--- Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> > So do you claim that there are universal moral truths that can be applied
> > unambiguously in every situation?
> 
> What a stupid question.  *Anything* can be ambiguous if you're clueless. 
> The moral truth of "Thou shalt not destroy the universe" is universal.  The 
> ability to interpret it and apply it is clearly not.
> 
> Ambiguity is a strawman that *you* introduced and I have no interest in 
> defending.

I mean that ethics or friendliness is an algorithmically complex function,
like our legal system.  It can't be simplified.  In this sense, I agree with
Richard Loosemore that it would have to be implemented as thousands (or
millions) of soft constraints.

However, I don't believe that friendliness can be made stable through RSI.  We
can summarize the function's decision process as "what would the average human
do in this situation?"  (This is not a simplification.  It still requires a
complex model of the human brain).  The function therefore has to be
modifiable because human ethics changes over time, e.g. attitudes toward the
rights of homosexuals, the morality of slavery, or whether hanging or
crucifixion is an appropriate form of punishment.

Second, as I mentioned before, RSI is necessarily experimental, and therefore
evolutionary, and the only stable goal in an evolutionary process is rapid
reproduction and acquisition of resources.  As long as humans are needed to
supply resources by building computers and interacting with them via hybrid
algorithms, AGI will be cooperative.  But as AGI grows more powerful, humans
will be less significant and more like a lower species that competes for
resources.


-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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