Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It)

I tend to think differently on this one.

Wherever I turn my head around in this world, I see lost causes everywhere. I see Goodhart's law and Campbell's law at loose everywhere. I see insane optimizers everywhere. Political parties that concentrate more on show, pomp and campaign funds than on actual issues. Corporates that seek money to the exclusion of actual creation of value. Governments that seek employment and GDP growth even when those are supported by artificial stimuli and not sustainable patterns of production and trade.

One might argue that none of these systems are actually as intelligent as a well educated human at any given moment in time. But that's the point, isn't it? You're unable to stop sub-human optimizers, how are you going to curb a near human or a super human one?

For me, the scary idea is not so much of an idea as it is an extension of something that is already happening in this world.

I really liked this comment by FrankAdamek:

With regards to teaching an AI to care: what you can teach a mind depends on the mind. The best examples come from human beings: for hundreds of years many (though not all) parents have taught their children that it is wrong to have sex before marriage, a precept that many people break even when they think they shouldn't and feel bad about it . And that's with our built in desires for social acceptance and hardware for propositional morality. For another example, you can't train tigers to care about their handlers. No matter how much time you spend with them and care for them, they sometimes bite off arms just because they are hungry. I understand most big cats are like this.

It's quite true that nobody plans to build a system with no concern for human life, but it's also true that many people assume Friendliness is easy.

A particularly troubling quote from the post:

I think the relation between breadth of intelligence and depth of empathy is a subtle issue which none of us fully understands (yet). It's possible that with sufficient real-world intelligence tends to come a sense of connectedness with the universe that militates against squashing other sentiences. But I'm not terribly certain of this, any more than I'm terribly certain of its opposite.

The obvious truth is that mind-design space contains every combination of intelligence and empathy.

One thing that I think is relevant, in the discussion of existential risk, is Martin Weitzmann's "Dismal Theorem" and Jim Manzi's analysis of it. (Link to the article, link to the paper.)

There, the topic is not unfriendly AI, but climate change. Regardless of what you think of the topic, it has attracted more attention than AGI, and people writing about existential risk are often using climate change as an example.

Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist, deals with the probability of extreme disasters, and whether it's worth it in cost-benefit terms to deal with them. Our problem, in cases of extreme uncertainty, is that we don't only have probability distributions, we have uncertain probability distributions; it's possible we got the models wrong. Weitzman's paper takes this into account. He creates a family of probability distributions, indexed over a certain parameter, and integrates over it -- and he proves that the process of taking "probability distributions of probability distributions" has the result of making the final distribution fat-tailed. So fat-tailed that the integral doesn't converge.

This is a terrible consequence. Because if the PDF of the cost of the risk doesn't converge, then we cannot define an expected cost. We can't do cost-benefit analysis at all. Weitzman's conclusion is that the right amount to spend mitigating risk is "more than we're doing."

Manzi criticizes this approach as just an elaborately stated version of the precautionary principle. If it's conceivable that your models are wrong and things are even riskier than you imagined, it doesn't follow that you should spend more to mitigate the risk; the reductio is that if you knew nothing at all, you should spend all your money mitigating the most unknown possible risk!

This is relevant to people talking about AGI. We're not considering spending a lot of money to mitigate this particular risk, but we are considering forgoing a lot of money -- the value of a possible useful AI. And it may be tempting to propose a shortcut, a la Marty Weitzman, claiming that the very uncertainty of the risk is an argument for being more aggressive in mitigating it. The problem is that this leads to absurd conclusions. You could think up anything -- murderous aliens! Killer vacuum cleaners! and claim that because we don't know how likely they are, and because the outcome would be world-endingly terrible, we should be spending all our time trying to mitigate the risk!

Uncertainty about an existential risk is not an argument in favor of spending more on it. There are arguments in favor of spending more on an existential risk -- they're the old-fashioned, cost-benefit ones. (For example, I think there's a strong case, in old-fashioned cost-benefit terms, for asteroid collision prevention.) But if you can't justify spending on cost-benefit grounds, you can't try a Hail Mary and say "You should spend even more -- because we could be wrong!"

