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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5nbn1i wrote

Reply to comment by 23235 in The 'alignment problem' is fundamentally an issue of human nature, not AI engineering. by LoquaciousAntipodean

The thing that keeps me optimistic is that I don't think 'true intelligence' scales in terms of 'power' at all; only in terms of the social utility that it brings to the minds that possess it.

Cruelty, greed, viciousness, spite, fear, anxiety - I wouldn't say any of these impulses are 'smart' in any way; I think of them as vestigial instincts, that our animal selves have been using our 'social intelligence' to contfront for millenia.

I don't think the ants/humans comparison is quite fair to humans; ants are a sort of 'hive mind' with almost no individual intelligence or self awareness to speak of.

I think dogs or birds are a fairer comparison, in that sense; humans know, all too well, that dogs or birds can be vicious and dangerous sometimes, but I don't think anyone would agree that the 'most intelligent' course of action would be something like 'exterminate all dogs and birds out of their own best interests'.

It's the fundamental difference between pure evolution and actual self-aware intelligence; the former is mere creativity, and it might, indeed, kill us if we're not careful. But the latter is the kind of decision-generating, value-judging wisdom I think we (humanity) actually want.

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23235 t1_j5s30e5 wrote

One hopes.

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LoquaciousAntipodean OP t1_j5s9pui wrote

As PTerry said, in his book Making Money, 'hope is the blessing and the curse of humanity'.

Our social intelligence evolves constantly in a homeostatic balance between hope and dread, between our dreams and our nightmares.

Like a sodium-potassium pump in a lipid bilayer, the constant cycling around a dynamic, homeostatic fulcrum generates the fundamental 'creative force' that drives the accreting complexity of evolution.

I think it's an emergent property of causality; evolution is 'driven', fundamentally, by simple entropy: the stacking up of causal interactions between fundamental particles of reality, that generates emergent complexity and 'randomness' within the phenomena of spacetime.

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