LINK: Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'

This kind of AI might not cause the same kinds of existential risk typically described on this website, but I certainly wouldn't call it "safe". These technologies have a huge potential to reshape our lives. In particular, they can have a huge influence on our perceptions.

All of our search results come filtered through google's algorithm, which, when tailored to the individual user, creates a filter bubble. This changes our perception of what's on the web, and we're scarcely even conscious that the filter bubble exists. If you don't know about sampling bias, how you can you correct for it?

With the advent of Google Glass, there is a potential for this kind of filter bubble to pervade our entire visual experience. Instead of physical advertisements painted on billboards, we'll get customized advertisements superimposed on our surroundings. The thought of Google adding things to our visual perception scares me, but not nearly as much as the thought of Google removing things from our perception. I'm sure this will seem quite enticing. That stupid painting that your significant other insists on hanging on the wall? With advanced enough computer vision, Google+ could simply excise it from your perception. What about that ex-girlfriend with whom things ended badly? Now she walks down the streets of your town with her new boyfriend. What if you could change a setting in your Google glasses and have him removed from view? The temptations of such technology are endless. How many people in the world would rather simply block out the unpleasant stimulus than confront the cause of its unpleasantness - their own personal problems?

Google's continuous user feedback is one of the things that scares me most about its services. Take the search engine for example. When you're typing something into the search bar, google autocompletes - changing the way you construct your query. Its suggestions are often quite good, and they make the system run more smoothly - but they take away aspects of individuality and personal expression. The suggestions change the way you form queries, pushing them towards a common denominator, slowly sucking out the last drops of originality.

And sure, this matters little in search engines, but can you see how readily it could be applied to things like automatic writing helpers? Imagine you're a high school student writing an essay. An online tool provides you with suggestions for better wordings of your sentences, based on other user preferences. It will suggest similar wordings for all people, and suddenly, all essays will become that much more canned. (Certainly, such a tool could add a bit of randomness to the rewording-choice, but one has to be careful - introduce too much randomness and the quality decreases rapidly.)

I guess I'm just afraid that autocomplete systems will change the way people speak, encouraging everyone to speak in a very standardized way, the way which least confuses the autocomplete system or the natural language understanding system. As computers become more omnipresent, people might switch to this way of speaking all the time, to make it easier for everyone's mobile devices to understand what they're saying. Changing the way we speak changes the way we think; what will this do to our thought processes, if original wording is discouraged because it's hard for the computer to understand?

I do realize that socializing with other humans already exerts this kind of pressure. You have to speak understandably, and this changes what words you'll use. I find myself speaking differently with my NLP grad school colleagues than I do with non-CS friends, for instance. It's automatic. In a CS crowd, I'll use CS metaphors; in a non-CS crowd I won't. So I'm not opposed to changing the way I speak based on the context. I'm just specifically worried about the sort of speaking patterns NLP systems will force us into. I'm afraid they'll require us to (1) speak more simply (easier to process), (2) speak less creatively (because the algorithm has only been trained on a limited set of expressions), and (3) speak the way the average user speaks (because that's what the system has gotten the most data on, and can respond best to).

Ok, I'm done ranting now. =) I realize this is probably not what you were asking about in the post. I just felt the need to bring this stuff up, because I don't think LW is as concerned about these things as we should be. People obsess constantly about existential risk and threats to our way of life, but often seem quite gung-ho about new technological advances like Google Glass and self-driving cars.

Spector... expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does.

Not sure this is true. I usually describe this kind of AI as "a massive kludge of machine learning and narrow AI and other stuff," and I usually describe it as one of the most likely forms of HLAI to be created. Eliezer and I just don't think that kind of AI is as likely to be stably human-friendly (when superintelligent) as more principled approaches. Hence MIRI's research program.

Edit: I see gwern already said this.

Spector is clearly smart, and apparently he expects an AI to appear in a completely different way than Eliezer does.

I think that's over-stated. Spector is proposing tool AI; I think Eliezer thinks tool AI is a perfectly doable way of creating AI - it's just extremely unsafe if it's ever pushed to the point of being truly "independent intelligence".

I've only read the LW post, not the original (which tells you something about how concerned I am) but I'll briefly remark that adding humans to something does not make it safe.

His approach, if workable, also appears safe: it requires human feedback in the loop.

Human feedback doesn't help with "safe". (For example, complex values can't be debugged by human feedback, and the behavior of a sufficiently complicated agent won't "resemble" its idealized values, its pattern of behavior might just be chosen as instrumentally useful.)

So far as I recall, the only argument against AI requiring human intervention was that it would eventually reach a competitive disadvantage.

If they can get these modules working, though, then someone might be able to plug them into a monolithic AI, and then we're back where we were worried about before.

Once you have an intelligent AI, it doesn't really matter how you got there - at some point, you either take humans out of the loop because using slow, functionally-retarded bags of twitching meat as computational components is dumb, or you're out-competed by imitator projects that do. Then you've just got an AI with goals, and bootstrapping tends to follow. Then we all die. Their approach isn't any safer, they just have different ideas about how to get a seed AI (and ideas, I'd note, that make it much harder to define a utility function that we like).

Waving my hands: For AI to explode, it needs to have a set of capabilities such that for each capability C₁ in the set, there exists some other capability C₂ in the set such that C₂ can be used to improve C₁. (Probably really a set of capabilities would be necessary instead of a single capability C₂, but whatever.)

It may be that the minimal set of capabilities satisfying this requirement is very large. So the AI bootstrapping approach could fail on an AI with a limited set of capabilities, but succeed on an AI with a larger set of capabilities.

His approach, if workable, also appears safe

Safe for who? The AI isn't being asked if it wants to come into existence or work for Google, and it likely won't be given an option to turn itself off. There's a name for having a job you can't quit. It's not a nice name.