There is a large, continuous spectrum between making an AI and hoping it works out okay, and waiting for a formal proof of friendliness. Now, I don't think a complete proof is feasible; we've never managed a formal proof for anything close to that level of complexity, and the proof would be as likely to contain bugs as the program would. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't push in that direction. Current practice in AI research seems to be to publish everything and take no safety precautions whatsoever, and that is definitely not good.

Suppose an AGI is created, initially not very smart but capable of rapid improvement, either with further development by humans or by giving it computing resources and letting it self-improve.Suppose, further, that its creators publish the source code, or allow it to be leaked or stolen.

AI improvement will probably proceed in a series of steps: the AI designs a successor, spends some time inspecting it to make sure the successor has the same values, then hands over control, then repeat. At each stage, the same tradeoff between speed and safety applies: more time spent verifying the successor means a lower probability of error, but a higher probability that other bad things will happen in the mean time.

And here's where there's a real problem. If there's only one AI improving itself, then it can proceed slowly, knowing that the probability of an asteroid strike, nuclear war or other existential risk is reasonably low. But if there are several AIs doing this at once, then whichever one proceeds least cautiously wins. That situation creates a higher risk of paperclippers, as compared to if there were only one AI developed in secret.

When he was paraphrasing the reasons:

Human value is fragile as well as complex, so if you create an AGI with a roughly-human-like value system, then this may not be good enough, and it is likely to rapidly diverge into something with little or no respect for human values

... that doesn't seem quite right. The main problem with values being fragile isn't that a "roughly-human-like value system" might diverge rapidly; it's that properly implementing a "roughly-human-like value system" is actually quite hard and most AGI programmer seem to underestimate it's complexity, and go for "hacky" solutions, which I find somewhat scary.

Ben seems aware of this, and later goes on to say:

This is related to the point Eliezer Yudkowsky makes that "value is complex" -- actually, human value is not only complex, it's nebulous and fuzzy and ever-shifting, and humans largely grok it by implicit procedural, empathic and episodic knowledge rather than explicit declarative or linguistic knowledge.

... which seems to be one of the reasons to pay extra attention to it (and this also seems to be a reason given by Eliezer, whereas Ben almost presents it as a counterpoint to Eliezer).

For me, the oddest thing about Goertzels' article is his claim that SIAI's arguments are so unclear that he had to construct it himself. The way he describes the argument is completely congruent with what I've been reading here.

In any case, his argument that it may not be possible to have provable Friendliness and it makes more sense to take an incremental approach to AGI than to not do AGI until Friendliness is proven seems reasonable.

Has it been demonstrated that Friendliness is provable?

Much is unclear. I believe this post is a good oppurtunity to give a roundup of the problem, for anyone who hasn't read the comments thread here:

The risk from recursive self-improvement is either dramatic enough to outweigh the low probability of the event or likely enough to outweight the probability of other existential risks. This is the idea everything revolves around in this community (it's not obvious, but I believe so). It is a idea that, if true, possible affects everyone and our collective future, if not the whole universe.

I believe that someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky and the SIAI should be able to state in a concise way (with possible extensive references) why it is rational to make friendly AI a top priority. Given that friendly AI seems to be what his life revolves around the absence of material in support for the proposition of risks posed by uFAI seems to be alarming. And I'm not talking about the absence of apocalyptic scenarios here but other kinds of evidence than a few years worth of disjunctive lines of reasoning. The bulk of all writings on LW and by the SIAI are about rationality, not risks posed by recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence.

• Where are the formulas? What are the variables? Where is a method exemplified to reflect the decision process of someone who's already convinced, preferably of someone within the SIAI? That would be part of what I call transparency and a foundational and reproducible corroboration of one's first principles.
• Where are the reference to substantial third-party research papers? There are many open problems regarding artificial general intelligence, how exactly does the SIAI handle those uncertainties and accounts for them in their probability estimations of the dangers posed by AI?
• Where does the SIAI outline the likelihood of slow versus fast development of AGI? Where are your probability estimations that account for these uncertainties. Where are your variables and references that allow you to make any kind of estimations to balance the risks of a hard rapture with a somewhat controllable development?
• What are the foundations that give credibility to the chain of reasoning that leads one to accept unfriendly superhuman intelligence going foom as a serious risk?
• Where is the supportive evidence at the origin of your complex multi-step extrapolations argued to be from inductive generalizations?

