unfortunately most of the cases I can think of where synthetic "minds" outperform biological "minds," but biological and synthetic "minds" outcompete pure synthetic "minds," end up fairly quickly dominated by pure synthetic "minds." The middle case is a very short intermediate period. The most prominent example is chess where "centaurs" consisting of a human and a computer are obsolete at this point in favor of just getting the most powerful computer you can get. See e.g. the International Correspondence Chess Federation's (which is centaur play) last championship. https://www.iccf.com/event?id=100104

17 competitors competed. Out of 136 games, every single game was drawn except for 10. The only reason those 10 games were not drawn was because they were all played against one competitor, Aleksandr Dronov, who died during the course of the tournament while those 10 games were in session and therefore forfeited those games. Every single game between competitors who did not die resulted in a draw. The only thing that separated the 11 joint first-place finishers and 6 joint second-place finishers was whether they played the deceased Dronov. The sole third-place finisher was Dronov because of his death. As far as I can tell, humans contributed nothing to this championship.

The current ICCF championship started last December and is still ongoing. Every single one of the currently completed 16 games is currently drawn.

This seems like a very weak hope to rely on.