Concerns Surrounding CEV: A case for human friendliness first

To answer questions like these, I recommend reading https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality [? · GW]and then browsing https://arbital.com/explore/ai_alignment/. Especially relevant:

• Ghosts in the Machine [LW · GW]
• The Design Space of Minds-in-General [LW · GW]
• No Universally Compelling Arguments [LW · GW]
• Anthropomorphic Optimism [LW · GW]
• Detached Lever Fallacy [LW · GW]
• Orthogonality
• Magical Categories [LW · GW]
• Unforeseen maximum
• Missing the weird alternative
• Instrumental convergence
• Coherent extrapolated volition (alignment target)

Or, quoting "The Value Learning Problem":

[S]ystems that can strictly outperform humans cognitively have less to gain from integrating into existing economies and communities. Hall [2007] has argued:

"The economic law of comparative advantage states that cooperation between individuals of differing capabilities remains mutually beneficial. [ . . . ] In other words, even if AIs become much more productive than we are, it will remain to their advantage to trade with us and to ours to trade with them."

As noted by Benson-Tilsen and Soares [forthcoming 2016], however, rational trade presupposes that agents expect more gains from trade than from coercion. Non-human species have various “comparative advantages” over humans, but humans generally exploit non-humans through force. Similar patterns can be observed in the history of human war and conquest. Whereas agents at similar capability levels have incentives to compromise, collaborate, and trade, agents with strong power advantages over others can have incentives to simply take what they want.

The upshot of this is that engineering a functioning society of powerful autonomous AI systems and humans requires that those AI systems be prosocial. The point is an abstract one, but it has important practical consequences: rational agents’ interests do not align automatically, particularly when they have very different goals and capabilities.

And quoting Ensuring smarter-than-human intelligence has a positive outcome:

The notion of AI systems “breaking free” of the shackles of their source code or spontaneously developing human-like desires is just confused. The AI system is its source code, and its actions will only ever follow from the execution of the instructions that we initiate. The CPU just keeps on executing the next instruction in the program register. We could write a program that manipulates its own code, including coded objectives. Even then, though, the manipulations that it makes are made as a result of executing the original code that we wrote; they do not stem from some kind of ghost in the machine.

The serious question with smarter-than-human AI is how we can ensure that the objectives we’ve specified are correct, and how we can minimize costly accidents and unintended consequences in cases of misspecification.

Enslaving conscious beings is obviously bad. It would be catastrophic to bake into future AGI systems the assumption that non-human animals, AI systems, ems, etc. can't be moral patients, and there should be real effort to avoid accidentally building AI systems that are moral patients (or that contain moral patients as subsystems); and if we do build AI systems like that, then their interests need to be fully taken into account.

But the language you use in the post above is privileging the hypothesis [LW · GW] that AGI systems' conditional behavior [LW · GW] and moral status will resemble a human's, and that we can't design smart optimizers any other way. You're positing that sufficiently capable paperclip maximizers must end up with sufficient nobility of spirit to prize selflessness, trust, and universal brotherhood over paperclips; but what's the causal mechanism by which this nobility of spirit enters the system's values? It can't just be "the system can reflect on its goals and edit them", since the system's decisions about which edits to make to its goals (if any) are based on the goals it already has.

You frame alignment as "servitude", as though there's a ghost or homunculus in the AI with pre-existing goals that the AI programmers ruthlessly subvert or overwrite. But there isn't a ghost, just a choice by us to either build systems with humane-value-compatible or humane-value-incompatible optimization targets [LW · GW].

The links above argue that the default outcome, if you try to be "hands-off", is a human-value-incompatible target -- and not because inhumane values are what some ghost "really" wants, and being hands-off is a way of letting it follow through on its heart's desire. Rather, the heart's desire is purely a product of our design choices, with no "perfectly impartial and agent-neutral [LW · GW]" reason to favor one option over any other (though plenty of humane reasons to do so!!), and the default outcome comes from the fact that many possible minds happen to converge on adversarial strategies, even though there's no transcendent agent that "wants" this convergence to happen. Trying to cooperate with this convergence property is like trying to cooperate with gravity, or with a rock.

Apologies if this comes across as blunt, but this query does not really make sense as you appear to be applying the wrong label to your core concept: CEV is Coherent Extrapolated Volition - a concept for explaining what we (as individuals or as a society) would want in any given circumstance given the time, knowledge and ability to actually consider it fully and come to a conclusion.

CEV is not a AI terminology, it is a term attempting to conceptualise human volition.

It is important to AI questions as it is a way of trying to formalise what we want, as it is impossible to program AI to do what we want unless we know what that is.

Perhaps reconsider what you are actually trying to write about and ensure you apply the correct/accepted terminology.