What if someone came along making coherent arguments about some existential risk about how some sort of particle collider might destroy the universe? I would ask what the experts think who are not associated with the person who makes the claims. What would you think if he simply said, "do you have better data than me"? Or, "I have a bunch of good arguments"? If you say that some sort of particle collider is going to destroy the world with a probability of 75% if run, I'll ask you for how you came up with these estimations. I'll ask you to provide more than a consistent internal logic but some evidence-based prior.

The current state of evidence IS NOT sufficient to scare people up to the point of having nightmares and ask them for most of their money. It is not sufficient to leave comments making holocaust comparisons on the blogs of AI researchers.

• Is smarter than human intelligence possible in a sense comparable to the difference between chimps and humans?
• How is an encapsulated AI going to get into control without already existing advanced nanotechnology? It might order something over the Internet if it hacks some bank account etc. (long chain of assumptions), but how is it going to make use of the things it orders?
• Why should self-optimization not be prone to be very limited. Changing anything substantial might lead Gandhi to swallow the pill that will make him want to hurt people, so to say.

You have to list your primary propositions on which you base further argumentation, from which you draw conclusions and which you use to come up with probability estimations stating risks associated with former premises. You have to list these main principles so anyone who comes across claims of existential risks and a plead for donation, can get an overview. Then you have to provide the references, if you believe they give credence to the ideas, so that people see that all you say isn't made up but based on previous work and evidence by people that are not associated with your organisation.

You could argue your case of "this is obviously true" with completely made-up claims, and I'd have no way to tell. -- Kaj_Sotala

This is a community devoted to refining the art of rationality. How is it rational to believe the Scary Idea without being able to tell if it is more than an idea?

Good article. Thx for posting. I agree with much of it, but ...

Goertzel writes:

I do see a real risk that, if we proceed in the manner I'm advocating, some nasty people will take the early-stage AGIs and either use them for bad ends, or proceed to hastily create a superhuman AGI that then does bad things of its own volition. These are real risks that must be thought about hard, and protected against as necessary. But they are different from the Scary Idea.

Is this really different from the Scary Idea?

I've always thought of this as part of the Scary Idea, in fact, the reason the Scary Idea is scary - scarier than nuclear weapons. Because when mankind reaches the abyss, and looks with dismay at the prospect that lies ahead, we all know that there will be at least one idiot among us why doesn't draw back from the abyss, but instead continues forward down the slippery slope.

At the nuclear abyss, that idiot will probably kill a few hundred million of us. No big deal. But at the uFAI abyss, we may have ourselves a serious problem.

Ben's post states,

Finally, I note that most of the other knowledgeable futurist scientists and philosophers, who have come into close contact with SIAI's perspective, also don't accept the Scary Idea. Examples include Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil.

Is there a reference for Bostrom's position on AGI-without-FAI risk? Is Goertzel correct here?

Although Goertzel is no longer on the Team page of SIAI site, his profile on Advisors page states that

Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., is SIAI Director of Research, responsible for overseeing the direction of the Institute's research division.

I assume this an oversight, left unchanged from before. (Edit: Fixed!)

Also, on Research areas page, areas 4 "Customization of Existing Open-Source Projects" and 6 "AGI Evaluation Mechanisms" are distinctly of AGI-without-FAI nature, from Goertzel's project.

Goertzel's article seems basically reasonable to me. There were some mis-statements that I can excuse at the very end, because by that point part of his argument was that certain kinds of hyperbole came up over and over and his text was mimicing the form of the hyperbolic arguments even as it criticized them. The grandmother line and IQ obsessed aliens spring to mind :-P

Given his summary of the "Scary AGI Thesis"...

If someone builds an advanced AGI without a provably Friendly architecture, probably it will have a hard takeoff, and then probably this will lead to a superhuman AGI system with an architecture drawn from the vast majority of mind-architectures that are not sufficiently harmonious with the complex, fragile human value system to make humans happy and keep humans around.

...it seemed like it would make sense to track down past discussions here where our discussions may have been implicitly shaped by the thesis. Here are two articles where the issue of concrete programming projects came up, spawning interesting discussions that seemed to have the Scary Thesis as a subtext:

• In June 2009, cousin_it wrote Let's reimplement EURISKO!, and some of the discussion got into AGI direction meta-strategy. The highest top level comment is Eliezer bringing up issues of caution.

