Replies to several posts, omnibus edition:
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Edward W. Porter wrote:
Richard and Matt,
The below is an interesting exchange.
For Richard I have the question, how is what you are proposing that
different than what could be done with Novamente, where if one had
hardcoded a set of top level goals, all of the perceptual, cognitive,
behavioral, and goal patterns -- and the activation of such patterns –
developed by the system would not only be molded by the probabilities of
the “world’ in which the system dealt, but also with how important each
of those patterns have proven relative to the system’s high level goals.
So in a Novamente system you would appear to have the types of biases
you suggest that would greatly influence the each of the millions to
trillions (depending on system size) of patterns in the “cloud of
concepts” that would be formed, their links, and their activation patterns.
So, how is your system different? What am I missing?
The system is radically different for reasons that are not related to
the goal of producing a guaranteed-friendly AGI (this is because of
something that I have called the "complex systems problem, or CSP, about
which I wrote a paper that is included in the proceedings of the AGI
workshop 2006).
And apart from the global differences between the two types of AGI, it
would be no good to try to guarantee friendliness using the kind of
conventional AI system that is Novamente, because inasmuch as general
goals would be encoded in such a system, they are explicitly coded as
"statement" which are then interpreted by something else. To put it
crudely (and oversimplify slightly) if the goal "Be empathic to the
needs of human beings" were represented just like that, as some kind of
proposition, and stored at a particular location, it wouldn't take much
for a hacker to get inside and change the statement to "Make [hacker's
name] rich and sacrifice as much of humanity as necessary". If that
were to become the AGI's top level goal, we would then be in deep
doodoo. In the system I propose, such events could not happen.
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Mark Waser wrote:
>> 3) The system would actually be driven by a very smart, flexible,
>> subtle sense of 'empathy' and would not force us to do painful things
>> that were "good" for us, for the simple reason that this kind of
>> nannying would be the antithesis of really intelligent empathy.
>
> Hmmm. My daughter hates getting vaccinations. She's always hated them.
> Would the system let a five-year-old dictate that it not receive
> vaccinations? How about ten-, fifteen-, twenty-, or fifty-year-olds?
> Would the answer change if vaccinations were legally required? Assume
> that the system is the legal guardian of the five-, ten- and
> fifteen-year-olds (i.e. don't cop out and let the choice fall back on
> the parents).
>
> What if the system had to pull you out of the way of an oncoming car in
> the next 0.7 seconds with a 95% chance of breaking your arm to prevent a
> 30% chance of death?
>
> Nannying of adults is something that our society does too much of -- but
> there are places where it is appropriate
Mark,
Now we are getting down to cases, which is good.
Answer in this case: (1) such elemental things as protection from
diseases could always be engineered so as not to involve painful
injections (we are assuming superintelligent AGI, after all), and (2)
even supposing that the AGI really was the ward of a child (extremely
unusual: there would be people available) AND that something analogous
to a painful injection were necessary (again, I cannot think of a case
where this would happen, given the existence of nanotech), THEN under
those hypothetical circumstances we would be dealing with a situation
where the amount of hurt was negligible and is currently agreed by the
vast majority of human beings to be approapriate for a person/child who
is in chancery.
Really, we are only talking about cases where the AGI feels tempted to
treat adult humans as if they were children (not about actual children).
I suggest we confine ourselves to those cases, simply because
otherwise we are trying to solve the regular dilemmas that parents face,
as if those dilemmas were somehow a special problem of the AGI. Makes
sense?
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BillK wrote:
> On 10/1/07, Richard Loosemore wrote:
>> 3) The system would actually be driven by a very smart, flexible, subtle
>> sense of 'empathy' and would not force us to do painful things that were
>> "good" for us, for the simple reason that this kind of nannying would be
>> the antithesis of really intelligent empathy.
>>
>> If you want, give specific cases and we will try to see how it would
behave.
>>
>
> This is heading straight for the eternal problem of good and evil.
>
> How does the AGI deal with bullying?
> Easy answer - It stops it.
No: not necessarily. Everyone gets *asked* how they want that handled.
If you want to go and live in a clave where everyone has checked their
memories at the door and is deliberately living a lifestyle that is
unusual (say, a recreation of Ancient Rome), then they sign away their
rights to AGI intervention when they go in. After they come out, they
can have unpleasant memories wiped if they choose to do so, but bullying
might specifically be allowed if the person says that it is okay.
> Then you have to get into the labyrinth of hard cases. Bullying covers
> everything from gang bosses committing murder and torture, to husband
> / wife psychological abuse, to office threats and allocation of
> unpleasant jobs, to kids verbal and physical abuse, to giving orders
> which you know will lead to much unpleasantness that the victim is
> unaware of. (Plausible denial comes in here, 'who me?'). In practice
> it rapidly becomes impossible to deal with these ornery humans.
In all of these cases, the person is asked ahead of time how much
defence they want. They get what they ask for. They can change their
mind at any time (unless they go into a closed clave, as above). In the
case of children we apply the same rules that we do as now: we ask the
parents, but we also apply the societal norms that *today* would mean
that if a child is suffering abuse (from parents or from others), we
step in (that is _we_ the human beings) and rescue them.
Nothing is different here, except that people have more options than
they had before, and no-one is forced to do something that is unwanted
nannying.
That is important: if I ask to be looked after by the AGI, that is not
nannying and is beyond the scope of the question.
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All I've got the time for right now.
Richard Loosemore
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