Hi all!
Over 50 people have subscribed to this new list since its creation a
couple days ago, which is pretty exciting. This seems like a large
enough crew that it's worth launching a discussion.
There are a lot of things I'd like to talk with y'all about on this
list -- in fact, I'd planned to start things off with a discussion of
the possible relevance of quantum theory and John Wheeler's notion of
"It from Bit" to the Singularity. But now I've decided to save that
for just a little later, because my friend Shane Legg posted an
interesting and controversial blog entry
http://www.vetta.org
entitled "Friendly AI is Bunk" which seems to me worthy of discussion.
Shane wrote it after a conversation we (together with my wife
Izabela) had in Genova last week. (As a bit of background, Shane is
no AGI slacker: he is currently a PhD student of Marcus Hutter working
on the theory of near-infinitely-powerful AGI, and in past he worked
with me on the Webmind AI project in the late 1990's, and with Peter
Voss on the A2I2 project.)
Not to be left out, I also wrote down some of my own thoughts
following our interesting chat in that Genova cafe' (which of course
followed up a long series of email chats on similar themes), which you
may find here:
http://www.goertzel.org/papers/LimitationsOnFriendliness.pdf
and which is also linked from (and briefly discussed in, along with a
bunch of other rambling) this recent blog entry of mine:
http://www.goertzel.org/blog/blog.htm
My own take in the above PDF is not as entertainingly written as
Shane's (a bit more technical) nor quite as extreme, but we have the
same basic idea, I think. The main difference between our
perspectives is that, while I agree with Shane that achieving
"Friendly AI" (in the sense of AI that is somehow guaranteed to remain
benevolent to humans even as the world and it evolve and grow) is an
infeasible idea ... I still suspect it may be possible to create AGI's
that are very likely to maintain other, more abstract sorts of
desirable properties (compassion, anyone?) as they evolve and grow.
This latter notion is extremely interesting to me and I wish I had
time to focus on developing it further ... I'm sure though that I will
take that time, in time ;-)
Thoughtful comments on Shane's or my yakking, linked above, will be
much appreciated and enjoyed.... (All points of view will be accepted
openly, of course: although I am hosting this new list, my goal is not
to have a list of discussions mirroring my own view, but rather to
have a list I can learn something from.)
Yours,
Ben Goertzel
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