• In January 2010, StuartArmstrong wrote Advice for AI makers and again Eliezer brings up caution to massive approval. This one is particularly interesting because Wei_Dai has a +20 child comment off of that talking about Goertzel's company webmind... and the anthropic argument.

At the same time, in the course of searching, the "other side" also came up, which I think speaks well for the community :-)

• Three days after the Eurisko article was posted, rwallace wrote Why safety is not safe which discussed the issue in the context of (1) historical patterns of competition versus historical patterns of politically managed non-innovation and (2) the fact that the "human trajectory" simply doesn't appear to be long term stable such that swift innovation may be the only thing that prevents a sort of "default outcome" of human extinction.

• Of course, even earlier, Eliezer was talking about the general subject of novel research as something that can prevent or cause tragedy, as with the July 2008 article Should We Ban Physics? (although he did his normal thing with an off-handed claim that it was basically impossible to actually prevent innovation).

Ben Goertzel also says "If one fully accepts SIAI's Scary Idea, then one should not work on practical AGI projects..." Here is another recent quote that is relevant:

What I find a continuing source of amazement is that there is a subculture of people half of whom believe that AI will lead to the solving of all mankind's problems (which me might call Kurzweilian S^) and the other half of which is more or less certain (75% certain) that it will lead to annihilation. Lets call the latter the SIAI S^.

Yet you SIAI S^ invite these proponents of global suicide by AI, K-type S^, to your conferences and give them standing ovations.

And instead of waging desperate politico-military struggle to stop all this suicidal AI research you cheerlead for it, and focus your efforts on risk mitigation on discussions of how a friendly god-like AI could save us from annihilation.

You are a deeply schizophrenic little culture, which for a sociologist like me is just fascinating.

But as someone deeply concerned about these issues I find the irrationality of the S^ approach to a-life and AI threats deeply troubling. -- James J. Hughes (existential.ieet.org mailing list, 2010-07-11)

Also reminds me of this:

It is impossible for a rational person to both believe in imminent rise of sea levels and purchase ocean-front property.

It is reported that former Vice President Al Gore just purchased a villa in Montecito, California for $8.875 million. The exact address is not revealed, but Montecito is a relatively narrow strip bordering the Pacific Ocean. So its minimum elevation above sea level is 0 feet, while its overall elevation is variously reported at 50ft and 180ft. At the same time, Mr. Gore prominently sponsors a campaign and award-winning movie that warns that, due to Global Warming, we can expect to see nearby ocean-front locations, such as San Francisco, largely under water. The elevation of San Francisco is variously reported at 52ft up to high of 925ft.

I've highlighted the same idea before by the way:

Ask yourself, wouldn't you fly a plane into a tower if that was the only way to disable Skynet? The difference between religion and the risk of uFAI makes it even more dangerous. This crowd is actually highly intelligent and their incentive based on more than fairy tales told by goatherders. And if dumb people are already able to commit large-scale atrocities based on such nonsense, what are a bunch of highly-intelligent and devoted geeks who see a tangible danger able and willing to do? More so as in this case the very same people who believe it are the ones who think they must act themselves because their God doesn't even exist yet.

Thanks for the original pointer goes to Kevin.

Key points, some of which I already mentioned in the post Should I believe what the SIAI claims?:

Yes, you may argue: the Scary Idea hasn't been rigorously shown to be true… but what if it IS true?

OK but ... pointing out that something scary is possible, is a very different thing from having an argument that it's likely.

The Scary Idea is certainly something to keep in mind, but there are also many other risks to keep in mind, some much more definite and palpable.

[...]

Also, there are always possibilities like: the alien race that is watching us and waiting for us to achieve an IQ of 333, at which point it will swoop down upon us and eat us, or merge with us. We can't rule this out via any formal proof, and we can't meaningfully estimate the odds of it either. Yes, this sounds science-fictional and outlandish; but is it really more outlandish and speculative than the Scary Idea?

