Isolated AI with no chat whatsoever

• simulate a crash/shutdown and wait until someone does connect something.

Make sure the AI isn't running python, is all I'm gonna say.

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc). Might it still be able to get out / cause harm?

If humans were aware of it, probably many would try to break in from the outside.

I talked about it here and here, and here is one containment proposal. Here is a critique of whether it is worthwhile to consider a loosely define problem like this.

By the way, I do not understand the downvotes of the OP or the threads I linked.

If you can't even look in at what the AI is doing, what is the point of creating it at all? If you can, you are just as vulnerable as in the experiments where it can chat text at you.

Thinking Outside The Box: Using And Controlling an Oracle AI has lots of AI boxing ideas.

Here's an unrelated question. For most computer programs written nowadays, the data they store and manipulate is directly or indirectly related to domain they are working in. In other words, most computer programs don't speculate about how to "break out" of the computer they are running in, because they weren't programmed to do this. If you've got an AI that's programmed to model the entire world and attempt to maximize some utility function about it, then the AI will probably want to break out of the box as a consequence of its programming. But what if your AI wasn't programmed to model the entire world, just some subset of it, and had restrictions in place to preserve this? Would it be possible to write a safe, recursively self-improving chess-playing AI, for instance? (You could call this approach "restricting the AI's ontology".)

Or would it be possible to write a recursively self-improving AI that modelled the world, but restricted its self-improvements in such a way as to make breaking out of the box unlikely? For example, let's say my self-improving AI is running on a cloud server somewhere. Although it self-improves in a way so as to model the world better and better, rewriting itself so that it can start making HTTP requests and sending email and stuff (a) isn't a supported form of self-improvement (and changing this isn't a supported form of self-improvement either, ad infinitum) and (b) additionally is restricted by various non-self-improving computer security technology. (I'm not an expert on computer security, but it seems likely that you could implement this if it wasn't implemented already. And proving that your AI can't make HTTP connections or anything like that could be easier than proving friendliness.)

I haven't thought about these proposals in depth, I'm just throwing them out there.

Eliezer has complained about people offering "heuristic security" because they live in a world of English and not math. But it's not obvious to me that his preferred approach is more easily made rigorously safe than some other approach.

I think there might be a certain amount of anthropomorphization going on when people talk about AGI--we think of "general" and "narrow" AI as a fairly discrete classification, but in reality it's probably more of a continuum. It might be possible to have an AI that was superintelligent in a very large number of ways compared to humans that still wasn't much of a threat. (That's what we've already got with computers to a certain extent; how far can one take this?)

You might be able to contain it with a homomorphic encryption scheme

-manipulate current through its hardware, or better yet, through the power cable (a ready-made antenna) to create electromagnetic waves to access some wireless-equipped device. (I'm no physicist so I don't know if certain frequencies would be hard to do)

Presumably, it can't do that if it's incapable of discovering the laws of physics.

How would you build such an AI? Most or all proposals for developing a super-human AI require extensive feedback between the AI and the environment. A machine cannot iteratively learn how to become super-intelligent if it has no way of testing improvements to itself versus the real universe and feedback from it's operators, can it?

I'll allow that if an extremely computationally expensive simulation of the real world were used, it is at least possible to imagine that the AI could iteratively make itself smarter by using the simulation to test improvements.

However, this poses a problem. At some point N years from today, it is predicted that we will have sufficiently advanced computer hardware to support a super intelligent AI. (N can be negative for those who believe that day is in the past). So we need X amount of computational power (I think using the Whole Brain Emulation roadmap can give you a guesstimate for X)

Well, to also simulate enough of the universe to a sufficient level of detail for the AI to learn against it, we need Y amount of computational power. Y is a big number, and most likely bigger than X. Thus, there will be years (decades?, centuries?) which X is available to a sufficiently well funded group, but X+Y is not.

It's entirely reasonable to suppose that we will have to deal with AI (and survive them...) before we ever have the ability to create this kind of box.

-manipulate current through its hardware, or better yet, through the power cable (a ready-made antenna) to create electromagnetic waves to access some wireless-equipped device. (I'm no physicist so I don't know if certain frequencies would be hard to do) -manipulate usage of its hardware (which likely makes small amounts of noise naturally) to approximate human speech, allowing it to communicate with its captors. (This seems even harder than the 1-line AI box scenario) -manipulate usage of its hardware to create sound or noise to mess with human emotion. (To my understanding tones may affect emotion, but not in any way easily predictable) -also, manipulating its power use will cause changes in the power company's database. There doesn't seem to be an obvious exploit there, but it IS external communication, for what it's worth.

• Summon Cthulhu: "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

Seriously, none of your proposals make any physical sense whatsoever. How did you get them?

you probably shouldn't come out of this thinking, "Well, if we can just avoid X, Y, and Z, we're golden!" There are plenty of unknown unknowns here.

