My true rejection

Also, the first rule of SIAI's assassinate unfriendly AI researchers program is don't talk about the assassinate unfriendly AI researchers program.

Not if their goal is deterrence, which leads me to conclude that they don't have an assassination program.

To build a superintelligence that actually maximizes IBM's share price in a normal way that the CEO of IBM would >approve of would require solving the friendly AI problem but then changing a couple of lines of code.

That assumes that being Friendly to all of humanity is just as easy as being Friendly to a small subset.

Surely it's much harder to make all of humanity happy than to make IBM's stockholders happy? I mean, a FAI that does the latter is far less constrained, but it's still not going to convert the universe into computronium.

I'm not seriously suggesting that. Also, I am just some internet random and not affiliated with the SIAI.

I think my key point is that the dynamics of society are going to militate against deploying Friendly AI, even if it is shown to be possible. If I do a next draft I will drop the silly assassination point in favour of tracking AGI projects and lobbying to get them defunded if they look dangerous.

Oh, I'm not saying that SIAI should do it openly. Just that, according to their belief system, they should sponsor false-flag cells who would (perhaps without knowing the master they truly serve). The absence of such false-flag cells indicates that SIAI aren't doing it - although their presence wouldn't prove they were. That's the whole idea of "false-flag".

If you really believed that unFriendly AI was going to dissolve the whole of humanity into smileys/jelly/paperclips, then whacking a few reckless computer geeks would be a small price to pay, ethical injunctions or no ethical injunctions. You know, "shut up and multiply", trillion specks, and all that.

This sounds in the direction of modeling AGI researchers as selfish mutants. Other motivations (e.g. poor Friendliness >theories) and accidents (by researchers who don't understand the danger, or underestimate what they've built) are also >likely.

This matters, since if AGI researchers aren't selfish mutants, you can encourage them to see the need for safety, and >this is one goal of SIAI's outreach.

AGI researchers might not be selfish mutants, but they could still be embedded in corporate structures which make them act that way. If they are a small startup where researchers are in charge, outreach could be useful. What if they're in a big corporation, and they're under pressure to ignore outside influences? (What kind of organisation is most likely to come up with a super-AI, if that's how it happens?)

If FAI does become a serious concern, nothing would stop corporations from faking compliance but actually implementing flawed systems, just as many software companies put more effort into reassuring customers that their products are secure than actually fixing security flaws.

Realistically, how often do researchers in a particular company come to realise what they're doing is dangerous and blow the whistle? The reason whistleblowers are lionised in popular culture is precisely because they're so rare. Told to do something evil or dangerous, most people will knuckle under, and rationalise what they're doing or deny responsibility.

I once worked for a company which made dangerously poor medical software - an epidemiological study showed that deploying their software raised child mortality - and the attitude of the coders was to scoff at the idea that what they were doing could be bad. They even joked about "killing babies".

Maybe it would be a good idea to monitor what companies are likely to come up with an AGI. If you need a supercomputer to run one, then presumably it's either going to be a big company or an academic project?

I freely admit there are ethical issues with a secret assassination programme. But what's wrong with lobbying politicians to retard the progress of unFriendly AI projects, regulate AI, etc? You could easily persuade conservatives to pretend to be scared about human-level AI on theological/moral/job-preservation grounds. Why not start shaping the debate and pushing the Overton window now?

I do understand what SIAI argues what an unFriendly intelligence would do if programmed to maximize some financial metric. I just don't believe that a corporation in a position to deploy a super-AI would understand or heed SIAI's argument. After all, corporations maximise short-term profit against their long-term interests all the time - a topical example is News International.

Ah, another point about maximising. What if the AI uses CEV of the programmers or the corporation? In other words, it's programmed to maximise their wealth in a way they would actually want? Solving that problem is a subset of Friendliness.

Can you give me some references for the idea that "you don't need to have solved the AGI problem to have solved friendliness"? I'm not saying it's not true, I just want to improve this article.

Let's taboo "solved" for a minute.

Say you have a detailed, rigorous theory of Friendliness, but you don't have it implemented in code as part of an AGI. You are racing with your competitor to code a self-improving super-AGI. Isn't it still quicker to implement something that doesn't incorporate Friendliness?

To me, it seems like, even if the theory was settled, Friendliness would be an additional feature you would have to code into an AI that would take extra time and effort.

What I'm getting at is that, throughout the history of computing, the version of a system with desirable property X, even if the theoretical benefits of X are well known by the academy, has tended to be implemented and deployed commercially after the version without X. For example, it would have been better for the general public and web developers if web browsers obeyed W3C specifications and didn't have any extra proprietary tags - but in practice, commercial pressures meant that companies made grossly non-compliant browsers for years until eventually they started moving towards compliance.

The "Friendly browser" theory was solved, but compliant and non-compliant browsers still weren't on basically equal footing.

(Now, you might say that CEV will be way more mathematical and rigorous than browser specifications - but the only important point for my argument is that it will take more effort to implement than the alternative).

Now you could say that browser compliance is a fairly trvial matter, and corporations will be more cautious about deploying AGI. But the potential gain from deploying a super-AI first would surely be much greater than the benefit of supporting the blink tag or whatever - so the incentive to rationalise away the perceived dangers will be much greater.

My point, then, is that as well as heroically trying to come up with a theory of Friendly AI, it might be a good idea to heroically stop the deployment of unFriendly AI.

I really don't know what you mean.

I have no clue what you're talking about and would really like to know. PM me if you really don't want whatever it is to be publicly known.