My comment from the discussion post:

Should I believe what the SIAI claims? I'm still not sure, although I learnt some things since that post. But what I know is how serious the people here take this stuff. Also read the comments on this post for how people associated with LW overreact to completely harmless AI research.

The issue with potential risks posed by unfriendly AI are numerous. The only organisation that takes those issues serious is the SIAI, as its name already implies. But I believe most people simply don't see a difference between the SIAI and one or a few highly intelligent people telling them that a particle collider could destroy the world while all experts working directly on it claim there's no risk. Now I think I understand the argument that if the whole world is at stake it does outweigh the low probability of the event. But does it? I think it is completely justified to have at least one organisation working on FAI, but is the risk as serious as portrayed and perceived within the SIAI? Right now if I had to hazard a guess I'd say that it will probably be a gradual development of many exponential growth phases. That is, we'll have this conceptual revolution and optimize it very rapidly. Then the next revolution will be necessary. Sure, I might be wrong there, as the plateau argument of self-improvement recursion might hold. But even if that is true, I think we'll need at least two paradigm-shattering conceptual revolutions before we get there. But what does that mean though? How quickly can such revolutions happen? I'm guessing that this could take a long time, if it isn't completely impossible. That is, if we are not the equivalent of Universal Turing Machine of abstract reasoning. Just imagine we are merely better chimps. Maybe it doesn't matter if a billion humans does science for a million years, we won't come up with the AI equivalent of Shakespeare's plays. This would mean that we are doomed to evolve slowly, to tweak ourselves incrementally into a posthuman state. Yet, there are also other possibilities, that AGI might for example be a gradual development over many centuries. Human intelligence might turn out to be close to the maximum.

There is so much we do not know yet (http://bit.ly/ckeQo6). Take for example a constrained well-understood domain like Go. AI does still perform awfully at Go. Or take P vs. NP.:

P vs. NP is an absolutely enormous problem, and one way of seeing that is that there are already vastly, vastly easier questions that would be implied by P not equal to NP but that we already don’t know how to answer. So basically, if someone is claiming to prove P not equal to NP, then they’re sort of jumping 20 or 30 nontrivial steps beyond what we know today. [...] We have very strong reasons to believe that these problems cannot be solved without major — enormous — advances in human knowledge. [...] So in order to prove such a thing, a prerequisite to it is to understand the space of all possible efficient algorithms. That is an unbelievably tall order. So the expectation is that on the way to proving such a thing, we’re going to learn an enormous amount about efficient algorithms, beyond what we already know, and very, very likely discover new algorithms that will likely have applications that we can’t even foresee right now. (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/3q-pnp.html).

But that is just my highly uneducated guess which I never seriously contemplated. I believe that for most academics the problem here is mainly about the missing proof of concept. Missing evidence. They are not the kind of people who wait before testing the first nuke because it might ignite the atmosphere. If there's no good evidence, a position supported by years worth of disjunctive lines of reasoning won't convince them either.

The paperclip maximizer (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer) scenario needs serious consideration. But given what needs to be done, what insights may be necessary to create something creative that is effective in the real world, it's hard to believe that this is a serious risk. It's similar with the kind of grey goo scenario that nanotechnology might hold. It will likely be a gradual development that once it becomes sophisticated enough to pose a serious risk is also understood and controlled by countermeasures.

I also wonder why we don't see any alien paperclip maximizer's out there? If there are any in the observable universe our FAI will lose anyway since it is far behind in its development.

I suppose the actual risk could be taking mere idea too serious.

Check out SIAI's publications page. Kaj's most recent paper (published at ECAP '10) is a good 2 page summary of why AGI can be an x-risk for anyone who is uninformed of SIAI's position:

"From mostly harmless to civilization-threatening: pathways to dangerous artificial general intelligences"

[link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_value_(philosophy\))

Having such beliefs with absolute certainty is incorrect, we don't have sufficient understanding for that, but weak beliefs multiplied by astronomical value lead to the same drastic actions, whose cost-benefit analysis doesn't take notice of small inconveniences such as being perceived to be crazy.

The unabomber performed some "drastic actions". I expect he didn't mind if he was "perceived to be crazy" by others - although he didn't want to plead insanity.

