MIRI's technical research agenda

So you think human-level intelligence by principle does not combine with goal stability.

To be clear I’ve been talking about human-like, which is a different distinction than human-level. Human-like intelligences operate similarly to human psychology. And it is demonstrably true that humans do not have a fixed set of fundamentally unchangeable goals, and human society even less so. For all its faults, the neoreactionaries get this part right in their critique of progressive society: the W-factor introduces a predictable drift in social values over time. And although people do tend to get “fixed in their ways”, it is rare indeed for a single person to remain absolutely rigidly so. So yes, in as far as we are talking about human-like intelligences, if they had fixed truly steadfast goals then that would be something which distinguishes them from humans.

Aren't you simply disagreeing with the orthogonality thesis, "that an artificial intelligence can have any combination of intelligence level and goal"?

I don’t think the orthogonality thesis is well formed. The nature of an intelligence may indeed cause it to develop certain goals in due coarse, or for its overall goal set to drift in certain, expected if not predictable ways.

Of course denying the orthogonality thesis as stated does not mean endorsing a cosmist perspective either, which would be just as ludicrous. I’m not naive enough to think that there is some hidden universal morality that any smart intelligence naturally figures out -- that’s bunk IMHO. But it’s just as naive to think that the structure of an intelligence and its goal drift over time are purely orthogonal issues. In real, implementable designs (e.g. not AIXI), one informs the other.

I don't think that this follows: it's easier to predict that someone won't like a plan, than it is to predict what's the plan that would maximally fulfill their values.

While I agree, his proposal does seem like a good start. Restricting a UFAI to pursue only a subset of all potentially detrimental plans is a modest gain, but still a gain worth achieving. I am skeptical that FAI should consist of a grand unified moral theory. I think an FAI made of many overlapping moral heuristics and patches, such as the restriction he describes, is more technically feasible, and might even be more likely to match actual human value systems, given the ambiguous, varying, and context sensitive nature of our evolved moral inclinations.

(I realize that these are not properties generally considered when thinking about computer superintelligences - we're inclined to see computers as rigidly algorithmic, which makes sense given current technology levels. But I believe extrapolating from current technology to predict how AGI will function is a greater mistake than extrapolating from known examples of intelligence - a process is better understood when looking at actions than when looking at substrate. With regard to intelligence at least, AGI will necessarily be much more flexible in its operations than traditional computers are. I expect that the cost of this flexibility in behavior will be sacrificing rigidity at the process level. Performing billions of Bayesian calculations a second isn't feasible, so a more organic and heuristic based approach will be necessary. If this is correct and such technologies will be necessary for an AGI's intelligence, then it makes sense that we'd be able to use them for an AGI's emotions or goals as well.)

Even if we do attempt to build a grand unified Friendly software, I expect little downside (relative to potential risks) to adding these sort of restrictions in addition.

Wow there is a world of assumptions wrapped up in there. For example that the AI has a concept of external agents and an ability to model their internal belief state. That an external agent can have a belief about the world which is wrong. This may sound intuitively obvious, but it’s not a simple thing. This kind of social awareness takes time to be learnt by humans as well. Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner showed that below a certain age (3-4 years) kids lack an ability to track this information. A teacher puts a toy in a blue cupboard, then leaves the room and you move it to the red cupboard, and the teacher comes back into the room. If you ask the kid not where the toy is, but what cupboard the teacher will look in to find it, and they will say the red cupboard.

It’s no accident that it takes time for this skill to develop. It’s actually quite complex to be able to keep track of and simulate the states of mind of other agents acting in our world. We just take it for granted because we are all well-adjusted adults of a species evolved for social intelligence. But an AI need not think in that way, and indeed of the most interesting use cases for tool AI (“design me a nanofactory constructible with existing tools” or “design a set of experiments organized as a decision tree for accomplishing the SENS research objectives”) would be best accomplished by an idiot savant with no need for social awareness.

I think it goes without saying that obvious AI safety rule #1 is don’t connect an UFAI to the internet. Another obvious rule I think is don’t build in capabilities not required to achieve the things it is tasked with. For the applications of AI I imagine in the pre-singularity timeframe, social intelligence is not a requirement. So when you say “part of its model of the world involves a model of its controllers”, I think that is assuming a capability the AI should not have built-in.

(This is all predicated on soft-enough takeoff that there would be sufficient warning if/when the AI self-developed a social awareness capability.)

Also, what 27chaos said is also worth articulating in my own words. If you want to prevent an intelligent agent from taking a particular category of actions there are two ways of achieving that requirement: (a) have a filter or goal system which prevents the AI from taking (box) or selecting (goal) actions of that type; or (b) prevent it by design from thinking such thoughts to begin with. An AI won’t take actions it never even considered in the first place. While the latter course of action isn’t really possible with unbounded universal inference engines (since “enumerate all possibilities” is usually a step in their construction), such designs arise quite naturally out of more realistic psychology-inspired designs.

Well this argument I can understand, although Omohundro’s point 6 is tenuous. Boxing setups could prevent the AI from acquiring resources, and non-agents won’t be taking actions in the first place, to acquire resources or otherwise. And as you notice the ‘undetectable’ qualifier is important. Imagine you were locked in a box guarded by a gatekeeper of completely unknown and alien psychology. What procedure would you use for learning the gatekeeper’s motives well enough to manipulate it, all the while escaping detection? It’s not at all obvious to me that with proper operational security the AI would even be able to infer the gatekeeper’s motivational structure enough to deceive, no matter how much time it is given.

MIRI is currently taking actions that only really make sense as priorities in a hard-takeoff future. There are also possible actions which align with a soft-takeoff scenario, or double-dip for both (e.g. Kaj’s proposed research[1]), but MIRI does not seem to be involving itself with this work. This is a shame.

[1] http://intelligence.org/files/ConceptLearning.pdf

Well if academic achievement is you goal, don't think my opinion should carry much weight -- I'm an industry engineer (bitcoin developer) that does AI work in my less than copius spare t.ime. I don't know how well respected this work would be in academia. To reiterate my own opinion, I think it is the most important AGI work we could be doing however.

Have you posted to the OpenCog mailing list? You'd find some like-minded academics there who can give you some constructive feedback, including naming potential advisors.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/opencog

EDIT: Gah I wish I knew about that workshop sooner. I'm going to be in Peurto Rico for the Financial Crypto '15 conference, but I could have swung by on my way. Do you know kanzure from ##hplusroadmap on freenode (Bryan Bishop)? He's a like-minded transhumanist hacker in the Austin area. You should meet up while you're there. He's very knowledgeable on what people are working on, and good at providing connections to help people out.