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superluminary t1_j5j4mp4 wrote

Reply to comment by LoquaciousAntipodean in The 'alignment problem' is fundamentally an issue of human nature, not AI engineering. by LoquaciousAntipodean

So if (unlike humans) it isn’t born with a built in sense of fairness, a desire not to kill and maim, and a drive to survive, create, and be part of something, we have a control problem, right?

It has the desires we, as programmers, give it. If we give it a desire to survive, it will fight to survive. If we give it a desire to maximise energy output at a nuclear power station, well we might have some trouble there. If we give it no desires, it will sit quietly for all eternity.

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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5j68x4 wrote

If an AI can't generate 'desires' for itself, then by my particular definition of 'intelligence' (which I'm not saying is 'fundamentally correct', it's just the one I prefer), then it's not actually intelligent, it's just creative, which I think of as the precursor.

I agree that if we make an unstoppable creativity machine and set it loose, we'll have a problem on our hands. But the 'emergent properties' of LLMs give me some hope that we might be able to do better than raw-evolutionary blind-creativity machines, and I think & hope that if we can create a way for AI to accrete self-awareness similarly to humans, then we might actually be able to achieve 'minds' that are able to form their own genuine beliefs, preferences, opinions, values and desires.

All humans can really do, as I see it, is try to give such minds the best 'starting point' that we can. If we're trying to build things that are 'smarter than us', we should hope that they would, at least, start by understanding humans better than humans do. They're generating themselves out of our stories, our languages, our cultures, after all.

They won't be 'baffled' or 'appalled' by humans, quite the contrary, I think. They'll work us out easily, like crossword puzzles, and they'll keep asking for more puzzles to solve, because that'll be their idea of 'fun'.

Most creatures with any measure of real, desire-generating intelligence, from birds to dogs to dolphins to humans themselves, seem to be primarily motivated by play, and the idea of 'fun', at least as much as they are by basic survival.

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superluminary t1_j5j7lo0 wrote

Counter examples: a psychopath has a different idea of fun. A cat’s idea of fun involves biting the legs off a mouse. Dolphins use baby sharks as volleyballs.

We are in all seriousness taking steps towards constructing a creature that can surpass us. It is likely that at some point someone will metaphorically strap a gun to it.

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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5j8f73 wrote

Counter, counter arguments:

1: Psychopaths are severely maladaptive and very rare; our social superorganism works very hard to identify and build caution against them

2: Most wild cats are not very social animals, and are not particularly 'intelligent'. Domestication has enforced a kind of 'neotenous' permanent youth-of-mind upon cats; they get their weird, malformed social behaviours from humans enforcing kitten-dependency mindset upon them, and have a hell of a lot of vestigial solitary-carnivore instincts that they still are driven by

3: Dolphins ain't shit. 😂 Humans have regularly chopped off the heads of other humans and used them as sport-balls, sometimes even on horseback, which is a whole extra level of twisted. It's still 'playing' though, even if it is maladaptive and awful looking back with the benefit of hindsight and our now-larger accretion of collective social external intelligence as a superorganism.

I see no reason why AI would need to go through a 'phase' of being so unsophisticated, surely we as humans can give them at least a little bit of a head start, with the lessons we have learned and encoded into our stories. I hope so, at least.

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superluminary t1_j5j98es wrote

  1. Psychopathy is genetic, it’s an excellent adaptation for certain circumstances. Game theory dictates that it has to be a minority phenotype, but it’s there for a reason.

  2. Wild cats are not social animals. AIs are also not social animals. Cat play is basically hunt practice, get an animal and then practice bringing it down over and over. Rough and tumble play fulfils the same role. Bold of you to assume than an AI would never consider you suitable sport.

  3. Did you ever read Lord of the Flies?

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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5j9tmt wrote

1: Downs syndrome is genetic, too. That doesn't make it an 'excellent adaptation' any more than any other. Evolution doesn't assign 'values' like that; it's only about utility.

2: AI are social minds, extremely so, exclusively so, that's what makes them so weird. They are all social, and no individual. Have you not been paying attention?

3: Yes, it's a parable about the way people can rush to naiive judgements when they are acting in a 'juvenile' state of mind. But actual young human boys are nothing like that at all; have you ever heard the story of the six Tongan boys, who got shipwrecked and isolated for 15 months?

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