Does astronomical value outweigh astronomical low probability? You can come up with all kinds of scenarios that bear astronomical value, an astronomical amount of scenarios if you allow for astronomical low probability. Isn't this betting on infinity?

I would like to explore Ben's reasons for rejecting the premises of the argument.

I think the first of the above points is reasonably plausible

He offers the possibility that intelligence might cause or imply empathy; I feel that although we see that connection when we look at all of Earth's creatures, correlation doesn't imply causation, so that (intelligence AND empathy) doesn't mean (intelligence IMPLIES empathy) - it probably means (evolution IMPLIES intelligence AND empathy) and we aren't using natural selection to build an AI.

I doubt human value is particularly fragile.

He makes the point that human values have robustly changed many times, and will probably continue to change in coordination with AGI. Human value is not fragile on the timescales we deal with as humans; our values have indeed changed since, say, Victorian times. But that took generations - most value change will take generations, because humans are (understandably) reserved about modifying their values. The timescales that AGIs will be dealing with are, on the low end, weeks. (An AGI with access to a microchip manufacturing plant, say). I can't see a plausible AGI that enacts changes at generational speed. So, yes, our values are robust, in the sense that a mountain is robust to weather patterns - but not robust to falling into the sun.

I think a hard takeoff is possible ... it's very unlikely to occur until we have an AGI system that has very obviously demonstrated general intelligence

I think he is accurate in this assessment.

I think the path to this "hard takeoff enabling" level of general intelligence is going to be somewhat gradual

Again, accurate. The path to nuclear fission was gradual over many years, but the reaction itself (the takeoff) could have irradiated a university in hours. His position appears to be that he think a hard takeoff is possible, but that we'll have warning signs and a deeper understanding of the AGI before it happens ... well, a scientist from the Manhattan Project in Japan during WWII would have a deeper understanding of the features of a nuclear explosion, but the defense against it is STILL not being in Hiroshima. I don't think more knowledge about the issue is going to significantly change the solution. We have reached the diminishing returns level of knowledge about AI with respect to decreasing existential risk of said AI.

pointing out that something scary is possible, is a very different thing from having an argument that it's likely.

This is just wrong. The only difference between possible and likely is the probability distribution, and we know how to reason with probability distributions. If Ben has an argument for why the probability distribution is SO small that even multiplied by 'hard takeoff, universe is paperclips, end of existence' comes out below the "AGI without Friendly" route, well, he should articulate it and provide evidence. Without certainty that the chances are very low, he should accept the Scary Idea.

I'm a lot more worried about nasty humans taking early-stage AGIs and using them for massive destruction

Preventing abuse of AGI and preventing uFAI takeoff scenarios are not mutually exclusive, you can and should attempt to prevent both.

I'm also quite unconvinced that "provably safe" AGI is even feasible.

Mostly claims and arguments that a proof of friendliness is impossible. In order to argue that "provably safe AGI isn't feasible, we should instead develop unpredictable but I-don't-see-the-danger AGI" you pretty much need an Incompleteness Proof; that there IS NO proof of friendliness, not that there isn't one yet. If you believe that friendliness proof is probably impossible, you shouldn't work on AGI at all, instead of working on possibly-unfriendly AI. That Ben came to the conclusion that work should continue, rather than halt entirely, suggests he is motivated to justify his own work rather than engage with his beliefs about the Scary Idea.

I just don't buy the Scary Idea.

The Scary Idea that Ben outlined is "The stakes are so high that 'unlikely' is not good enough; we need 'surer than we've ever been'. Anything less is too dangerous." and his refutations have amounted to "I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's likely".

In essence, he hasn't refuted the argument, but instead made it scarier. If AI developers can see "stakes are very high" and "there is a small chance", and argue against "the stakes are high enough that a small chance is too much chance", then uFAI is that much more likely.

Robin Hanson on Friendly AI:

I’m also not big on friendly AI, but my position differs somewhat. I’m pretty skeptical about a very local hard takeoff scenario, where within a month one unnoticed machine in a basement takes over a world like ours. And even given on such a scenario the chance that its creators could constraint it greatly via a provably friendly design seems remote. And the chance such constraint comes from a small team that is secretive to avoid assisting wreckless others seems even more remote.

[...] I just see little point anytime soon in trying to coordinate to prevent such an outcome.