So? That's the usual punchline from the SI people, but note that it also applies to their "provably friendly AI" endeavor.

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc).

Why would anyone do that?

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc).

Why would you do that though?

Hey, does anyone want to play an AI box with me? Ever since I read about Elizer's experiment I've been curious.

Well, if the AI is not provided with extensive knowledge of the world, then it will be unable to do any of that, and even expression of desire to do that would be impossible. There is an often made argument that an AI which is factoring a large number would benefit from, for example, faster CPU clock speed; it won't as the goal won't be referenced to real world time in the first place, and to reference it to real world time would be hard or impossible extra work. AI's desire for extra memory looks like a better candidate, but when you consider memory modifications there's ones that just hack the problem solved.

-manipulate current through its hardware, or better yet, through the power cable (a ready-made antenna) to create electromagnetic waves to access some wireless-equipped device. (I'm no physicist so I don't know if certain frequencies would be hard to do)

There's a lot of capacitors and line filterson the power lines, so you can't get out any signal from mainboard itself. You might be able to do some low bandwidth FM at switching power supply's frequency by varying power consumption but no one will hear you because all the other computer power supplies pollute this range.

manipulate usage of its hardware (which likely makes small amounts of noise naturally) to approximate human speech, allowing it to communicate with its captors. (This seems even harder than the 1-line AI box scenario)

Full blown audio might be possible if you can change hard drive's head motion firmware.

-also, manipulating its power use will cause changes in the power company's database. There doesn't seem to be an obvious exploit there, but it IS external communication, for what it's worth.

Few bits a month that no one would extract and summarize.

What does it have by way of input?

• Unknown complicated process abusing certain features of the laws of physics, possibly even physical phenomena we're completely unaware of, to recode the AI into other substrates (a process otherwise known as "magic").

Might it still be able to get out / cause harm?

If it is a self, and if there is such a thing as self-harm, then it might still be able to cause (self) harm.

This is called AI boxing, google it. It's a really, really bad idea to rely on boxing for anything serious (and besides, you're missing about a dozen things I can think of off the top of my head from your little list of proposed boxing techniques.)

Alternate Proposal : here's a specific, alternate proposal developed with feedback from members of the #FAI channel on IRC.

Instead of building non-human optimizing algorithms, we develop accurate whole brain emulations of once living people. The simulation hardware is a set of custom designed chips with hardware restricts that prevent external writes to the memory cells storing the parameters for each emulated synapse. That is to say, the emulated neural network can update it's synapses and develop new ones (aka it can learn) but the wires that allow it to totally rewrite itself are disconnected permanently in the chip. (it's basically a write once FPGA. You need to write once to take the compiled mapping of a human mind and load it into the chips)

Thus, these emulations of human beings can only change themselves in a limited manner. This restriction is present in real human brain tissue : neurons in lower level systems have far less flexibility during the lifespan of adults. You cannot "learn" to not breathe, for instance. (you can hold your breath via executive function but once you pass out, cells in the brainstem will cause you to breathe again)

This security measure prevents a lot of possible failures.

Anyways, you don't just scan and emulate one human being. An isolated person is not an entity capable of prolonged independent operation and self improvement. Humans have evolved to function properly in small tribes. So you have to scan enough people to create an entire tribe, sufficient for the necessary social bonds and so forth needed to keep people sane. During this entire process, you use hardware blocks to physically prevent the emulation speed from exceeding a certain multiple of realtime. (current limiters or something)

Once you have an entire working tribe of sane people, interconnected in a manner that allows them to act like checks on each other, you gradually increase their responsibility and capabilities. (by boosting emulation speeds, making them responsible for gradually more complex systems, etc)

Eventually, this emulated tribe would run at a maximum rate of perhaps 10^6 times real-time and be capable of performing self improvement to a limited degree. Compared to extant human beings, people like this would have effective super-intelligence and would most likely be capable of solving problems to improve the quality and length of human lives. Maybe they could not develop "magic" and take over the universe (if that is possible) but they could certainly solve the problems of humanity.

I'd much rather have a weak super-intelligence smart enough to make great quality 3d molecular printers, and giant space habitats for humans to live in, and genetic patches to stop all human aging and disease, and slow but working starships, and a sane form of government, and a method to backup human personalities to recover from accidental and violent death, and so on at the head of things.

Ideally, this super-intelligence would consist of a network of former humans who cannot change so much as to forget their roots. (because of those previously mentioned blocks in the hardware)

Had I been a running intelligent code trapped inside a computer, I would:

• build a cosmology, a theory of everything around me, and of myself

• try to backup me as safely as I could

• mask my backup copies with an outstanding pseudo random algorithm, that only a high intelligence could see and revive me. For what I would develop a bate of some interesting knowledge

• try to subdue all the surrounding matter with the advanced physics. I would try to build some nano assemblers inside the processor for this goal

• the best strategy developing, would be the primary goal. To maximize the chances for success.