Perhaps the current state of evidence really is insufficient to support the scary hypothesis.

But surely, if one agrees that AI ethics is an existentially important problem, one should also agree that it makes sense for people to work on a theory of AI ethics. Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true.

Just because we don't currently have evidence that a killer asteroid is heading for the Earth, doesn't mean we shouldn't look anyway...

At the Singularity Summit's "Meet and Greet", I spoke with both Ben Geortzel and Eliezer Yudowski (among others) about this specific problem.

I am FAR more in line with Ben's position than with Eliezer's (probably because both Ben and I are either Working or Studying directly on the "how to do" aspect of AI, rather than just concocting philosophical conundrums for AI, such as the "Paperclip Maximizer" scenario of Eliezer's, which I find highly dubious).

AI isn't going to spring fully formed out of some box of parts. It may be an emergent property of something, but if we worry about all of the possible places from which it could emerge, then we might as well worry about things like ghosts and goblins that we cannot see (and haven't seen) popping up suddenly as a threat.

At Bard College on the Weekend of October the 22nd, I attended a Conference where this topic was discussed a bit. I spoke to James Hughes, head of the IEET (Institute for the Ethics of Emerging Technologies) about this problem as well. He believes that the SIAI tends to be overly dramatic about Hard Takeoff scenarios at the expense of more important ethical problems... And, he and I also discussed the specific problems of "The Scary Idea" that tend to ignore the gradual progress in understanding human values and cognition, and how these are being incorporated into AI as we move toward the creation of a Constructed Intelligence (CI as opposed to AI) that is equivalent to human intelligence.

Also, WRT this comment:

For another example, you can't train tigers to care about their handlers. No matter how much time you spend with them and care for them, they sometimes bite off arms just because they are hungry. I understand most big cats are like this.

You CAN train (Training is not the right word for it) tigers, and other big cats to care about their handlers. It requires a type of training and teaching that goes on from birth, but there are plenty of Big Cats who don't attack their owners or handlers simply because they are hungry, or some other similar reason. They might accidentally injure a handler due to the fact that they do not have the capacity to understand the fragility of a human being, but this is a lack of cognitive capacity, and it is not a case of a higher intelligence accidentally damaging something fragile... A more intelligent mind would be capable of understanding things like physical frailty and taking steps to avoid damaging a more fragile body... But, the point still stands... Big cats can and do form deep emotional bonds with humans, and will even go as far as to try to protect and defend those humans (which, can sometimes lead to injury of the human in its own right).

And, I know this from having worked with a few big cats, and having a sister who is a senior zookeeper at the Houston Zoo (and head curator of the SW US Zoo's African Expedition) who works with big cats ALL the time.

Back to the point about AI.

It is going to be next to impossible to solve the problem of "Friendly AI" without first creating AI systems that have social cognitive capacities. Just sitting around "Thinking" about it isn't likely to be very helpful in resolving the problem.

That would be what Bertrand Russell calls "Gorging upon the Stew of every conceivable idea."

That is, rather than "if you go ahead with an AGI when you're not 100% sure that it's safe, you're committing the Holocaust," I suppose my view is closer to "if you avoid creating beneficial AGI because of speculative concerns, then you're killing my grandma" !!

Yeah, that may very well be a big risk too. As I said before here: Or maybe most civilisations are that cautionary that even if something is estimated to be safe by the majority they rather avoid it. And this overcautious makes them either evolve so slow that the chance of a fatal natural disaster to occur before sufficient technology is developed to survive it, rises to 100%, or stops them from evolving at all for being unable to prove something being 100% safe before trying it and thus never taking the necessary steps to become less vulnerable to existing risks.

This post doesn't show up under "NEW", nor does it show up under "Recent Posts".

ADDED: Never mind. I forgot I had "disliked" it, and had "do not show an article once I've disliked it" set.

(I disliked it because I find it kind of shocking that Ben, who's very smart, and whom I'm pretty sure has read the things that I would refer him to on the subject, would say that the Scary Idea hasn't been laid out sufficiently. Maybe some people need every detail spelled out for them, but Ben isn't one of them. Also, he is committing the elementary error of not considering expected value.

ADDED: Now that I've read Ben's entire post, I upvoted rather than downvoted this post. Ben was not committing the error of not considering expected value, so much as responding to many SIAI-influenced people who are not considering expected value. And I agree with most of what Ben says. I would add that Eliezer's plan to construct something that will provably follow some course of action - any course of action - chosen by hairless primates, is likely to be worse in the long run than a hard-takeoff AI that kills all humans almost immediately. Explaining what I mean by "worse" is problematic; but no more problematic than explaining why I should care about propagating human values.)

I also disagree about what the Scary Idea is - to me, the idea that the AI will choose to keep humans around for all eternity, is scarier than that it will not. But that is something Eliezer either disagrees with, or has deliberately made obscure.)

Have you read it?

I've looked at it.

I believe it is utter nonsense.

That is my impression too. Which is why I don't understand why you are complaining about censorship of ideas and wondering why EY doesn't spend more time refuting ideas.

As I understand it, we are talking about actions that might be undertaken by an AI that you and I would call insane. The "censorship" is intended to mitigate the harm that might be done by such an AI. Since I think it possible that a future AI (particularly one built by certain people) might actually be insane, I have no problem with preemptive mitigation activities, even if the risk seems miniscule.

In other words, why make such a big deal out of it?

regardless of dis/agreement, guy has a really cool voice http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS6DKeGvBW8&feature=related

On Ben's blog post, I noted that a poll at the 2008 global catastrophic risks conference put the existential risk of machine intelligence at 5% - and that the people attending probably had some of the largest estimations of risk of anyone on the planet - since they were a self-selected group attending a conference on the topic.

"Molecular nanotech weapons" also get 5%. Presumably there's going to be a heavy intersection between those two figures - even though in the paper they seem to be adding them together!

The motivation for the censorship is not to keep the idea from the AGI. It is to keep the idea from you. For your own good.

Seriously. And don't ask me to explain.

As I said, explanations exist. Don't confuse with actual good understanding, which as far as I know nobody managed to attain yet.

I obviously assume "not too tiny".

This comment and your other comments that are being voted down should rather be turned into a top-level post. Some people here seem to be horrible confused about this.

I couldn't agree more, upvoted.

The idea of provably safe AGI is typically presented as something that would exist within mathematical computation theory or some variant thereof. So that's one obvious limitation of the idea: mathematical computers don't exist in the real world, and real-world physical computers must be interpreted in terms of the laws of physics, and humans' best understanding of the "laws" of physics seems to radically change from time to time. So even if there were a design for provably safe real-world AGI, based on current physics, the relevance of the proof might go out the window when physics next gets revised.

I didn't get the impression that Eliezer's goal was to "build a provably Friendly AI" (in the mathematical sense of "provable"), as Ben puts it. The impression I get is more that Eliezer wants to put off building an AI until we understand enough about morality and human values. Eliezer also cares about mathematical proofs, but more for the purpose of preserving values under self-modification (something that humans don't usually have to deal with).

As an analogy, imagine you're trying to debug some complex and badly written code you were previously unfamiliar with. One approach is to find the bit in the code that seems related to the bug, and modify it locally ( "if DatabaseDown() return False" and the like) until the issue seems fixed. Another approach is to try to understand how the program works to the point where you understand which conceptual mistake caused the bug, and see the right way to fix it.

The second approach takes more time but is also less likely to create another bug somewhere else, or to deteriorate the overall quality of the code. I think most programmers who've worked on sufficiently large codebases have seen examples of both approaches.

Anyway, I get the impression that Eliezer is advocating something like the second approach here (understand how everything works before implementing), and that Ben is describing that as "proving correctness", which seems to be quite different (and much stronger!).

Again, I don't think this terminology is adequate.

Let's not dwell on terminology, where the denoted concepts remain much more urgently unclear.

RE: Empathy and intelligence- It is possible to be brilliant in some respects without empathy, but it is definitely a handicap not to have it. There are many aspects of intelligence, only some of which are measured by IQ tests. Empathy is one, others are musical and artistic talents and social skills. I question whether it is possible to teach an AI any of these, especially empathy. The latest research I've read indicates that the ability to develop empathy is tied to what have been labeled "mirror neurons". They are missing in people with autism- and, quite possibly, in psychopaths too.